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_ JUKES was as ready a man as any half-dozen young mates that may
be caught by casting a net upon the waters; and though he had
been somewhat taken aback by the startling viciousness of the
first squall, he had pulled himself together on the instant, had
called out the hands and had rushed them along to secure such
openings about the deck as had not been already battened down
earlier in the evening. Shouting in his fresh, stentorian voice,
"Jump, boys, and bear a hand!" he led in the work, telling
himself the while that he had "just expected this."
But at the same time he was growing aware that this was rather
more than he had expected. From the first stir of the air felt
on his cheek the gale seemed to take upon itself the accumulated
impetus of an avalanche. Heavy sprays enveloped the Nan-Shan
from stem to stern, and instantly in the midst of her regular
rolling she began to jerk and plunge as though she had gone mad
with fright.
Jukes thought, "This is no joke." While he was exchanging
explanatory yells with his captain, a sudden lowering of the
darkness came upon the night, falling before their vision like
something palpable. It was as if the masked lights of the world
had been turned down. Jukes was uncritically glad to have his
captain at hand. It relieved him as though that man had, by
simply coming on deck, taken most of the gale's weight upon his
shoulders. Such is the prestige, the privilege, and the burden
of command.
Captain MacWhirr could expect no relief of that sort from any one
on earth. Such is the loneliness of command. He was trying to
see, with that watchful manner of a seaman who stares into the
wind's eye as if into the eye of an adversary, to penetrate the
hidden intention and guess the aim and force of the thrust. The
strong wind swept at him out of a vast obscurity; he felt under
his feet the uneasiness of his ship, and he could not even
discern the shadow of her shape. He wished it were not so; and
very still he waited, feeling stricken by a blind man's
helplessness.
To be silent was natural to him, dark or shine. Jukes, at his
elbow, made himself heard yelling cheerily in the gusts, "We must
have got the worst of it at once, sir." A faint burst of
lightning quivered all round, as if flashed into a cavern -- into
a black and secret chamber of the sea, with a floor of foaming
crests.
It unveiled for a sinister, fluttering moment a ragged mass of
clouds hanging low, the lurch of the long outlines of the ship,
the black figures of men caught on the bridge, heads forward, as
if petrified in the act of butting. The darkness palpitated down
upon all this, and then the real thing came at last.
It was something formidable and swift, like the sudden smashing
of a vial of wrath. It seemed to explode all round the ship with
an overpowering concussion and a rush of great waters, as if an
immense dam had been blown up to windward. In an instant the men
lost touch of each other. This is the disintegrating power of a
great wind: it isolates one from one's kind. An earthquake, a
landslip, an avalanche, overtake a man incidentally, as it were
-- without passion. A furious gale attacks him like a personal
enemy, tries to grasp his limbs, fastens upon his mind, seeks to
rout his very spirit out of him.
Jukes was driven away from his commander. He fancied himself
whirled a great distance through the air. Everything disappeared
-- even, for a moment, his power of thinking; but his hand had
found one of the rail-stanchions. His distress was by no means
alleviated by an inclination to disbelieve the reality of this
experience. Though young, he had seen some bad weather, and had
never doubted his ability to imagine the worst; but this was so
much beyond his powers of fancy that it appeared incompatible
with the existence of any ship whatever. He would have been
incredulous about himself in the same way, perhaps, had he not
been so harassed by the necessity of exerting a wrestling effort
against a force trying to tear him away from his hold. Moreover,
the conviction of not being utterly destroyed returned to him
through the sensations of being half-drowned, bestially shaken,
and partly choked.
It seemed to him he remained there precariously alone with the
stanchion for a long, long time. The rain poured on him, flowed,
drove in sheets. He breathed in gasps; and sometimes the water
he swallowed was fresh and sometimes it was salt. For the most
part he kept his eyes shut tight, as if suspecting his sight
might be destroyed in the immense flurry of the elements. When
he ventured to blink hastily, he derived some moral support from
the green gleam of the starboard light shining feebly upon the
flight of rain and sprays. He was actually looking at it when
its ray fell upon the uprearing sea which put it out. He saw the
head of the wave topple over, adding the mite of its crash to the
tremendous uproar raging around him, and almost at the same
instant the stanchion was wrenched away from his embracing arms.
