“Hullo,” I said.
“Hullo,” said Jimmy.
“What’s the matter?” I asked. “You look white.”
“Do I?” Jimmy gave a direction down the voice-pipe. “If I do it’s because I feel a bit sick. Just had a bit of a scare. Don’t know what it was. Got the creeps. But it’s O.K. now.”
I was silent for a moment and looked round the horizon. It was getting dark, and all land had disappeared.
“How’s the barometer?” I asked.
“Steady.”
The Peter was beginning to roll a little – not an unusual occurrence even in a calm sea. But I didn’t like the soft sighing sound in the rigging. I do not think there is a more melancholy lonely sound in the world than that whine of wind on wires and ropes. Curious, but sometimes you hear it, and it makes you shiver, when you can hardly feel a breath of wind on your face. The air round the ship seemed quite gentle, but the sighing was there unmistakably. Then suddenly a hard, bleak puff of wind screamed down, turning the small black waves white, tugging at one’s hair, the flag, sending doors banging, lifting the heavy canvas lashed over the hold, raising the sadness in the rigging to a screech, and passing as swiftly as it had come. Oh, that depressing sound, and the cold, leaden splash of the bow wave breaking on the night sea! I sent for a duffel coat and remained on the bridge.
At 20.30 the wind, such as it was, came from a north-westerly direction. Six minutes later it changed abruptly and increased. By a quarter to nine it was blowing gale force from the south. In this part of the world the dangerous winds are reputed to be the northerly ones, so I thought little of it. It was a nuisance and was going to mean a bad night unless it slackened. Almost perceptibly the waves increased in height from four or five feet to twelve. Within another half hour they were fifteen feet; that is, as high as the bridge. Coming right on the starboard beam, we rolled heavily.
“How’s the barometer?”
“Dropped two points since six o’clock.”
We altered course five degrees to starboard to make allowance for the beam sea. Jimmy turned in to get some sleep, but within half an hour was up again.
“It’s a bastard, isn’t it!” he said. He stood by me, and then added, “They are getting bigger, aren’t they?” They certainly were getting bigger, and also increasingly difficult to see in the darkness. As he said it the signalman, whose cap had gone in the wind, but who continued to hold a hand to his head, as if to keep that in place, cried out, “Look at this one, sir! Bet it’s twenty foot or more.” The monster of a wave looked as if it might crush us, but the Peter lifted herself, swayed to an alarming angle, and rode lightly over. A motor mechanic, an ill-shaped little fellow from Glasgow, put his face up the companion-way. “ ’Scuse me, sir, we going on?” “Yes, Mickey Mouse.” Mickey Mouse whistled and slid down the steps.
At 23.00 we saw the black, low shape of Z. We were much closer than I had expected, and on the wrong side. So we altered course for a while and rode more easily with the sea astern. Z. having been put in its right place, we continued on our way. The spray, which was being whipped off the water, was getting hellish. Shortly before midnight we were in the narrow waters that divide K. from Z. Here, considering we were almost hemmed in by islands, we expected to find some abatement. There was none. The lightning broke out in a vivid pink flash and we saw clearly, for the first time, exactly how enormous the waves were. It seemed odd that they should race at this size into this almost protected area. What I had not realised was the deterioration of the weather outside the islands. Within the past half hour, on the weather side of Z., which was in fact offering us stout protection, had begun the greatest storm in living memory in these stormy parts. The Peter was increasingly difficult to handle, her bow continuously swinging away from the wind, and she wouldn’t answer to the helm even when hard over. To turn her into those giant waves and that roaring wind we had to go full ahead on the engines, which nearly shook her to pieces, or play one engine off against the other, putting the outboard full ahead and the inboard half astern. The spray took the form of a rushing mist, which, seen in the lightning, had all the qualities of a nightmare. We wallowed down past K. bay. No bonfires. No red lanterns – though if they had lit twenty we should never have seen them. In any case, we could never have reached the jetty. The sea was tumbling from all sides, and I heard later the jetty had been carried away. Mercilessly our stern was lifted thirty feet in the air and then our bows, thirty feet in the air into this pink, hail-like mist, and then we were dropped with a sickening thud. To have used oil would have been sensible, but the movement of the ship was so violent it was impossible for a man to shift his position. To have gone on deck was certain death; where you were you stayed, holding on for very life.
We turned back. So far as any direction was possible we headed towards the south-west. I had no desire on arriving back at the far coast, to find myself on the wrong side of the front line of battle. The ship could not be steered in any sense of the word. All we could do was to try keep the heavy seas on the port bow. I must say the Peter rode them magnificently.
A few minutes after midnight there was a sound like a muffled pistol-shot heard above the deafening roar. I didn’t see it go, but it was the wireless mast.
