CHAPTER V. UNDER WATER
When the Dipsey, the little submarine vessel which had started to makeits way to the north pole under the ice of the arctic regions, had sunkout of sight under the waters, it carried a very quiet and earnestlyobservant party. Every one seemed anxious to know what would happennext, and all those whose duties would allow them to do so gatheredunder the great skylight in the upper deck, and gazed upward at thelittle glass bulb on the surface of the water, which they were towing bymeans of an electric wire; and every time a light was flashed into thisbulb it seemed to them as if they were for an instant reunited to thatvast open world outside of the ocean. When at last the glass globe wasexploded, as a signal that the Dipsey had cut loose from all ties whichconnected her with the outer world, they saw through the water abovethem the flash and the sparks, and then all was darkness.
The interior of the submarine vessel was brightly lighted by electriclamps, and the souls of the people inside of her soon began to brightenunder the influence of their work and the interest they took in theirnovel undertaking; there was, however, one exception--the soul of Mrs.Block did not brighten.
Mrs. Sarah Block was a peculiar person; she was her husband's secondwife, and was about forty years of age. Her family were country people,farmers, and her life as a child was passed among folk as old-fashionedas if they had lived in the past century, and had brought theirold-fashioned ideas with them into this. But Sarah did not wish to beold-fashioned. She sympathized with the social movements of the day; shebelieved in inventions and progress; she went to school and studied agreat deal which her parents never heard of, and which she very promptlyforgot. When she grew up she wore the widest hoop-skirts; she was one ofthe first to use an electric spinning-wheel; and when she took chargeof her father's house, she it was who banished to the garret theold-fashioned sewing-machine, and the bicycles on which some of theolder members of the family once used to ride. She tried to persuade herfather to use a hot-air plough, and to give up the practice ofkeeping cows in an age when milk and butter were considered not onlyunnecessary, but injurious to human health. When she married SamuelBlock, then a man of forty-five, she really thought she did so becausehe was a person of progressive ideas, but the truth was she married himbecause he loved her, and because he did it in an honest, old-fashionedway.
In her inner soul Sarah was just as old-fashioned as anybody--she hadbeen born so, and she had never changed. Endeavor as she might to makeherself believe that she was a woman of modern thought and feeling, hersoul was truly in sympathy with the social fashions and customs in whichshe had been brought up; and those to which she was trying to educateherself were on the outside of her, never a part of her, but alwaysthe objects of her aspirations. These aspirations she believed to beprinciples. She tried to set her mind upon the unfolding revelationsof the era, as young women in her grandfather's day used to try to settheir minds upon Browning. When Sarah told Mr. Clewe that she was goingon the Dipsey because she would not let her husband go by himself, shedid so because she was ashamed to say that she was in such sympathy withthe great scientific movements of the day that she thought it was herduty to associate herself with one of them; but while she thought shewas lying in the line of high principle, she was in fact expressing thetruthful affection of her old-fashioned nature--a nature she was alwaysendeavoring to keep out of sight, but which from its dark corner ruledher life.
She had an old-fashioned temper, which delighted in censoriousness.The more interest she took in anything, the more alive was she to itsdefects. She tried to be a good member of her church, but she said sharpthings of the congregation.
No electrical illumination could brighten the soul of Mrs. Block.She moved about the little vessel with a clouded countenance. She wasimpressed with the feeling that something was wrong, even now at thebeginning, although of course she could not be expected to know what itwas.
At the bows, and in various places at the sides of the vessel, andeven in the bottom, were large plates of heavy glass, through which theinmates could look out into the water, and there streamed forward intothe quiet depths of the ocean a great path of light, proceeding from apowerful searchlight in the bow. By this light any object in the watercould be seen some time before reaching it; but to guard more thoroughlyagainst the most dreaded obstacle they feared to meet--down-reachingmasses of ice--a hydraulic thermometer, mounted on a little submarinevessel connected with the Dipsey by wires, preceded her a long distanceahead. Impelled and guided by the batteries of the larger vessel, thislittle thermometer-boat would send back instant tidings of any changesin temperature in the water occasioned by the proximity of ice. Toprevent sinking too deep, a heavy lead, on which were several electricbuttons, hung far below the Dipsey, ready at all times, day or night,to give notice if she came too near the reefs and sands of the bottom ofthe Arctic Ocean.
The steward had just announced that the first meal on board the Dipseywas ready for the officers' mess, when Mrs. Block suddenly rushed intothe cabin.
