第15章 CHAPTER V(3)

Major Daniel, the senior marine officer of the 'Blonde,' was a reserved and taciturn man. He was quiet and gentlemanlike, always very neat in his dress; rather severe, still kind to his men. His aloofness was in no wise due to lack of ideas, nor, I should say, to pride - unless, perhaps, it were the pride which some men feel in suppressing all emotion by habitual restraint of manner. Whether his SANGFROID was constitutional, or that nobler kind of courage which feels and masters timidity and the sense of danger, none could tell. Certain it is he was as calm and self-possessed in action as in repose. He was so courteous one fancied he would almost have apologised to his foe before he remorselessly ran him through.

On our second visit to Amoy, a year or more after the first, we met with a warmer reception. The place was much more strongly fortified, and the ship was several-times hulled.

We were at very close quarters, as it is necessary to pass under high ground as the harbour is entered. Those who had the option, excepting our gallant old captain, naturally kept under shelter of the bulwarks and hammock nettings. Not so Major Daniel. He stood in the open gangway watching the effect of the shells, as though he were looking at a game of billiards. While thus occupied a round shot struck him full in the face, and simply left him headless.

Another accident, partly due to an ignorance of dynamics, happened at the taking of Canton. The whole of the naval brigade was commanded by Sir Thomas Bouchier. Our men were lying under the ridge of a hill protected from the guns on the city walls. Fully exposed to the fire, which was pretty hot, 'old Tommy' as we called him, paced to and fro with contemptuous indifference, stopping occasionally to spy the enemy with his long ship's telescope. A number of bluejackets, in reserve, were stationed about half a mile further off at the bottom of the protecting hill. They were completely screened from the fire by some buildings of the suburbs abutting upon the slope. Those in front were watching the cannon-balls which had struck the crest and were rolling as it were by mere force of gravitation down the hillside. Some jokes were made about football, when suddenly a smart and popular young officer - Fox, first lieutenant of one of the brigs - jumped out at one of these spent balls, which looked as though it might have been picked up by the hands, and gave it a kick. It took his foot off just above the ankle. There was no surgeon at hand, and he was bleeding to death before one could be found. Sir Thomas had come down the hill, and seeing the wounded officer on the ground with a group around him, said in passing, 'Well, Fox, this is a bad job, but it will make up the pair of epaulets, which is something.'

'Yes sir,' said the dying man feebly, 'but without a pair of legs.' Half an hour later he was dead.

I have spoken lightly of courage, as if, by implication, I myself possessed it. Let me make a confession. From my soul I pity the man who is or has been such a miserable coward as I was in my infancy, and up to this youthful period of my life. No fear of bullets or bayonets could ever equal mine.

It was the fear of ghosts. As a child, I think that at times when shut up for punishment, in a dark cellar for instance, I must have nearly gone out of my mind with this appalling terror.

Once when we were lying just below Whampo, the captain took nearly every officer and nearly the whole ship's crew on a punitive expedition up the Canton river. They were away about a week. I was left behind, dangerously ill with fever and ague. In his absence, Sir Thomas had had me put into his cabin, where I lay quite alone day and night, seeing hardly anyone save the surgeon and the captain's steward, who was himself a shadow, pretty nigh. Never shall I forget my mental sufferings at night. In vain may one attempt to describe what one then goes through; only the victims know what that is. My ghost - the ghost of the Whampo Reach - the ghost of those sultry and miasmal nights, had no shape, no vaporous form; it was nothing but a presence, a vague amorphous dread. It may have floated with the swollen and putrid corpses which hourly came bobbing down the stream, but it never appeared; for there was nothing to appear. Still it might appear. I expected every instant through the night to see it in some inconceivable form. I expected it to touch me. It neither stalked upon the deck, nor hovered in the dark, nor moved, nor rested anywhere. And yet it was there about me, - where, I knew not. On every side I was threatened. I feared it most behind the head of my cot, because I could not see it if it were so.

This, it will be said, is the description of a nightmare.

Exactly so. My agony of fright was a nightmare; but a nightmare when every sense was strained with wakefulness, when all the powers of imagination were concentrated to paralyse my shattered reason.

The experience here spoken of is so common in some form or other that we may well pause to consider it. What is the meaning of this fear of ghosts? - how do we come by it? It may be thought that its cradle is our own, that we are purposely frightened in early childhood to keep us calm and quiet. But I do not believe that nurses' stories would excite dread of the unknown if the unknown were not already known. The susceptibility to this particular terror is there before the terror is created. A little reflection will convince us that we must look far deeper for the solution of a mystery inseparable from another, which is of the last importance to all of us.