Chapter IV: The Gale Breaks

On the sixth day, during dinner, Vanderdecken said he believed we had seen the worst of the storm. There was a small lull in the wind, and a faintness sifting up, so to speak, from behind the peaks and valleys of the horizon into the sky all around, like a very dim dawning of fair weather innumerable leagues distant yet.

"I shall be glad to see the sun again," said Imogene.

"Let us get quit of these waters," exclaimed Vanderdecken, moodily, and often dropping his knife and fork to take his beard in both hands and stroke it with a fixed look in his eyes, which would have made you swear he beheld a vision, "and we shall have so much sun every day climbing higher and higher until it hangs right over our mastheads like a flaming shield that the coolness of the Biscayan Sea and the entrance of the English Channel shall be sweet as drink to a dry man."

"Pray, mynheer," said I, "how far to the eastwards do you suppose this gale has driven us?"

He looked at me with a sudden temper in his face as if he would crush me for daring to ask. Nevertheless, he answered, but with a deep thrill in the rich tremble of his voice, "About one hundred and fifty leagues, sir; and what of that?"

"Ay, and what of that?" exclaimed Van Vogelaar, who had turned a scowling eye on me on my asking this question.

"Why, nothing, gentlemen," I answered, warned by the violet eyes that dwelt upon me to slide out of this matter as quickly as I could. "The ground to be recovered is not great, and a pretty little south-east wind should float us, with square yards, round the Cape in three or four days."

Vanderdecken made no response; his eyes fell away from me to the table, at which he gazed in the posture of one who dreams waking. Van Vogelaar, on the other hand, continued to stare at me for a long minute, which, as he sate on my right hand and consequently had to turn his head and hold his face full towards me, proved a very severe trial to my temper, insomuch that I could have beat him for his insolence. But a very little reflection taught me to consider this steadfast, surly and abusive regard as meaningless as a dead man's stare would be if moulded to the expression Van Vogelaar wore; so I waited till he should have made an end of his scrutiny, and the captain shortly after rising, I followed him on deck, the weather as yet being too heavy and wet for Imogene.

It was as Vanderdecken had said. The gale had broke and we might look for a clear sky presently, yet the sea still ran fearfully high, and the wash and weltering of it along the sea-line that was now indifferently clear, suggested a vast sierra whose sides beyond were in sunshine, whilst over our trucks lay the sombre twilight of the tempest. There was still a fine rain in the air, though not such as to cloud the ocean, but I was so fascinated by the picture of the Flying Dutchman's fight with the mighty combers which rolled at her from the north and west that I lingered gazing till I was pretty near as soaked as when I had been fished up and brought aboard.

But a sailor makes no trouble of a wet jacket so long as he has a dry shirt for his back, which I had, thanks to Vanderdecken, who had been so good as to lend me several shifts of linen.

I do not know that I ever saw or heard of a ship that threw from her such bodies of foam as did this vessel. She would rise at the sea buoyantly enough, yet at every lean-to to windward for a giddy sliding swoop into the hollow, she hurled an enormous space of seething and spitting and flashing froth many fathoms from her, into which she would sink as though it were snow and so squatter, as 'tis termed, and lie there whilst you might count to ten or fifteen, ere rising out of it to the irresistible heave of the next leviathan sea. Often had I watched this picture during the six days, but the light breaking around the whole circle of the sea, like radiance dully streaming through greased paper, the decreasing force of the wind, that while leaving the surges still monstrous, suffered the ship to fall with deader weight to windward, thus enlarging the snow-like surface she cast from her whilst rendering it fiercer in its boiling, made this particular example of the ship's sea-going qualities a marvel in my sight, and I stood for a long time looking and looking.

