Читать книгу John Holdsworth (William Clark Russell) (Literary Thoughts Edition) - William Clark Russell - Страница 6

At six o’clock next morning the sleeping passengers were awakened by cries and trampings which, to some of them at least, were novel disturbers of their slumbers. They might have told the reason of all this noise without going on deck; for those who slept in cots found the deck making an angle with their beds, and the lee port-holes veiled with rushing green water, and all the movables crowded together at any distance from where they had been deposited the night before. And hoarse cries sounded, and the flanking of massive chains, and the strange groaning a ship makes when she heels over to a weight of canvas.

Yes! the “Meteor” was under weigh, with a spanking breeze on the starboard quarter, which she would haul round abeam—her best point of sailing—when she had cleared the South Foreland. If this breeze held, the pilot said, he would be out of the ship and toasting her in rum and water at Plymouth before the sun went down next day.

Some of the passengers came on deck when the ship was off Folkestone, and then they saw as fair a sight as the world has to offer—the great white English cliffs topped with swelling tracts of green, with here and there small bays with spaces of yellow sand between; houses thickly grouped—so it seemed in beholding them from the sea—upon the very margin of the cliff; slate-coloured hills paling far, far away with visionary clouds upon them; and between the ship and the shore many pleasure-boats and other craft, with white or ochre-coloured sails and bright flags, lending spots of red and blue to the perspective of the chalky cliff.

The pilot hugged the wind, rightly apprehensive that it might draw ahead and cripple him for sea room; and the “Meteor” hereabouts was so close to the land that those on board her could see the people walking on shore—man’s majesty illustrated by dots of black upon the beach or the heights. Overhead was a brilliantly blue sky, with small wool-white clouds driving over it; the sea laughed in dimples and shivered the white sunlight far and wide, so that every crest gleamed with a diamond spark of its own; and away on the left, a pale faint cloud floating upon the horizon, was the French coast.

The gay panorama swept by and new scenes opened—stretches of barren coast with ungainly Coastguards’ huts for their sole decoration; spaces of vivid green ruled off with lines of soft brown sand, and low black rocks mirrored in the lake-like surface of the water under the lee; whitewashed villages with wreaths of blue smoke curling from their midst, and broad expanses of trees darkening the lightlier-coloured landscape with delicate shadows. Sturdy vessels, the dray-horses of the Channel, slow, deep laden, and wafting, many of them, the scent of pine and other woods across the water, were overtaken and passed, often amid the laughter of the crew on the “Meteor’s” forecastle, and “chaff,” which even the grave Captain Steel, the “Meteor’s” skipper, condescended to smile at. How picturesque these vessels! Here a Dutch barque painted white, with square-faced men staring over the bulwarks; a red-capped commander in sea boots and vast inexpressibles, and a steersman who sometimes looked at the “Meteor” and sometimes at the sails of his own ship, mixing duty and curiosity in a manner delightful to behold; there a North-country brig with dirty patched sails and black rigging, and a crew with smoked faces and a grinning head at the galley door; sometimes a French smack with as many hands on board as would man a Black Ball Liner, women among them in red petticoats and handkerchiefs around their faces, some gutting fish, some mending nets, some peeling potatoes, and all talking and gesticulating at once, but suspending both their work and their talk to crowd to the smack’s side and stare at the noble English vessel; and sometimes a little open boat at anchor, with a man in her fishing with deep gravity, and paying no more heed to the ship in whose wake his cockle-shell would bob like a cork float, than were he the only tenant of the great glittering surface of water.

But soon the coast sank low in the horizon. The “Meteor” was standing for the deeper water of the Middle Channel, and close hauled, but with all sails set, she had paled old England into a thin blue cloud, and was heading straight for the great Atlantic Ocean.

The night passed; the morning broke; but the “Meteor” was not out of the Channel yet. The pilot grumbled as he cast his groggy eyes aloft and saw the weather-leaches lifting. He would have to go about to fetch Plymouth, unless he had a mind to cross the Atlantic, and this was certainly not his intention.

All the passengers came on deck after breakfast; the ladies brought out their work, the gentlemen lighted cigars, and those who had made a voyage before looked knowing as they cast their eyes about and asked nautical questions of the captain.

As to the pilot, he was ungetatable. Moreover, his language was so clouded with marine expletives that his lightest answer was generally a shock to the sensibilities.

Every boatman from Margate to Penzance calls himself a pilot nowadays; but the genuine pilot—such a man as this who was taking the “Meteor” down Channel—stands out upon the marine canvas with an individuality that makes him unique among seafaring human kind. Figure a square, bow-legged man, in a suit of heavy pilot cloth, a red shawl round his neck, a tall hat on his head, a throat the colour of an uncooked beefsteak, and a face of a complexion like new mahogany, small moist rolling eyes, a voice resembling the tones of a man with the bronchitis calling through a tin trumpet, and an undying affection for Jamaica rum. Such was Mr. Dumling, the “Meteor’s” pilot, a man to whom the gaunt sea-battered posts, the tall skeleton buoys, the fat wallowing beacons, and the endless variety of lights ashore and at sea, from the North Foreland to the Land’s End, were as familiar and intelligible as the alphabet is to you; who was so profoundly acquainted with the Channel that he boasted his power to tell you within a quarter of a mile of where he was, by the mere faculty of smell! A man who could look over a ship’s side and say, “Here are four fathoms of water, and yonder are nine,” “And where the shadow of the cloud rests the water is twelve fathoms deep;” and so on, every inch of the road, for miles and miles—a miracle of memory! To appreciate the value of such a man you should be with him in the Channel in a pitch-dark night, blowing great guns from the north-east, with the roar of the Goodwin on the lee bow, and a sea so heavy that every blow the ship receives communicates the impression that she has struck the ground, while the black air is hoarse with the gale and fogged with stinging spray.

The wind is nowhere more capricious than in the English Channel. At one o’clock the spanking breeze swept round to the south-east; the watch went to work at the braces; up went the foretopmast-stun’sail, and the “Meteor” rushed ahead at twelve knots an hour.

“We shall be off Plymouth at eight o’clock,” says the pilot, and went below to lunch with a serene face.

He was right. At eight o’clock the “Meteor” was lying with her main yards backed, dipping her nose in a lively sea, with a signal for a boat streaming at her mast-head.

The passengers might take their last look at old England then, whilst the glorious sunset bathed the land in gold, and made the wooded shores beautiful with colour and shadow. And now, dancing over the waters, came a white sail, which dimmed slowly into an ashen hue as the crimson in the skies faded and the waters darkened.

“Any letters for shore?” says Captain Steel, moving among the passengers, and soon his hand grows full. Many of the men come forward and deliver missives for the wife, for Sue, for Poll, to the skipper, who gives them to the pilot. The boat, glistening with the sea-water she has shipped, sweeps alongside, ducks her sail, and is brought up by a line flung from the main chains.

“Good-bye, cap’n,” says the gruff pilot; “wish you a pleasant voyage, I’m sure, gen’l’men and ladies;” drops into the main chains, and from the main chains drops into the boat; the sail is hoisted, a hat waved, a cheer given from the ship’s forecastle, and away bounds the lugger in a cloud of spray.

Now bawls Captain Steel from the break of the poop; round swing the main yards; the noble ship heels over, trembles, and starts forward, and, with the expiring gleam of the sunset upon her highest sails, the “Meteor” heads for the broad Atlantic, and glides into the gloom and space of the infinite, windy night.