“Take that infernal bird with you,” shouted Bo’sun Kirkby, as the rest of the crew prepared to follow behind; I decided this was not because he hated Spot, but was frightened of losing a mascot. In any event, Natty scowled—but obediently lifted the cage from its peg, covered it so that her pet would be quiet, then handed him to Mr. Stevenson. To judge by his sour expression, our Scotsman was not at all pleased to receive him. Spot himself seemed much more than disappointed, if his parting remark was any indication. “Here we go to glory!” he squawked as he vanished toward the galley. “Here we go to glory!”
With the deck now clear of anyone not lending a hand, and the minimum of sail above us, we then began the very difficult business of turning the Nightingale. We might as well have tried reshaping Nature herself. The ship seemed to buckle as she floundered into the trough between two enormous waves, with a pitiful squeal of timbers and a shiver that ran from fore to aft—and shook me with a tremor of pure fear. For a moment our fate seemed to hang in the balance, and I thought we might be battered to pieces; when I looked through the windows of the roundhouse at Bo’sun Kirkby, he seemed to be holding back the force of the ocean single-handed, with rain and spray pouring off his sea cloak as if he were standing under a waterspout, and his badger face almost collapsed with the effort of his work. But never more than almost. The Nightingale was his ship, and eventually she had no choice except to do as he wanted. With another series of mighty slaps and shudderings, and waves the size of horses galloping over our sides, we came around by slow degrees—then were suddenly free and sailing back the same way we had just traveled.
At this point Mr. Tickle took a length of rope and marched forward again, if it can be called a march when a man is clinging to every solid thing he can find, as the wind propels him. When he had fought his way beyond the mainmast he lashed himself to the long-nine gun, where he could keep a lookout for any dangers as they presented themselves. It was a brave act, and left me feeling I must also find some useful function to perform, rather than sit stupefied while others put themselves at risk. But when I suggested this to Bo’sun Kirkby, by gesticulating through the windows of the roundhouse, he shouted at me not to be a fool: I must stay put and keep Natty with me. I opened my mouth to demur as he said this, which made his usual kindness drain out of his face: he told me very sternly that we should consider ourselves lucky not to be confined with the others belowdecks, since we were young and ignorant. In a less dangerous situation I would have felt myself rebuked; things being as they were, I reckoned he was merely telling the truth. I decided I would not try his patience any further, and contented myself with peering through heavy curtains of rain as they flashed against our windows.
I say we were sailing at this point, but in truth it was more like a sort of flight, since even a ship as airy as the Nightingale could no longer skip along the surface of the sea but plunged from one abyss to another. After a few more minutes of this battering, Natty and I slithered from our bench and knelt on the floor of the roundhouse, eyes level with the sides of the ship. This might have allowed us to follow each rise and fall as if we were actually a part of the timber. But the confusion of spray and wind was now so great, and the juddering between light and dark so quick, it is more accurate to say we felt rather than saw what happened around us. Every leap forward was an immense laboring effort, followed by a dreadful moment of suspension, then a vault into empty space, then a watery crash that seemed likely to split us apart, then another colossal laboring effort.
I cannot say how long this lasted. In the same way that everything solid in nature seemed liquid and formless, so the usual connections of time were all broken apart. Nothing joined up, and nothing made sense. One minute Natty and I were jumbled together on the floor like puppets. Next we were shielding our faces as an especially fierce wave, vicious as a punch, smashed a window of the roundhouse and showered us with glass before shriveling away again. Next we were watching the silhouette of Treasure Island rip past us, with spray silvering the dismal summit of Spyglass Hill. Or rather, we thought we saw it; I could not easily believe a place that had contained so much—had given so much and taken so much—could be turned into such a quickly passing thing. Almost into nothing at all.
