David Copperfield
company. One man, referring to the topic they had been discussing, asked
me whether I thought the souls of the collier-crews who had gone down,
were out in the storm?
I remained there, I dare say, two hours. Once, I opened the yard-gate,
and looked into the empty street. The sand, the sea-weed, and the flakes
of foam, were driving by; and I was obliged to call for assistance
before I could shut the gate again, and make it fast against the wind.
There was a dark gloom in my solitary chamber, when I at length returned
to it; but I was tired now, and, getting into bed again, fell--off
a tower and down a precipice--into the depths of sleep. I have an
impression that for a long time, though I dreamed of being elsewhere and
in a variety of scenes, it was always blowing in my dream. At length,
I lost that feeble hold upon reality, and was engaged with two dear
friends, but who they were I don’t know, at the siege of some town in a
roar of cannonading.
The thunder of the cannon was so loud and incessant, that I could not
hear something I much desired to hear, until I made a great exertion
and awoke. It was broad day--eight or nine o’clock; the storm raging, in
lieu of the batteries; and someone knocking and calling at my door.
‘What is the matter?’ I cried.
‘A wreck! Close by!’
I sprung out of bed, and asked, what wreck?
‘A schooner, from Spain or Portugal, laden with fruit and wine. Make
haste, sir, if you want to see her! It’s thought, down on the beach,
she’ll go to pieces every moment.’
The excited voice went clamouring along the staircase; and I wrapped
myself in my clothes as quickly as I could, and ran into the street.
Numbers of people were there before me, all running in one direction, to
the beach. I ran the same way, outstripping a good many, and soon came
facing the wild sea.
The wind might by this time have lulled a little, though not more
sensibly than if the cannonading I had dreamed of, had been diminished
by the silencing of half-a-dozen guns out of hundreds. But the sea,
having upon it the additional agitation of the whole night, was
infinitely more terrific than when I had seen it last. Every appearance
it had then presented, bore the expression of being swelled; and the
height to which the breakers rose, and, looking over one another,
bore one another down, and rolled in, in interminable hosts, was most
appalling. In the difficulty of hearing anything but wind and waves,
and in the crowd, and the unspeakable confusion, and my first breathless
efforts to stand against the weather, I was so confused that I looked
out to sea for the wreck, and saw nothing but the foaming heads of the
great waves. A half-dressed boatman, standing next me, pointed with his
bare arm (a tattoo’d arrow on it, pointing in the same direction) to the
left. Then, O great Heaven, I saw it, close in upon us!
One mast was broken short off, six or eight feet from the deck, and lay
over the side, entangled in a maze of sail and rigging; and all that
ruin, as the ship rolled and beat--which she did without a moment’s
pause, and with a violence quite inconceivable--beat the side as if it
would stave it in. Some efforts were even then being made, to cut this
portion of the wreck away; for, as the ship, which was broadside on,
turned towards us in her rolling, I plainly descried her people at
work with axes, especially one active figure with long curling hair,
conspicuous among the rest. But a great cry, which was audible even
above the wind and water, rose from the shore at this moment; the sea,
sweeping over the rolling wreck, made a clean breach, and carried men,
spars, casks, planks, bulwarks, heaps of such toys, into the boiling
surge.
The second mast was yet standing, with the rags of a rent sail, and
a wild confusion of broken cordage flapping to and fro. The ship had
struck once, the same boatman hoarsely said in my ear, and then lifted
in and struck again. I understood him to add that she was parting
amidships, and I could readily suppose so, for the rolling and beating
were too tremendous for any human work to suffer long. As he spoke,
there was another great cry of pity from the beach; four men arose with
the wreck out of the deep, clinging to the rigging of the remaining
mast; uppermost, the active figure with the curling hair.
There was a bell on board; and as the ship rolled and dashed, like a
desperate creature driven mad, now showing us the whole sweep of her
deck, as she turned on her beam-ends towards the shore, now nothing but
her keel, as she sprung wildly over and turned towards the sea, the bell
rang; and its sound, the knell of those unhappy men, was borne towards
us on the wind. Again we lost her, and again she rose. Two men were
gone. The agony on the shore increased. Men groaned, and clasped their
hands; women shrieked, and turned away their faces. Some ran wildly
up and down along the beach, crying for help where no help could be. I
found myself one of these, frantically imploring a knot of sailors whom
I knew, not to let those two lost creatures perish before our eyes.
They were making out to me, in an agitated way--I don’t know how,
for the little I could hear I was scarcely composed enough to
understand--that the lifeboat had been bravely manned an hour ago, and
could do nothing; and that as no man would be so desperate as to attempt
to wade off with a rope, and establish a communication with the shore,
there was nothing left to try; when I noticed that some new sensation
moved the people on the beach, and saw them part, and Ham come breaking
through them to the front.
I ran to him--as well as I know, to repeat my appeal for help. But,
distracted though I was, by a sight so new to me and terrible, the
determination in his face, and his look out to sea--exactly the same
look as I remembered in connexion with the morning after Emily’s
flight--awoke me to a knowledge of his danger. I held him back with both
arms; and implored the men with whom I had been speaking, not to listen
to him, not to do murder, not to let him stir from off that sand!