If ever a man was to guess the deathless character of this craft it would be at such a time as this. The giant forces of nature with which she had warred were languishing. The beaten storm, not indeed yet breathless, was slowly silencing the desperate roar of its invisible artillery; the seas, like battering-rams, thundered against her sides, but with a gradual lessening of their fury, and the victorious ship, her decks streaming, her bows and sides hound-like with salival drainings, a fierce music of triumphant shoutings aloft, her reefed courses swollen as are the cheeks of trumpeters urging to the conflict, rose and fell, pitched and strained, among those liquid heights and hollows, every nerve in her ancient fabric strung taut for a battle that was to be repeated again and again, whilst the faintness round the horizon waxed into a delicate brightness of sunshine streaming off the edge of the canopy that still hovered on high, and the wind sank into whistlings, without admixture of thunderous intervals, and the surge-slopes drooped out of their savage sharpness.

By seven o'clock that night the gale was spent, and there was then blowing a quiet breeze from the west-south-west. The swell rolled slowly from the quarter from which the wind had stormed, and caused the Braave to wallow most nauseously, but she grew a bit steadier after they had shaken the reefs out of the courses and made sail on her. I watched this business with deep interest. Vanderdecken, standing on the poop, gave his orders to Van Vogelaar on the quarter-deck. The sailors went to work with true Dutch phlegm and deliberateness, taking plenty of time to unknot the reef-points, then carrying the fore and main-jeers to the capstan, and walking round without a song, sullen and silent. There was no liveliness--none of the springing and jumping and cheerful heartiness you would expect in a crew who, after battling through six dismal days of black winds and lashing seas, were now looked down upon by a Heaven of stars, shining gloriously among a few slowly-moving clouds.

Ay, you saw how dead were the bodies which the supernatural life in them kept a-going. They set their topsails, topgallant-sails and mizzen, which I have elsewhere described as a lateen-shaped sail secured to a yard, like to the triangular canvas carried by xebecs and gallies, then hoisted their jib or fore-staysail and let fall the clews of the spritsail, keeping the sprit-topsail handed. The larboard tacks were still aboard and the ship heading north, lying up for the coast that was now about two hundred and fifty to three hundred leagues from us. She made a wild picture, not wanting in solemnity either, yet charged with an element of fear. Twilight is but short-lived in those seas and it was dark--though the sky as I have said was full of radiant galaxies--some while before they had ended the business of crowding sail upon the ship. Amid the fury and froth of the gale the phosphoric gleamings of the timbers had been hidden; but now that peace had come and there was no other commotion than such as the long cradling swing of the swell produced, those grave-yard lights glistened out afresh and they made you think of the eyes of countless worms creeping in and out of the rottenness of an hundred and fifty years. It was certain that Vanderdecken and his mates saw these misty, sickly, death-suggestive glimmerings; for the faint lights trembled along the decks, twinkled upon the masts, shone with sufficient power on the sides to make--as I had observed when the ship first drew near to the Saracen--a light of their own in the black water; they must have been noticeable things to the crew, even as to Imogene and me; for they saw what we saw--the sun, the stars, the ocean, the sails, the directions of the compass--whatever was to be seen.

Why, then, was it that this fluttering, malignant sheen did not catch their notice? I know not. Maybe the senses permitted to them went so far only as to impel them to persevere in making the passage of the Cape. For besides these phosphoric crawlings, the aged condition of the ship, her antique rig, and a variety of other features illustrating the passage of time, would have been visible to them, had their perception not been limited by the Curse to the obligations it imposed.

After a little Vanderdecken went below, and presently returned bringing Imogene with him. On the poop 'twas all darkness save for the phosphorescence in the ship and the sea-fire over the side. The captain and the lady came close before I distinguished them.

"Fair weather at last, Mr. Fenton!" she exclaimed, after peering to make sure of me, and then stopping so as to oblige Vanderdecken to stop too, for he had her arm in his, and I think he meant to walk to and fro the deck with her.

"Yes," I replied, "Heaven is merciful. Such another six days I would not pass through for the wealth in this ship."

"Pray speak in Dutch, sir, that I may follow you," said Vanderdecken, with a certain stern and dignified courtesy.

"If I could converse with ease, mynheer," said I, "I should speak in no other language aboard this vessel. As it is, I fear you do not catch half my meaning."