Perhaps it was this idea of inconsequence that began to change my mood. Or perhaps it was my sense that the Nightingale, having survived the opening salvos of the storm, would not easily be sunk by any further assaults on her. In all events, as the island disappeared behind us again, I realized I was beginning almost to enjoy our ordeal. To see Bo’sun Kirkby clasping his wheel, while such fury raved about him! To find Mr. Tickle so thoroughly drenched at his place by the long nine that he appeared to be coated in silver! I thought he must be exulting, rather than struggling for breath. I was exulting—when I should have been concentrating on humdrum things, such as how to avoid smashing my head into smithereens.
Natty was too surprised, or too frightened, to share this mood of delirium. “Have you thought?” she shouted.
“Thought what?” I replied—and felt the words torn out of my mouth.
“Have you thought what will happen when we reach the coast?” We were side by side on the floor of the roundhouse, with our backs pressed against a bench and our feet braced against the legs of the table. Sea water, blowing through our broken window, had saturated Natty’s hair, and her face was alight with it.
I gave a sort of laugh, which was no answer at all.
“The sea around us is a kind of gigantic basin,” she went on, pushing her face against my own, to make sure I could hear what she was saying. “Eventually we must come up against the edge.”
It seemed absurd for her to take this rational tone when everything about us was in uproar, and I could not help smiling. “When?” I asked her.
“How should I know when?” she snapped back, as though irritated by her own tone, as well as mine. “When we run out of sea.”
Natty’s annoyance was nothing, compared to the palaver of wind and waves, but it stung me nonetheless—and made me see that I had been so relieved to think I was escaping one kind of danger, I had not realized there might be another still to come.
“It will be Spanish America,” I said, as much to myself as Natty, and hauled onto the bench again, so that I could look toward the horizon. All my hilarity left me as suddenly as it had arrived.
“Most probably Spanish America,” said Natty. The resignation in her voice surprised me—until she added: “My father was there. My father is everywhere. Everywhere we go, we follow him.”
“We shall see,” I said, which was not helpful—but I had no appetite for wondering about fathers at that particular moment.
Natty gave me another of her fierce glances. “Think!” she shouted at me, exasperated.
But I could not think. I could only point along the deck toward Mr. Tickle. Although the Nightingale was still heaving through the water in very unsteady bounds, and sometimes flying above it altogether, my crew mate had taken it upon himself to untie the rope that lashed him to the long nine, and was attempting to move further forward into the bows. He might as well have tried to wade through a raging torrent; I expected to see him swept overboard at any moment. At the same time, I realized he must have a reason to risk death in this way—and although I could not understand what it might be, I knew I must help him.
Without saying another word to Natty, I heaved open the door of the roundhouse and stepped onto the deck. The rush of wind was immediately so enormous, it was as much as I could do to drag the door shut again, and very nearly impossible to follow where Mr. Tickle had already gone. I did not so much walk, or even stagger, along the deck, but crept. Every idea of family, or home, or love was sluiced out of me. Every memory of my father, of the river, of Natty disappeared. Not even the cries of our passengers, rising very faintly through the planks, meant what I would normally have taken them to mean. They were not sounds of fear or desperation, but merely noises. The entire world was myself, and my only
wish was to continue living.
37
The Wreck of All Our Hopes
I WAS SO often flung back by the weight of water, or forced to stop and cling to whatever was handy, an effort that should have taken less than a minute took ten, each of which felt like an hour. When I had crawled as far as the mainmast, broken rigging snapped at me so I thought I might be blinded. By the long nine, a wave cracked my head against the old ammunition box and I lay dazed for a moment, while waves foamed over me in a continuous fury.
At last I came close enough to the bows for Mr. Tickle to rescue me, which he did by flinging a length of rope that caught me in a kind of lasso, before tugging me forward so I landed beside him like a flounder. His gray beard and face streamed as if they were about to dissolve. Even the bowl of his pipe had filled with water, and trembled as he spoke.
“Did you see?” he shouted.
I was confused, and did not understand what he meant. Because the last words we had exchanged had been about Treasure Island, I assumed he was asking whether I had seen its silhouette, when we had ripped past it ten or so miles back.
“I did!” I shouted back to him. “Very tiny and drowned!”