Another cry arose on shore; and looking to the wreck, we saw the cruel
sail, with blow on blow, beat off the lower of the two men, and fly up
in triumph round the active figure left alone upon the mast.
Against such a sight, and against such determination as that of the
calmly desperate man who was already accustomed to lead half the people
present, I might as hopefully have entreated the wind. ‘Mas’r Davy,’
he said, cheerily grasping me by both hands, ‘if my time is come, ‘tis
come. If ‘tan’t, I’ll bide it. Lord above bless you, and bless all!
Mates, make me ready! I’m a-going off!’
I was swept away, but not unkindly, to some distance, where the people
around me made me stay; urging, as I confusedly perceived, that he was
bent on going, with help or without, and that I should endanger the
precautions for his safety by troubling those with whom they rested. I
don’t know what I answered, or what they rejoined; but I saw hurry on
the beach, and men running with ropes from a capstan that was there, and
penetrating into a circle of figures that hid him from me. Then, I saw
him standing alone, in a seaman’s frock and trousers: a rope in his
hand, or slung to his wrist: another round his body: and several of the
best men holding, at a little distance, to the latter, which he laid out
himself, slack upon the shore, at his feet.
The wreck, even to my unpractised eye, was breaking up. I saw that she
was parting in the middle, and that the life of the solitary man upon
the mast hung by a thread. Still, he clung to it. He had a singular red
cap on,--not like a sailor’s cap, but of a finer colour; and as the few
yielding planks between him and destruction rolled and bulged, and his
anticipative death-knell rung, he was seen by all of us to wave it. I
saw him do it now, and thought I was going distracted, when his action
brought an old remembrance to my mind of a once dear friend.
Ham watched the sea, standing alone, with the silence of suspended
breath behind him, and the storm before, until there was a great
retiring wave, when, with a backward glance at those who held the rope
which was made fast round his body, he dashed in after it, and in a
moment was buffeting with the water; rising with the hills, falling
with the valleys, lost beneath the foam; then drawn again to land. They
hauled in hastily.
He was hurt. I saw blood on his face, from where I stood; but he took
no thought of that. He seemed hurriedly to give them some directions for
leaving him more free--or so I judged from the motion of his arm--and
was gone as before.
And now he made for the wreck, rising with the hills, falling with the
valleys, lost beneath the rugged foam, borne in towards the shore,
borne on towards the ship, striving hard and valiantly. The distance was
nothing, but the power of the sea and wind made the strife deadly. At
length he neared the wreck. He was so near, that with one more of his
vigorous strokes he would be clinging to it,--when a high, green, vast
hill-side of water, moving on shoreward, from beyond the ship, he seemed
to leap up into it with a mighty bound, and the ship was gone!
Some eddying fragments I saw in the sea, as if a mere cask had been
broken, in running to the spot where they were hauling in. Consternation
was in every face. They drew him to my very feet--insensible--dead.
He was carried to the nearest house; and, no one preventing me now, I
remained near him, busy, while every means of restoration were tried;
but he had been beaten to death by the great wave, and his generous
heart was stilled for ever.
As I sat beside the bed, when hope was abandoned and all was done, a
fisherman, who had known me when Emily and I were children, and ever
since, whispered my name at the door.
‘Sir,’ said he, with tears starting to his weather-beaten face, which,
with his trembling lips, was ashy pale, ‘will you come over yonder?’
The old remembrance that had been recalled to me, was in his look. I
asked him, terror-stricken, leaning on the arm he held out to support
me:
‘Has a body come ashore?’
He said, ‘Yes.’
‘Do I know it?’ I asked then.
He answered nothing.
But he led me to the shore. And on that part of it where she and I had
looked for shells, two children--on that part of it where some lighter
fragments of the old boat, blown down last night, had been scattered by
the wind--among the ruins of the home he had wronged--I saw him lying
with his head upon his arm, as I had often seen him lie at school.
CHAPTER 56. THE NEW WOUND, AND THE OLD
No need, O Steerforth, to have said, when we last spoke together, in
that hour which I so little deemed to be our parting-hour--no need to
have said, ‘Think of me at my best!’ I had done that ever; and could I
change now, looking on this sight!
They brought a hand-bier, and laid him on it, and covered him with a
flag, and took him up and bore him on towards the houses. All the men
who carried him had known him, and gone sailing with him, and seen him
merry and bold. They carried him through the wild roar, a hush in the
midst of all the tumult; and took him to the cottage where Death was
already.
But when they set the bier down on the threshold, they looked at one
another, and at me, and whispered. I knew why. They felt as if it were
not right to lay him down in the same quiet room.
We went into the town, and took our burden to the inn. So soon as I
could at all collect my thoughts, I sent for Joram, and begged him to
provide me a conveyance in which it could be got to London in the night.
I knew that the care of it, and the hard duty of preparing his mother to
receive it, could only rest with me; and I was anxious to discharge that