After a crushing thump on his back he found himself suddenly
afloat and borne upwards. His first irresistible notion was that
the whole China Sea had climbed on the bridge. Then, more
sanely, he concluded himself gone overboard. All the time he was
being tossed, flung, and rolled in great volumes of water, he
kept on repeating mentally, with the utmost precipitation, the
words: "My God! My God! My God! My God!"
All at once, in a revolt of misery and despair, he formed the
crazy resolution to get out of that. And he began to thresh
about with his arms and legs. But as soon as he commenced his
wretched struggles he discovered that he had become somehow mixed
up with a face, an oilskin coat, somebody's boots. He clawed
ferociously all these things in turn, lost them, found them
again, lost them once more, and finally was himself caught in the
firm clasp of a pair of stout arms. He returned the embrace
closely round a thick solid body. He had found his captain.
They tumbled over and over, tightening their hug. Suddenly the
water let them down with a brutal bang; and, stranded against the
side of the wheelhouse, out of breath and bruised, they were left
to stagger up in the wind and hold on where they could.
Jukes came out of it rather horrified, as though he had escaped
some unparalleled outrage directed at his feelings. It weakened
his faith in himself. He started shouting aimlessly to the man
he could feel near him in that fiendish blackness, "Is it you,
sir? Is it you, sir?" till his temples seemed ready to burst.
And he heard in answer a voice, as if crying far away, as if
screaming to him fretfully from a very great distance, the one
word "Yes!" Other seas swept again over the bridge. He received
them defencelessly right over his bare head, with both his hands
engaged in holding.
The motion of the ship was extravagant. Her lurches had an
appalling helplessness: she pitched as if taking a header into a
void, and seemed to find a wall to hit every time. When she
rolled she fell on her side headlong, and she would be righted
back by such a demolishing blow that Jukes felt her reeling as a
clubbed man reels before he collapses. The gale howled and
scuffled about gigantically in the darkness, as though the entire
world were one black gully. At certain moments the air streamed
against the ship as if sucked through a tunnel with a
concentrated solid force of impact that seemed to lift her clean
out of the water and keep her up for an instant with only a
quiver running through her from end to end. And then she would
begin her tumbling again as if dropped back into a boiling
cauldron. Jukes tried hard to compose his mind and judge things
coolly.
The sea, flattened down in the heavier gusts, would uprise and
overwhelm both ends of the Nan-Shan in snowy rushes of foam,
expanding wide, beyond both rails, into the night. And on this
dazzling sheet, spread under the blackness of the clouds and
emitting a bluish glow, Captain MacWhirr could catch a desolate
glimpse of a few tiny specks black as ebony, the tops of the
hatches, the battened companions, the heads of the covered
winches, the foot of a mast. This was all he could see of his
ship. Her middle structure, covered by the bridge which bore
him, his mate, the closed wheelhouse where a man was steering
shut up with the fear of being swept overboard together with the
whole thing in one great crash -- her middle structure was like a
half-tide rock awash upon a coast. It was like an outlying rock
with the water boiling up, streaming over, pouring off, beating
round -- like a rock in the surf to which shipwrecked people
cling before they let go--only it rose, it sank, it rolled
continuously, without respite and rest, like a rock that should
have miraculously struck adrift from a coast and gone wallowing
upon the sea.
The Nan-Shan was being looted by the storm with a senseless,
destructive fury: trysails torn out of the extra gaskets,
double-lashed awnings blown away, bridge swept clean,
weather-cloths burst, rails twisted, light-screens smashed -- and
two of the boats had gone already. They had gone unheard and
unseen, melting, as it were, in the shock and smother of the
wave. It was only later, when upon the white flash of another
high sea hurling itself amidships, Jukes had a vision of two
pairs of davits leaping black and empty out of the solid
blackness, with one overhauled fall flying and an iron-bound
block capering in the air, that he became aware of what had
happened within about three yards of his back.
He poked his head forward, groping for the ear of his commander.
His lips touched it -- big, fleshy, very wet. He cried in an
agitated tone, "Our boats are going now, sir."