Mr. Tickle removed the pipe from between his teeth, turned it upside down to empty the water from the bowl, then clamped it back between his teeth while raising both his eyebrows. I knew from this that I had missed my mark, and gave him a foolish smile.
This made him pat me on the arm in the forgiving way he had, then point with his thumb over the prow that sheltered us. I widened my eyes, to show I was wondering whether he wanted me to look—and when he nodded, I found a way to crouch half-upright while clinging to the bulwark. I immediately had all the breath knocked out of me, with the wind slamming into me and seeming to grab my head as if it meant to crush the brains out of me. Everything sensible begged to duck down and be safe again—but with Mr. Tickle’s large hand pressing into my back, I knew I must stick at my post for a moment and tell him what he needed me to confirm.
I shielded my face and tried to find the horizon, but it kept flying away from me—a bar of darkness that one moment plunged underwater, and the next launched into the heavens. Not just a single bar of darkness, but bar upon bar, all heaped in higgledy-piggledy confusion. On the island, storms at evening had allowed the sun to set in glory, with explosions of orange and gold. But this was a different end to daylight. It seemed the sun had been entirely extinguished, and would never rise again.
Mr. Tickle was impatient for his answer, and bellowed up to me. “Well, lad, what can you see?” Once more I tried to protect my eyes, peering and squinting until I could fix a fragment of the distance. But suddenly it was not distance. The horizon was a mile away—or less than a mile. And it was not simple darkness. It was a deep-green featureless wall. No, I was mistaken again. Not featureless. As I narrowed my eyes even more tightly, I saw the shape had a spine, made of peaks and valleys. And where I saw these valleys I also found a shore, with cliffs carved out of sheer rock, all lit by plumes of white spray cascading across them.
Natty’s voice came back to me, no longer resigned as it had been, but hissing like her father. Spanish America, it said. Spanish America.
For the first time in my life I felt entirely at the mercy of the world—the idea of it made my legs crumple beneath me, so that I slumped down beside Mr. Tickle. I felt I had been asked to carry an intolerable weight. Mr. Tickle could not support it either. When I told him what I had seen, I might as well have heaped stones onto him: his face sagged and emptied. When I lolled my head against his chest, I was surprised to hear his heart still beating—loud as a kitchen clock.
I had no idea whether he understood what I said to him next—although it was nothing except a description of the coast, and an estimate that we would strike it very soon. He did not reply, and his expression did not change. I stared at him closely, willing him to speak. But again there was nothing, just the water streaming off his nose and beard. He never wiped it away. He had lost the power to feel, and even the will to care.
I took this as the final proof we could not survive. But rather than making me panic, and struggle to save myself against all odds, I accepted the idea quite calmly, as if I were a child that had been told it was bedtime. Without any exceptional sense of hurry, I looked about me with a marveling curiosity at everything I was about to leave, until even the rage of the storm seemed beautiful: the spray breaking over the prow in flowery branches; the miniature white bubbles in the water as it drained beneath my hands; the dozens of different shades of gray cloud that swirled overhead—dove gray, and pewter gray, and charcoal.
When I had done this, and with an equally steady composure, I decided I should make my peace with my Maker, and commend my soul to Him; although I had not lived an especially virtuous life, I had at least made efforts to improve my condition, and did not want to slip back at the last. I therefore said the “Nunc Dimittis” under my breath, and when I had finished, and felt the comfort of that phrase in which we hear about the servant departing in peace, I shook Mr. Tickle by the hand and called him a good brave fellow.
It will sound from this as though I had determined to stay and die where I sat, beside my friend. But in fact all my looking and praying was a kind of preparation for what I always knew must come next (and therefore last): namely, a creeping struggle back along the deck of the Nightingale with the wind raging in my face. That was where I meant to die—lying beside Natty in the roundhouse.
