I turned about, and, addressing Gambrel earnestly, entreated him to "hang on to the wheel."But I could hardly speak from emotion.The fatal moment had come.I held my breath.The tap-ping had stopped as unexpectedly as it had begun, and there was a renewed moment of intolerable sus-pense; something like an additional turn of the racking screw.I don't suppose I would have ever screamed, but I remember my conviction that there was nothing else for it but to scream.
Suddenly--how am I to convey it? Well, sud-denly the darkness turned into water.This is the only suitable figure.A heavy shower, a down-pour, comes along, making a noise.You hear its approach on the sea, in the air, too, I verily believe.
But this was different.With no preliminary whisper or rustle, without a splash, and even with-out the ghost of impact, I became instantaneously soaked to the skin.Not a very difficult matter, since I was wearing only my sleeping suit.My hair got full of water in an instant, water streamed on my skin, it filled my nose, my ears, my eyes.
In a fraction of a second I swallowed quite a lot of it.
As to Gambril, he was fairly choked.He coughed pitifully, the broken cough of a sick man;and I beheld him as one sees a fish in an aquarium by the light of an electric bulb, an elusive, phos-phorescent shape.Only he did not glide away.
But something else happened.Both binnacle-lamps went out.I suppose the water forced itself into them, though I wouldn't have thought that possible, for they fitted into the cowl perfectly.
The last gleam of light in the universe had gone, pursued by a low exclamation of dismay from Gambril.I groped for him and seized his arm.
How startlingly wasted it was.
"Never mind," I said."You don't want the light.All you need to do is to keep the wind, when it comes, at the back of your head.You understand?""Aye, aye, sir....But I should like to have a light," he added nervously.
All that time the ship lay as steady as a rock.
The noise of the water pouring off the sails and spars, flowing over the break of the poop, had stopped short.The poop scuppers gurgled and sobbed for a little while longer, and then perfect silence, joined to perfect immobility, proclaimed the yet unbroken spell of our helplessness, poised on the edge of some violent issue, lurking in the dark.
I started forward restlessly.I did not need my sight to pace the poop of my ill-starred first com-mand with perfect assurance.Every square foot of her decks was impressed indelibly on my brain, to the very grain and knots of the planks.Yet, all of a sudden, I fell clean over something, landing full length on my hands and face.
It was something big and alive.Not a dog--more like a sheep, rather.But there were no animals in the ship.How could an animal....
It was an added and fantastic horror which I could not resist.The hair of my head stirred even as Ipicked myself up, awfully scared; not as a man is scared while his judgment, his reason still try to resist, but completely, boundlessly, and, as it were, innocently scared--like a little child.
I could see It--that Thing! The darkness, of which so much had just turned into water, had thinned down a little.There It was! But I did not hit upon the notion of Mr.Burns issuing out of the companion on all fours till he attempted to stand up, and even then the idea of a bear crossed my mind first.
He growled like one when I seized him round the body.He had buttoned himself up into an enor-mous winter overcoat of some woolly material, the weight of which was too much for his reduced state.
I could hardly feel the incredibly thin lath of his body, lost within the thick stuff, but his growl had depth and substance: Confounded dump ship with a craven, tiptoeing crowd.Why couldn't they stamp and go with a brace? Wasn't there one God-forsaken lubber in the lot fit to raise a yell on a rope?
"Skulking's no good, sir," he attacked me directly."You can't slink past the old murderous ruffian.It isn't the way.You must go for him boldly--as I did.Boldness is what you want.
Show him that you don't care for any of his damned tricks.Kick up a jolly old row.""Good God, Mr.Burns," I said angrily.
"What on earth are you up to? What do you mean by coming up on deck in this state?""Just that! Boldness.The only way to scare the old bullying rascal."I pushed him, still growling, against the rail.
"Hold on to it," I said roughly.I did not know what to do with him.I left him in a hurry, to go to Gambril, who had called faintly that he believed there was some wind aloft.Indeed, my own ears had caught a feeble flutter of wet canvas, high up overhead, the jingle of a slack chain sheet....
These were eerie, disturbing, alarming sounds in the dead stillness of the air around me.All the instances I had heard of topmasts being whipped out of a ship while there was not wind enough on her deck to blow out a match rushed into my memory.
"I can't see the upper sails, sir," declared Gambril shakily.
"Don't move the helm.You'll be all right," Isaid confidently.
The poor man's nerves were gone.Mine were not in much better case.It was the moment of breaking strain and was relieved by the abrupt sensation of the ship moving forward as if of her-self under my feet.I heard plainly the soughing of the wind aloft, the low cracks of the upper spars taking the strain, long before I could feel the least draught on my face turned aft, anxious and sight-less like the face of a blind man.
Suddenly a louder-sounding note filled our ears, the darkness started streaming against our bodies, chilling them exceedingly.Both of us, Gambril and I, shivered violently in our clinging, soaked garments of thin cotton.I said to him:
"You are all right now, my man.All you've got to do is to keep the wind at the back of your head.