"Look here, Sammy," she exclaimed; "I want you, or somebody who knowsmore than you do, to tell me how the people on this vessel are goin'to get air to breathe with. It has just struck me that when we havebreathed up all the air that's inside, we will simply suffocate, just asif we were drowned outside a boat instead of inside; and for my partI can't see any difference, except in one case we keep dry and in theother we are wet."
"More than that, madam," said Mr. Gibbs, the Master Electrician, who,in fact, occupied the rank of first officer of the vessel; "if we aredrowned outside in the open water we shall be food for fishes, whereasif we suffocate inside the vessel we shall only be food for reflection,if anybody ever finds us."
"You did not come out expectin' that, I hope?" said Mrs. Block. "Ithought something would happen when we started, but I never supposed wewould run short of air."
"Don't bother yourself about that, Sarah," said Sammy. "We'll have allthe air we want; of course we would not start without thinkin' of that."
"I don't know," said Sarah. "It's very seldom that men start offanywhere without forgettin' somethin'."
"Let us take our seats, Mrs. Block," said Mr. Gibbs, "and I will setyour mind at rest on the air point. There are a great many machinesand mechanical arrangements on board here which of course you don'tunderstand, but which I shall take great pleasure in explaining to youwhenever you want to learn something about them. Among them are twogreat metal contrivances, outside the Dipsey and near her bows, whichopen into the water, and also communicate with the inside of her hull.These are called electric gills, and they separate air from the wateraround us in a manner somewhat resembling the way in which a fish'sgills act. They continually send in air enough to supply us not onlywith all we need for breathing, but with enough to raise us to thesurface of the water whenever we choose to produce it in sufficientquantities."
"I am glad to hear it," said Mrs. Block, "and I hope the machines willnever get out of order. But I should think that sort of air, made freshfrom the water, would be very damp. It's very different from the air weare used to, which is warmed by the sun and properly aired."
"Aired air seems funny to me," remarked Sammy.
There was fascination, not at all surprising, about the great glasslights in the Dipsey, and whenever a man was off duty he was pretty sureto be at one of these windows if he could get there. At first Mrs. Blockwas afraid to look out of any of them. It made her blood creep, shesaid, to stare out into all that solemn water. For the first two days,when she could get no one to talk to her, she passed most of her timesitting in the cabin, holding in one of her hands a dustbrush, and inthe other a farmer's almanac. She did not use the brush, nor did sheread the almanac, but they reminded her of home and the world which wasreal.
But when she did make up her mind to look out of the windows, she becamegreatly interested, especially at the bow, where she could gaze outinto the water illuminated by the long lane of light thrown out bythe search-light. Here she continually imagined she sa
w things, andsometimes greatly startled the men on lookout by her exclamations. Onceshe thought she saw a floating corpse, but fortunately it was Sammy whowas by her when she proclaimed her discovery, and he did not believein any such nonsense, suggesting that it might have been some sort of afish. After that the idea of fish filled the mind of Mrs. Block, and sheset herself to work to search in an encyclopaedia which was on board fordescriptions of fishes which inhabited the depths of the arctic seas. Tomeet a whale, she thought, would be very bad, but then a whale is clumsyand soft; a sword-fish was what she most dreaded. A sword-fish runninghis sword through one of the glass windows, and perhaps coming inhimself along with the water, sent a chill down her back every time shethought about it and talked about it.
"You needn't be afraid of sword-fishes," said Captain Jim Hubbell. "Theydon't fancy the cold water we are sailin' in; and as to whales, don'tyou know, madam, there ain't no more of 'em?"
"No more whales!" exclaimed Sarah. "I have heard about 'em all my life!"
"Oh, you can read and hear about 'em easy enough," replied Captain Jim,"but you nor nobody else will ever see none of 'em ag'in--at least, inthis part of the world. Sperm-whales began gittin' scarce when I wasa boy, and pretty soon there was nothin' left but bow-head or rightwhales, that tried to keep out of the way of human bein's by livin' farup North; but when they came to shootin' 'em with cannons which wouldcarry three or four miles, the whale's day was up, and he got scarcerand scarcer, until he faded out altogether. There was a British vessel,the Barkright, that killed two bow-head whales in 1935, north ofMelville Island, but since that time there hasn't been a whale seen inall the arctic waters. I have heard that said by sailors, and I haveread about it. They have all been killed, and nothin' left of 'em butthe skeletons that's in the museums."
Mrs. Block shuddered. "It would be terrible to meet a livin' one, andyet it is an awful thought to think that they are all dead and gone,"said she.