At about 2 A.M. there began a curious phenomenon. There were four of us on the bridge – Jimmy, the signalman Douglas, a lookout nicknamed Hopeless, and myself. We were all drenched to the skin and exhausted by the violence of our beating from the wind. We huddled together, clutching at the sides of the bridge. It was impossible to speak, for even if we bawled the wind, now tearing past us at a hundred miles an hour, laden with stinging salt water, wrenched the sound away from our lips and drowned it in a howl. But Hopeless managed, after a couple of attempts, to make some words heard. “CAN YOU SEE? IS – IT – SPIRITS?” He was obviously upset about something. He couldn’t let go to point, but it wasn’t necessary, for we saw for ourselves. Creeping along the gunwale, starting from the bows, were ripples of bright blue light. In a minute they reached the bridge and crept under our fingers. Then the stump of the mast was ringed with blue – then every wire, every rope, all the edges of everything, including the hoods of our duffel coats, our finger-nails, the tops of our sea-boots. The light varied in thickness from the tenth of an inch to the breadth of a thumb, but all was of equal brilliance, a vivid blue, and seemed to move to and fro as if alive. For two hours we battled on, bristling with blue light, fascinated, entranced by its prettiness, and each of us hardly daring to wonder how the night would end. Before dawn the light receded.
The dawn came very late that morning. Jimmy managed to say “Happy New Year!” in my ear. The dawn was more terrible than the night, for the waves were thirty feet and over, and we could see each one completely and calculate its danger. They were a dirty yellow in colour, where they weren’t white, as if they were scooping up the seabed. Some of them assumed fantastic toppling shapes, tapering up to narrow ribands of water through which we could see the wave behind; then the tops would be blown clean off, like eggs cut with a knife, and a solid mass of water would disappear in streaks in the air. Part of the port gunwale was smashed and washed away. At ten to eight we sighted a rocky island, tow hundred yards ahead. We saw it for the second we were balanced on top of a wave. We didn’t get another opportunity, for it was hidden by walls of water. That island rises to twenty feet above sea level. It is about a quarter of a mile in circumference and uninhabited. From our perch on the top of the wave we saw the whole island was awash and at the northern end submerged. From that glimpse I was able to ascertain our position. We had been blown twenty-six miles north of our rough course during the night. I turned the ship head on into the sea. On a calm day the Peter could knock up fourteen knots. Her speed of advance into this sea, flat out, was half a knot.
Throughout the day we maintained the same speed – half a knot. The four of us clung together, in the same position we had been in all the time. I bawled down the voice-pipe to the coxsw
ain, asking him if he was all right. “Fine!” came the reply, and I think I heard whistling. We all longed for something to drink, but it was out of the question. Every man in the ship was pinned to his position. How the lads in the engine-room, in that sickly smell of hot oil, stood it out I shall never know.
I cannot remember when we began to pray. When we realised, I think, that at this speed we had no hope of shelter that night, and a very good chance three or four times a minute of capsizing or being pounded to pieces. When we saw the rocky island awash, I was aware that Douglas, crouched against me, had released his hand for a moment to cross himself. That, I think, set us all – anyway, those of us on the bridge – saying the Our Father. We mingled our muttered prayers with attempts at rather bawdy music-hall songs, not in defiance of God, but to relieve our minds of the strain. By the afternoon our faces were sodden with water, puffy and raw. Our eyes were ghastly to look at and painful to keep open. One at a time we probably dropped asleep, to awake thirty seconds later wondering how many hours had gone by. So we stayed there, having no alternative. At six o’clock I tried to sing “For those in peril on the sea” – and then it occurred to me to exorcise the ship. How silly and inexplicable that sounds! I am almost ashamed to write it. I wriggled round to face the after part of the ship, which included the cabin where I had experienced that evil thing. Jimmy and Douglas clasped me round the chest while I raised my right hand, making the sign of the cross. “In the name of Jesus Christ, leave us!” I said. Poor Hopeless! That depressed him more than anything. He began to cry.
The next morning we were weak and bitterly cold. The waves were of the same menacing height and ferocity, but the wind had dropped, probably to about eighty miles an hour. And we had lost our fear. We were all convinced we would die during the day. Shortly after noon we passed very close to the battered overturned hulk of a schooner. We could make out the name, Topaz. Subsequently we learnt that every one of those twelve that had sailed up the coast had been lost with all hands. On shore aircraft had been overturned by the wind on the airfields, gun emplacements on harbour walls had been washed away, with their gun crews, and in one well-protected harbour six sailors had been drowned. Giant waves rolled up the coast, in some cases running inland for two or three hundred yards.
