My Danish Sweetheart: A Novel. Volume 1 of 3Russell, William Clark
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My Danish Sweetheart: A Novel. Volume 1 of 3
Russell, William Clark
Adventure stories; Fiction; Love stories; Sea stories
How passed the rest of this the first day of my wild and dangerous
adventure, of Helga's and my first day of suffering, peril, and romantic
experience, I cannot clearly recall. A few impressions only survive. I
remember returning to the deck-house and finding the captain still
sleeping. I remember conversing with Helga, who looked me very earnestly
in the face when I entered, and who, by some indefinable influence of
voice and eye, coaxed me into speaking of my fit of horror on deck. I
remember that she left me to obtain some food, which, it seems, was kept
in one of the cabins below, and that she returned with a tin of
preserved meat, a little glass jar of jam, a tin of biscuits, and a
bottle of red wine like to what we had before drunk--a very pleasant,
well-flavoured claret; that all the while we ate, her father slept,
which made her happy, as she said he needed rest, not having closed his
eyes for three nights and days, though it was wonderful to me that he
should have fallen asleep in such a mood of excitement and of
consternation as I had left him in; but as to his slumbering amid that
uproar of straining timbers and flying waters, it is enough to say that
he was a seaman.
I also recollect that throughout the remainder of the day we worked the
pump at every two hours or thereabouts; but the water was unmistakably
gaining upon the barque, and to keep her free would have needed the
incessant plying of the pumps--both pumps at once--by gangs of fellows
who could relieve one another and rest between. Helga told me that her
father had given orders for a windmill pump to be rigged, Scandinavian
fashion, but that there had been some delay, so the barque sailed
without it. I said that no windmill pump would have stood up half an
hour in such a gale of wind as was blowing; but all the same, I bitterly
lamented that there was nothing of the sort aboard, for these windmill
arrangements keep the pumps going by the revolution of their sails, and
such a thing must have proved inexpressibly valuable when the weather
should moderate, so as to allow us to erect it.
The Captain slept far into the afternoon, but I could not observe when
he awoke that he was the better for his long spell of rest. I entered
his cabin fresh from a look round on deck, and found him just awake,
with his eyes fixed upon his daughter, who sat slumbering upon the
locker, with her back against the cabin-wall and her pale face bowed
upon her breast. He immediately attacked me with questions, delivered in
notes so high, penetrating, and feverish with hurry and alarm that they
awoke Helga. We had to tell him the truth--I mean, that the water was
gaining, but slowly, so that it must conquer us if the gale continued,
yet we might still hope to find a chance of our lives by keeping the
pump going. He broke into many passionate exclamations of distress and
grief, and then was silent, with the air of one who abandons hope.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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