passed through the door she murmured to herself, 'He will kill me.'
'Perhaps he will, too,' thought Stephen some minutes later; he had gone on deck to shake off the painful impression of this interview and to hear what the merchantman had to say, and there only a few feet along the gangway from him stood the gunner, dark, angry, dangerous, liable to fly out for a nothing, a powerful man with long hanging arms.
Stephen was too late for anything but the parting civilities, exchanged over a quarter of a mile of heaving aquamarine sea all flecked with white as the ships filled on opposite tacks, but Pullings told him that the news was most disappointing: the Norfolk had not put into the River Plate, which might have allowed the hurrying Surprise to gain at least a few hundred miles, but had carried straight on. A Montevideo barque had spoken her in about forty degrees south, which almost certainly meant that she had increased her lead, having had fairer winds. 'Our only hope now,' he said, 'is meeting a ship that has seen her refitting at say Port Desire before tackling the Horn: otherwise we shall certainly have to follow her round. And God knows whether we shall ever find her.'
'But Mr Allen knows the haunts of the English whalers, and surely the Norfolk's one function is to pursue them?'
'Yes, to be sure. But the fishery has spread far south and west these last years, and if we do not catch her along the coast in the waters the master knows, along by Chile, Peru, the Galapagos, Mexico and California - if she has sailed off westwards three thousand miles and more, how are we ever to find her in all that sea? No trade in those parts, no merchantmen to see her go by, no port where we can hear news of her. It would call for most uncommon luck: and luck is what we have not had much of, this goddam voyage.'
Southward and still farther south, but never a ship did they meet. Day after day, even week after week, the quiet sea was empty clean round its rim, an enormous loneliness; and all this time the winds were faint, capricious and sometimes foul: but above all faint. Three nights running Jack had his recurrent dream of riding a horse that shrank and dwindled until his feet touched the ground on either side and people looked at him with strong disapproval, even with contempt; and each time he woke up with the same sense of sweating anxiety.
Imperceptibly the air grew colder, and the sea; and every day the sun was at least a degree farther from the zenith at the noon observation. By now the young gentlemen could all take its altitude with tolerable proficiency; Jack looked at their daily workings of the ship's position south of the Line and west of Greenwich with real satisfaction, and sometimes he would call them in to hear part of a Latin ode (at present they were slowly mangling poor Horace) or the declension of a noun in Greek. 'If they are all drowned tomorrow,' he remarked to Stephen, 'their fathers cannot say I han't done my duty by them. When I was a squeaker nobody gave a tinker's curse whether my daily workings were right or wrong, and as for dashing away in Latin and Greek...' He also fed them almost daily, turn and turn about, often asking the youngster of the morning watch to breakfast with him and another or sometimes two to dine.
During this long slow passage there was time, ample time, for the usual invitations to resume their steady sequence and even to grow somewhat monotonous: the Captain dining with his officers in the gunroom, the members of the gunroom dining in the cabin by rotation, and the midshipmen by ones and twos with both. And the farther south the ship travelled the poorer grew the fare: both cooks did their best, but private stores were running low and although Pontius Pilate, the gunroom cock, still crowed every morning when the coops were carried up on to the quarterdeck, and although his hens still laid the occasional egg, while goat Aspasia provided milk for the cabin's holy coffee, the last sheep died a little south of the fortieth parallel - it had been shorn, nay shaved, for its own good under the equator and was now unable to endure the increasing cold - and salt pork took its place on the Captain's table on a day when the chaplain was dining with him. Jack apologized for the change, since the invitation had been 'to share his mutton' but Martin said, 'Not at all, not at all; this is the best salt pork I have ever eaten - such a very subtle combination of East India spices - yet even if it had been black penitential gruel it would still have been a feast. This morning, sir, at half past eight, I saw my first penguin! A jackass penguin, as the Doctor assures me, swimming with extraordinary speed and grace hard by the ship, flying, as it were, in the element!'
The Surprise was in fact on the edge of the waters where the Pacific, the Atlantic and the Indian oceans run round the world in a continuous stream common to a large number of far southern animals; the sea had quite abruptly changed its colour, temperature and even character and although it was perhaps a little too early to hope for the larger albatrosses there was a strong likelihood of mallemawks, blue petrels, whale-birds and of course many more penguins. The day after this change both he and Stephen left their warm cots as soon as they heard the familiar grinding of holystones on the deck far above their heads - a sound that was felt rather than heard, coming as a vibration through the timbers and the taut cordage - and made their way to the gunroom, where the steward gave them each a bowl of hot burgoo, a kind of liquid porridge. By this time - for Martin had washed and even shaved by the light of a purser's dip - a faint grey was showing in the east, and Honey came below, bare- footed and red legged from the cold and streaming deck, to put on his shoes and stockings in the warmth. He told them that the worst of the wet would be gone, swabbed away, in five minutes, and that the night's drizzle had lifted: 'Wind at north-east and a following sea. But it is precious cold still: will you not wait until after breakfast? It will be stockfish, judging by the smell of glue.'
No, they said, they preferred to be in the open before hammocks were piped up and stuffed into those things along the sides, sadly obstructing the view. They would go upstairs in five minutes, as soon as the decks were reasonably...
'Oh sir, oh sir,' cried Calamy, running barefoot down. 'A huge great enormous whale - he is just alongside.'
Alongside he was, and vast he was: a sperm whale with his great blunt squared-off head abreast of the forechains, his dark body streaming aft far along the quarterdeck, perhaps seventy-five or even eighty feet of massive creature, giving such an impression of tranquil strength the ship seemed frail beside him. He lay with the upper part of his head and the whole uneven length of his back awash, and he blew: a thick white jet that spouted up and forward while a man could count three. Then after a slight pause he deliberately sunk his head for twice that time; raised it and blew again, breathed and blew, breathed and blew, all the while keeping alongside the ship with a slight rippling motion of that huge broad horizontal tail. He was a biscuit-toss away in the grey transparent water; he could be seen above it and below; and they watched him entranced, all silent along the rail.
'That is one of your old eighty-barrel bulls,' said the master at Stephen's elbow. 'Maybe ninety. The kind we call schoolmasters, though they are usually alone.'
'He does not seem at all alarmed,' whispered Stephen.
'No. I dare say he is deaf. I have known old ones deaf, aye, and blind of both eyes too, though they seemed to manage very well. Yet perhaps it is the company he likes; they seem to do so sometimes, the lonely ones; like dolphins. He will be going down any minute now; he has pretty well had his spoutings out, and...' The very shocking report of a musket in the silence cut him short. Darting a glance along the rail Stephen saw the Marine officer, still in his night-cap, with the smoking gun in his hands and a great fool's laugh upon his face. The whale's head plunged in a boil of water, his huge back arching and the tail coming clear, poised there above the surface for an instant of time before it vanished straight downwards.
