William Clark Russell

“ No mere effort of imagination can do justice to Holdsworth’s suffering. The feeling that he ought to remember, coupled with his incapacity and the sense of the past holding, perhaps, memories of vital consequence to him to recall, created a mental torture more afflicting than it is in the power of any man, who has not suffered in this way, to conceive. Loss of memory, even in trifling matters, always partakes of the nature of pain. The fruitless effort to recall a name, a date, begets uneasiness, and is soon converted into a positive torment. ”

“ Without irony, sir, I wouldn’t give a pin’s head for the best piece of humour in the world. You’ll excuse what I am about to say, sir, I’m sure. You are a traveller—I flatter myself I can tell that with half an eye. Now, sir, as a man who has visited other countries, and observed human nature in a hundred different forms, you can’t help being a Whig. Confess, sir, that you share my political views, which are those of a man who has only one cry—‘Down with rubbish!’”
“I hate rubbish as much as any man,” replied Holdsworth. ”

“ I think this sometimes!” cried Holdsworth passionately. “That is the haunting thought—but it may not be! Oh, sir, it cannot be! Were there dear ones belonging to me, could my memory forget them? Could they be very dear to me, and be forgotten?”
Mr. Sherman drew a deep breath, and said, “No, I believe that would be impossible. If love united you to any person at your home, that love would be an instinct to prompt you with an influence that should have no reference to memory. But the mind of man is a great mystery.” ”

“ Sherman was silent, and Holdsworth watched him with anxiety, that was almost pathetic, so eager was his hope that his friend would find some light in this dim and curious night-fancy to help him with.
“I can see nothing serviceable in this,” said Mr. Sherman presently, “but it is hopeful. Wait a while. This voice may return, or you may dream something more tangible. Remember,” he added with a smile, “that the morning light does not flood the world suddenly. The pale, faint gray comes first, and there are many gradations of brightness between the first peep of dawn and the rising of the sun.” ”

“ It would ease me, sir, greatly ease me, if God would but illuminate my mind only for a moment, that I might know what is lost to me. And the loneliness of it all!—the feeling of desolation that comes over me in my solitude! Mr. Sherman, consider how lonely I am! Not a voice, not an echo of anything that may be dear to me, comes out of that darkness behind me. Who would believe that memory is life, and the loss of it worse than death?”
He bowed his head and covered his face with his thin hands, and some tears trickled through his fingers. ”

“ Figure yourself groping in a dense gloom, saying: “There are things here which I feel are precious to me, which are of deep consequence to my happiness and to the happiness of others, but I cannot recall their names or their aspect!” and meanwhile the subtlest of your instincts is driving you mad with importunities to prosecute your search and lay the store of memory open to the light! This is worse than blindness; it is death in life. The years that you have lived are cut away from your existence, and with them all the precious accumulations of experience—love, sorrow, and thought itself. ”

“ Holdsworth, not having been made, did not take. He then led him to a vacant chair between two of the more soberly clad of the company, and having received and transmitted his commands to the waiter with a host-like and hospitable air, as though such a low arrangement as a reckoning had no existence, resumed his place at the head of the table, knocked loudly with his knuckles, and called upon Mr. Harris for a song.
On this, up started a thin young man with a yellow beard, and, leaning on his hands, gazed slowly around him with a leering and perfectly self-possessed bloodshot eye. ”

“ It was after dark always when Dolly, closely veiled, would creep down the road, with some little bundle under her shawl, for the pawnbroker, that she might obtain a trifle in order to furnish her child with a meal on the morrow. It was in the privacy of her own home that she laboured, as no menial ever will labour; sitting up late night after night, over the endless task of darning and mending her own and her child’s shabby apparel; often going supperless to bed, and waking to a day even more hopeless than the one that had preceded it. ”

“ Holdsworth parried them with the rudder like a fencer with a foil. His eye was marvellously quick, the movements of his hands delicate and unerring. What the waves were to that small open boat, the seas of the Pacific under a westerly gale are to a full-rigged ship. She sank into hollows half-mast deep, where the air was stagnant, behind and before her black walls of illuminated water, the hinder ones of which, catching her under the stern, raised her with irresistible force to a height that turned her inmates giddy and sick ”

“ George’s Church rearing high its flaming vane, and on the left the gleam of the river shadowed by many trees.
“There’s Southbourne!” said the coachman, pointing with his whip.
The dust whirled in a cloud behind the wheels, the guard sounded his horn, and with a rush and a rattle the coach drew up opposite the “Hare and Hounds,” a tavern as familiar to Holdsworth as the sight of his own hand.
“Hullo!” cried the coachman. “Hi, you there! Help! A glass o’ brandy! Blowed if the gentleman hasn’t fainted!” ”