And again he heard that voice, forced and ringing feebly, but
with a penetrating effect of quietness in the enormous discord of
noises, as if sent out from some remote spot of peace beyond the
black wastes of the gale; again he heard a man's voice -- the
frail and indomitable sound that can be made to carry an infinity
of thought, resolution and purpose, that shall be pronouncing
confident words on the last day, when heavens fall, and justice
is done -- again he heard it, and it was crying to him, as if
from very, very far -- "All right."
He thought he had not managed to make himself understood. "Our
boats -- I say boats -- the boats, sir! Two gone!"
The same voice, within a foot of him and yet so remote, yelled
sensibly, "Can't be helped."
Captain MacWhirr had never turned his face, but Jukes caught some
more words on the wind.
"What can -- expect -- when hammering through -such -- Bound to
leave -- something behind -- stands to reason."
Watchfully Jukes listened for more. No more came. This was all
Captain MacWhirr had to say; and Jukes could picture to himself
rather than see the broad squat back before him. An impenetrable
obscurity pressed down upon the ghostly glimmers of the sea. A
dull conviction seized upon Jukes that there was nothing to be
done.
If the steering-gear did not give way, if the immense volumes of
water did not burst the deck in or smash one of the hatches, if
the engines did not give up, if way could be kept on the ship
against this terrific wind, and she did not bury herself in one
of these awful seas, of whose white crests alone, topping high
above her bows, he could now and then get a sickening glimpse --
then there was a chance of her coming out of it. Something
within him seemed to turn over, bringing uppermost the feeling
that the Nan-Shan was lost.
"She's done for," he said to himself, with a surprising mental
agitation, as though he had discovered an unexpected meaning in
this thought. One of these things was bound to happen. Nothing
could be prevented now, and nothing could be remedied. The men
on board did not count, and the ship could not last. This
weather was too impossible.
Jukes felt an arm thrown heavily over his shoulders; and to this
overture he responded with great intelligence by catching hold of
his captain round the waist.
They stood clasped thus in the blind night, bracing each other
against the wind, cheek to cheek and lip to ear, in the manner of
two hulks lashed stem to stern together.
And Jukes heard the voice of his commander hardly any louder than
before, but nearer, as though, starting to march athwart the
prodigious rush of the hurricane, it had approached him, bearing
that strange effect of quietness like the serene glow of a halo.
"D'ye know where the hands got to?" it asked, vigorous and
evanescent at the same time, overcoming the strength of the wind,
and swept away from Jukes instantly.
Jukes didn't know. They were all on the bridge when the real
force of the hurricane struck the ship. He had no idea where they
had crawled to. Under the circumstances they were nowhere, for
all the use that could be made of them. Somehow the Captain's
wish to know distressed Jukes.
"Want the hands, sir?" he cried, apprehensively.
"Ought to know," asserted Captain MacWhirr. "Hold hard."
They held hard. An outburst of unchained fury, a vicious rush of
the wind absolutely steadied the ship; she rocked only, quick and
light like a child's cradle, for a terrific moment of suspense,
while the whole atmosphere, as it seemed, streamed furiously past
her, roaring away from the tenebrous earth.
It suffocated them, and with eyes shut they tightened their
grasp. What from the magnitude of the shock might have been a
column of water running upright in the dark, butted against the
ship, broke short, and fell on her bridge, crushingly, from on
high, with a dead burying weight.
A flying fragment of that collapse, a mere splash, enveloped them
in one swirl from their feet over their heads, filling violently
their ears, mouths and nostrils with salt water. It knocked out
their legs, wrenched in haste at their arms, seethed away swiftly
under their chins; and opening their eyes, they saw the piled-up
masses of foam dashing to and fro amongst what looked like the
fragments of a ship. She had given way as if driven straight in.
Their panting hearts yielded, too, before the tremendous blow;
and all at once she sprang up again to her desperate plunging, as
if trying to scramble out from under the ruins.
