FullReads

Well, the rest of that year seemed pretty much like all the others, except that coming home was better than ever. But when Christmas went by, and February came and our turn to be out again on the Gunnel, I went with a dismal feeling I hadn’t known before. For Bathsheba was drawing near her time, and the sorrow was that she must go through it without me. She had walked down to the quay with us, to see us off; and all the way she chatted and laughed with my father as cheerful as cheerful–but never letting her eyes rest on me, I noticed, and I saw what that meant; and when it came to goodbye, there was more in the tightening of her arms about me than I’d ever read in it before.

The old man, I reckon, had a wisht time with me, the next two or three weeks; but, by the mercy of God, the weather behaved furious all the while, leaving a man no time to mope. ‘Twas busy all, and busy enough, to keep a clear light inside the lantern, and warm souls inside our bodies. All through February it blew hard and cold from the north and north-west, and though we lay in the very mouth of the Gulf Stream, for ten days together there wasn’t a halliard we could touch with the naked hand, nor a cloth nor handful of cotton-waste but had to be thawed at the stove before using. Then, with the beginning of March, the wind tacked round to south-west, and stuck there, blowing big guns, and raising a swell that was something cruel. It was one of these gales that tore away the bell from the lighthouse, though hung just over a hundred feet above water-level. As for us, I wonder now how the little boat held by its two-ton anchors, even with three hundred fathom of chain cable to bear the strain and jerk of it; but with the spindrift whipping our faces, and the hail cutting them, we didn’t seem to have time to think of that. Bathsheba thought of it, though, in her bed at home–as I’ve heard since–and lay awake more than one night thinking of it.

But the third week in March the weather moderated; and soon the sun came out and I began to think. On the second afternoon of the fair weather I climbed up under the cage and saw the Islands for the first time; and coming down, I said to my father:

“Suppose that Bathsheba is dead!”

We hadn’t said more than a word or two to each other for a week; indeed, till yesterday we had to shout in each other’s ear to be heard at all. My father filled a pipe and said, “Don’t be a fool.”

“I see your hand shaking,” said I.

Said he, “That’s with the cold. At my age the cold takes a while to leave a man’s extremities.”

“But,” I went on in an obstinate way, “suppose she is dead?”

My father answered, “She is a well-built woman. The Lord is good.”

Not another word than this could I get from him. That evening–the wind now coming easy from the south, and the swell gone down in a wonderful way–as I was boiling water for the tea, we saw a dozen fishing-boats standing out from the Islands. They ran down to within two miles of us and then hove-to. The nets went out, and the sails came down, and by and by through the glass I could spy the smoke coming up from their cuddy-stoves.

“They might have brought news,” I cried out, “even if ’tis sorrow!”

“Maybe there was no news to bring.”

“‘Twould have been neighbourly, then, to run down and say so.”

“And run into the current here, I suppose? With a chance of the wind falling light at any moment?”