“ Something absolutely of human pathos that appealed to the heart, as the distress of a living thing might, seemed mixed up in the aspect of unutterable desolation she presented, the more defined and keen because of the mocking joyousness of the sunlight that streamed over her, and the fair and azure surface of the sea on which she rested. Her figure-head, uninjured by the gale—as perfect a piece of workmanship as ever graced a vessel’s bows—might, by no violent fantasy, have been deemed the spirit of the ship poising herself an instant ere she soared towards the sky. ”

“ Brave to foolhardiness in a gale of wind, on a lee-shore, in confronting a mutinous crew, in dealing with the severest of marine exigencies, this little gentleman, in some trivial matters, was as timorous as a mouse, and would have made his escape overboard, rather than be grasped by Holdsworth, who, if he were not the dissembled madman his ragged, withered face suggested him to be, was still hedged about with enough of mysterious and secret horror to make him awful in the practical little Scotchman’s eyes. ”

“ The parting of these shrouds released the wreck from the ship’s side, and it drifted some fathoms away. The horrible grinding sounds ceased; but still the masts and yards, which the lightning disclosed seething in the water, black, ugly, and as dangerous as a lee-shore, were attached to the hull by a network of rope, all which must be severed. The knives of the men cut and hacked in all directions; and first here and then there, and sometimes as if crashing in half-a-dozen places at once, the adze wielded by Holdsworth was to be heard. ”

“ Could he endure to think that this delicate, gentle girl was linked to a man who neglected her, who might even ill-treat her, who at that moment might be squandering the money that had been given him on his own gross appetites, without thought of the wife and child wanting bread at home? What must be the issue of such a life if it were permitted to endure? Sooner or later Holdsworth must avow himself to save her and his child from that uttermost degree of ruin and misery to which Conway was dragging them. ”

“ But a burial at sea is the launching of the dead into infinity. The sense of his extinction is absolute. He is swallowed up and annihilated by the universe of water, which also seems to overwhelm his very memory.
At twelve o’clock the body of Johnson, sewn up in canvas, with a weight of lead attached to his feet, lay extended upon one of the gratings of the main-hatchway, one end resting on the bulwarks of the ship, the other upon the shoulders of two sailors. The crew stood round, holding their caps in their hands; and near the body stood Mr. Sherman reading the Burial Service. ”

“ Sometimes the widow, whose name was Tennent, would come on deck and find them together, when she would sit beside them and listen with a smile to Holdsworth, whose stories the little boy Louis would on no account suffer his mamma to interrupt. And to repay him for his kindness to the child, and not more for that than because she admired his honest nature, and was won by his gentle and tender simplicity, she would lead him on, with a world of feminine tact, to talk of his wife, and comfort and make him happy with her sympathy, her interest, and her assurances. ”

“ Some of the passengers crawled upon deck and gazed with wonderment around them. Certainly the panorama was a somewhat different one from what had been unrolled to their eyes the day before. The ship had a fagged and jaded look with her drenched decks, her ropes blown slack with the violence of the wind, and the canvas made unequal to the eye by the reefs in the topsails. It was again Holdsworth’s watch on deck. ”

“ No glimpse of the brave fellows was to be obtained; nothing but the flapping outline of the white sail could be seen; the mast creaked harshly; but from time to time the men’s voices could be heard even above the roar of the tempest, the groaning of the ship, and the rolling of spare casks, a sheep-pen which had become unlashed, and other things about the waist and quarter-deck; and slowly the faint spaces of thundering canvas vanished in the darkness, and were securely stowed.
Meanwhile, the hands about the poop had been sent to man the pumps. ”

“ The second mate answered the salutation by bending on the small ensign and running it up. Any further signalling was out of the question in that gale. The men on board the brig could just be made out. She was a smart vessel, black-hulled, with bows like a knife, and skysail poles, which gave her masts an aspect of perfect symmetry; and she was splendidly handled. She went like a swan over the seething billows, streaming a foaming wake, and in a very few moments was lost in the haze and gloom of the near horizon. ”

“ 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. ”

“ A stupor now fell upon Holdsworth—a species of drowsy indifference to his fate and to the fate of his companions. He had fallen wearily upon a thwart and sat with his back against the mast, and visions began to float before him, and his whole physical being seemed lapped into a dreamy insensibility, that subdued, whilst it lasted, that subtle agonising craving for water which, since he was awakened from his sleep, had tormented him with a pang more exquisite than any other form of human suffering. ”