Visibility was as bad as ever, but something about the sea suggested we were close to land. At 15.30 the engines, overheated, failed. We were drifting hopelessly. We were all resigned. The only anxiety of which I was conscious was the fact that Able Seaman Broadstairs couldn’t swim. We all knew swimming would be of no help, but it seemed bad that he had never learnt to swim. I remember thinking, “I wish I couldn’t swim, because that will make it worse. I shall struggle for life.” It was on such lines that I tried to comfort myself about Broadstairs.
It began to get dusk. Jimmy said, “Christ! Not another night! I couldn’t!” The waves were now of a tumbling, clumsy, falling-on-top-of-each-other nature. At 17.15 we grounded, twenty yards from a rocky beach. The sea was on the beam. “Abandon ship!” I yelled. One carley float was loosed by Hopeless. It somersaulted towards the shore before anyone could grab the line that held it. Then a gigantic wave, which made the others appear ripples, picked us up and carried us right inshore, flinging us on the rocks. We heard a splitting sound. The four of us on the bridge clambered down. The Peter was lying on her side, at an angle of thirty degrees, precariously balanced. She was still surrounded by heavy surf. It was then that Stoker White came out in his true colours. He girded himself with a rope and flung himself into the filthy yellow water. It looked suicidal – but he reached the shore and lay there – a large, fat, exhausted, panting creature – a link between us and safety. “Come on, you sons of she-devils!” he croaked. “Come on, sonny!”. This last to Broadstairs. Broadstairs, grinning, caught hold of the rope and sprang from the ship’s side. He slipped, fell, cracked his skull and broke his back. He didn’t make any noise. The surf washed him away. The others wasted no time. One by one, orderly, silently, they got ashore. Jimmy was next to last. Then my turn came. I was scared, and put off the moment, though I knew to do so was taking a far greater risk than swinging on the rope. I crawled along to the cabin. Everything was broken, upside down, ruined – as if that evil presence had sought revenge on harmless, inanimate objects, the friendly possessions of a man. I have always had some decent books on board. I couldn’t resist snatching one up from the deck, where it had fallen, splayed out. In drawing-room games of Desert Island Books I had always chosen the most rewarding to spend the rest of my life with – the Bible, Shakespeare, Dickens, Milton, and so on. I rejected them all at this moment and took a cheap thriller I hadn’t read. That, and my diary. I stepped out on deck. The crew were all halloaing me. Managed the rope easily. So there we all were. That is, all of us except Broadstairs. We recovered his body next day, terribly battered. It was difficult getting the rings off his fingers. We sent them to his mother.
The Peter slipped on her side, rolled over, and split in two. We were five miles behind the Allied lines. Good.
One thing we all understood, each in his different way. Everyone of us had been purged of a pet vice or special fear.
4
The Ghost-Feelers
Modern Gothic Tales
The Lady’s Maid’s Bell
Edith Wharton
Location: Brympton Place, Hudson, USA.
Time: Autumn, 1902.
Eyewitness Description: “The silence began to be more dreadful to me than the most mysterious sounds. I felt that someone was cowering there, behind the locked door, watching and listening as I watched and listened . . .”
Author: Edith Wharton (1862–1937) is another writer whose ghost stories are acknowledged as “landmarks in supernatural fiction”. She was a central practitioner of the genre in the Twentieth century, redefining the old Gothic melodrama into a new form combining supernatural dread with sexual tension and founding a school of female “Ghost-Feelers” who sensed rather than saw spirits. Growing up in a haunted house in New York that instilled in her a “chronic state of fear”, Wharton later confessed that she could not bear to even sleep in the same room as a book of ghost stories until she was 28. A loveless and repressed marriage made her seek escape in writing, creating novels about the morals and private passions of American society and ghost stories that described dark and mysterious events in unstable households. These began with “The Lady’s Maid’s Bell”, written in 1904, which deeply moved readers in recounting a story of adultery and supernatural protection. There can be little doubt that Wharton drew on her own experiences for this groundbreaking tale, in particular the narrator, the maid Alice Hartley’s near-fatal attack of typhoid, which she had herself survived.
I
It was the autumn after I had the typhoid. I’d been three months in hospital, and when I came out I looked so weak and tottery that the two or three ladies I applied to were afraid to engage me. Most of my money was gone, and after I’d boarded for two months, hanging about the employment-agencies, and answering any advertisement that looked any way respectable, I pretty nearly lost heart, for fretting hadn’t made me fatter, and I didn’t see why my luck should ever turn. It did though – or I thought so at the time. A Mrs Railton, a friend of the lady that first brought me out to the States, met me one day and stopped to speak to me: she was one that had always a friendly way with her. She asked me what ailed me to look so white, and when I told her, “Why, Hartley,” says she, “I believe I’ve got the very place for you. Come in tomorrow and we’ll talk about it.”
The Mammoth Book of Modern Ghost Stories Page 33