The seas in the dark seemed to rush from all sides to keep her
back where she might perish. There was hate in the way she was
handled, and a ferocity in the blows that fell. She was like a
living creature thrown to the rage of a mob: hustled terribly,
struck at, borne up, flung down, leaped upon. Captain MacWhirr
and Jukes kept hold of each other, deafened by the noise, gagged
by the wind; and the great physical tumult beating about their
bodies, brought, like an unbridled display of passion, a profound
trouble to their souls. One of those wild and appalling shrieks
that are heard at times passing mysteriously overhead in the
steady roar of a hurricane, swooped, as if borne on wings, upon
the ship, and Jukes tried to outscream it.
"Will she live through this?"
The cry was wrenched out of his breast. It was as unintentional
as the birth of a thought in the head, and he heard nothing of it
himself. It all became extinct at once -- thought, intention,
effort -- and of his cry the inaudible vibration added to the
tempest waves of the air.
He expected nothing from it. Nothing at all. For indeed what
answer could be made? But after a while he heard with amazement
the frail and resisting voice in his ear, the dwarf sound,
unconquered in the giant tumult.
"She may!"
It was a dull yell, more difficult to seize than a whisper. And
presently the voice returned again, half submerged in the vast
crashes, like a ship battling against the waves of an ocean.
"Let's hope so!" it cried -- small, lonely and unmoved, a
stranger to the visions of hope or fear; and it flickered into
disconnected words: "Ship. . . . . This. . . . Never -- Anyhow .
. . for the best." Jukes gave it up.
Then, as if it had come suddenly upon the one thing fit to
withstand the power of a storm, it seemed to gain force and
firmness for the last broken shouts:
"Keep on hammering . . . builders . . . good men. . . . . And
chance it . . . engines. . . . Rout . . . good man."
Captain MacWhirr removed his arm from Jukes' shoulders, and
thereby ceased to exist for his mate, so dark it was; Jukes,
after a tense stiffening of every muscle, would let himself go
limp all over. The gnawing of profound discomfort existed side
by side with an incredible disposition to somnolence, as though
he had been buffeted and worried into drowsiness. The wind would
get hold of his head and try to shake it off his shoulders; his
clothes, full of water, were as heavy as lead, cold and dripping
like an armour of melting ice: he shivered -- it lasted a long
time; and with his hands closed hard on his hold, he was letting
himself sink slowly into the depths of bodily misery. His mind
became concentrated upon himself in an aimless, idle way, and
when something pushed lightly at the back of his knees he nearly,
as the saying is, jumped out of his skin.
In the start forward he bumped the back of Captain MacWhirr, who
didn't move; and then a hand gripped his thigh. A lull had come,
a menacing lull of the wind, the holding of a stormy breath --
and he felt himself pawed all over. It was the boatswain. Jukes
recognized these hands, so thick and enormous that they seemed to
belong to some new species of man.
The boatswain had arrived on the bridge, crawling on all fours
against the wind, and had found the chief mate's legs with the
top of his head. Immediately he crouched and began to explore
Jukes' person upwards with prudent, apologetic touches, as became
an inferior.
He was an ill-favoured, undersized, gruff sailor of fifty,
coarsely hairy, short-legged, long-armed, resembling an elderly
ape. His strength was immense; and in his great lumpy paws,
bulging like brown boxinggloves on the end of furry forearms, the
heaviest objects were handled like playthings. Apart from the
grizzled pelt on his chest, the menacing demeanour and the hoarse
voice, he had none of the classical attributes of his rating.
His good nature almost amounted to imbecility: the men did what
they liked with him, and he had not an ounce of initiative in his
character, which was easy-going and talkative. For these reasons
Jukes disliked him; but Captain MacWhirr, to Jukes' scornful
disgust, seemed to regard him as a first-rate petty officer.
He pulled himself up by Jukes' coat, taking that liberty with the
greatest moderation, and only so far as it was forced upon him by
the hurricane.
"What is it, boss'n, what is it?" yelled Jukes, impatiently.
What could that fraud of a boss'n want on the bridge? The
typhoon had got on Jukes' nerves. The husky bellowings of the
other, though unintelligible, seemed to suggest a state of lively
satisfaction.
There could be no mistake. The old fool was pleased with
something.
The boatswain's other hand had found some other body, for in a
changed tone he began to inquire: "Is it you, sir? Is it you,
sir?" The wind strangled his howls.
"Yes!" cried Captain MacWhirr. _
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