My journey to reach Mr. Tickle had almost exhausted me. My journey away from him was impossible—but I would not accept that. The gale screamed in my ears. Rain drove nails into my head and hands. The sky wrapped darker and darker scarves around my eyes. Waves tore at me, wrestled with one another, boiled in pools and streams. I defied them all. I defied them because I could imagine Natty waiting for me—and knew I must reach her. A few moments before, I had been concerned with my own survival above all else. Now Natty was the whole purpose of my existence.
Nothing I could do was enough. In my lookout from the prow, I had not been able to see whether any reefs lay offshore. After only two or three minutes of clambering and sliding, which brought me no closer to Natty than the mainmast, where I clung for a moment to recover my breath, I heard the sound I had dreaded. A sound like none I had heard before, but which I understood immediately. A tremendous dunch that was partly a sigh, partly a roar, and partly a scream. A hideous combination of solid and yielding. A pathetic wounding.
We had run aground. My first thought was not a thought but a question: why is there so much light on our ruin? This at least was easily answered. When I twisted my face upward, I saw the wind had entered into a conspiracy with the sea, and suddenly blown the clouds from the sky, and the rain with them, so the spectacle of the wreck lay open to the moon and stars. They glared with a fierce brilliance—clear beams shattering across the water; lying solid over the black rock on which we had foundered, which coiled out from the cliffs ahead like a gigantic eel; and shimmering on the cliffs themselves, a hundred yards off our bow. In the space of a few leaping seconds I saw the cliffs stood higher than our mainmast, with a ribbon of gulls fraying into the sky above. The narrow shore was deserted, without any sign of a path or track that might lead us to safety, or anyone to our rescue.
While I was still gazing at these cliffs, recoiling from their desolation, I heard the timbers of our hull give another pitiful groan. This time there was no delay, no suspense, only a sudden welter of disasters. The waves took their chance like wolves, and leaped furiously over the bulwarks. The prow lurched underwater, creating a great juddery bubble of air that burst with a shine that seemed luminous. And all the while, in a chorus of misery and surrender, the rigging overhead, or such strands as remained, kept up their keening as the gale tore through.
Even now, and in a way that astonished me almost as much as the storm itself, I found my brain kept to its steady course. I can only explain this by saying that I reckoned I mi
ght have no more than a few moments to live—and so was ravening for order. I was even able to notice the end of the Nightingale came in separate scenes, like the acts of a play. First she slewed around on her rocky perch, until our hull lay sideways to the main blast of the gale and parallel to the shore. Then, with a laborious slowness that felt heavy even to watch, she listed toward the land. Next I heard the last small sail at our jib ripped free of its rigging, and floundering into the waves. Next I heard the hatches burst open, which allowed the water to plunge into our hold in a hundred cataracts.
Finally, in the fifth act, our terrified passengers began to appear on deck, all carved with deep and shivering shadows. Some were dumbstruck as they crawled forward, and found a boom or a rope where they might cling, and hang, and await their fate. Some railed at the tops of their voices, protesting they could not believe a just God would persist in treating them so harshly. All were immediately soused, and with the moonlight twisting across them resembled maggots on a corpse.
And here I have a confession to make, as well as a scene to paint. I knew I should help my fellow sufferers, but I did not. Not even to show the least respect and kindness. I ignored them. I pushed past them, in fact, and pretended not to feel the fingers that grasped at me, or to hear the voices that clamored. When I came to Rebecca, who was pointing toward the whizzing sky with one hand, while the other pressed her Bible to her breast, I saw a puzzlement that cut me very deep—yet made no impression. My whole heart and mind was fixed elsewhere. Fixed on Natty.
But I had lost sight of her—and when I peered ahead to the roundhouse I thought she must already have been taken from me. The door swung wildly, and wave after wave gushed through the empty window frame. As these torrents shrank away through the bilges, making a hideous sucking noise like a huge breath drawn endlessly inward, the ship rose a little from the reef. Rose, and hesitated, and sent a curious shudder along her whole length. This was the moment of decision, though not controlled by any human power. When it passed, the Nightingale settled back onto the reef with an immense sigh, before very suddenly collapsing onto her side; the angle was so steep, everything and everyone on deck was immediately tipped into the water.
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