"Oh, yes! you are intelligible, sir," he answered, "though you sometimes use words which sound like Dutch but signify nothing."

"Nothing to you, my friend," thought I; "but I warrant them of good currency in the Amsterdam of to-day." In short, his language was to mine, or at least to the smattering I had of the Batavian tongue, what the speech of a man of the time of Charles II. would be to one of this century--not very wide asunder; only that one would now and again introduce an obsolete expression, whilst the other would occasionally employ a term created years after his colloquist's day.

"But it pleases me, captain, to speak in my own tongue," said Imogene. "I should not like to forget my language."

"It will be strange if you forget your language in a few months, my child!" he answered, with a slight surprise.

A sudden roll of the ship causing the great mainsail to flap, he started, looked around him, and cried out with a sudden anger in his deep voice, to the steersman, "How is the ship's head?"

"North-by-east," was the answer.

"We want no easting," he cried out again, with the same passion in his voice, and strode with vehemence to the binnacle where stood Antony Arents, who had charge of the deck, and who had gone to view the compass on hearing the skipper call.

"This will not do!" I heard the captain say, his deep tones rumbling into the ear as though you passed at a distance a church in which an organ was played. "By the bones of my father, I'll not have her break off! Sweat your braces, man! Take them to the capstan! If we spring our masts and yards for it she'll have to head nothing east of north!"

There was a fierce impetuosity in his speech that made the delivery of it sound like a sustained execration. Arents went forward and raised some cries. I could see the figure of Vanderdecken black against the stars, up and down which he slided with the heave of the ship. He was motionless, close to the binnacle, and I could imagine the stormy rise and fall of his broad and powerful chest under his folded arms.

The watch came aft to the braces and strained at them. 'Twas a shadowy scene. There were none of those songs and choruses which seamen used to keep time in their pulling and hauling and to encourage their spirits withal. The boatswain, Jans, was on the forecastle attending the fore: Arents stood on the quarter-deck. Occasionally one or the other shouted out an order which the dim concavities on high flung down again out of their hollows, as though there were ghosts aloft mocking at these labours. You saw the pallid shinings writhing about the feet of the sailors, and the sharper scintillations of the wood-work wherever it was chafed by a rope. When they had trimmed, but not yet with the capstan, Arents called to the captain, who returned an answer implying that the ship had come up again, and that the trim as it was would serve. Thereupon the men stole out of sight into the darkness forward, melting into the blackness as do visions of a slumberer into the void of deep and dreamless rest; Arents returned to the poop and stood near the captain, who held his place with the entranced stirlessness I was now accustomed to see in him. But, no doubt, his eyes were on the needle, and had I dared approach, I might have beheld a fire in his eyes keener than the flame of the mesh with which the binnacle was illuminated.

"You would know him as one not of this world," said I to Imogene, "even should he pass you quickly in a crowd."

"There are some lines in the book of poetry downstairs which fit him to perfection," she answered--

"'Thou hast a grim appearance, and thy face
Bears a command in it; though thy tackle's torn,
Thou shew'st a noble vessel.'"

"Ay," said I, "they are wonderfully pat; they might have been made for him."

"Here are others," she continued--

"'He has, I know not what,
Of greatness in his looks and of high fate,
That almost awes me.'

"And when his moods change these verses are always present--

'Read'st thou not something in my face that speaks
Wonderful change and horror from within me?'"

She put a tragic note into her voice as she recited; the starlight was in her eyes, and they were fixed on me; her face whitened out to the astral gleaming till you saw her hair throbbing on her forehead to the blowing of the wind. She continued--

"I could quote a score of passages marvellously true of the captain and his fellows, serving indeed as revelations to me, so keen are the eyes of poets. And little wonder," says she, with a sigh, "for what else have I had to read but that book of poetry!"

"Just now," said I, "he asked if you thought it likely you should lose your language in a few months. This plainly shows that he supposes he met with you in his passage from Batavia--that is his last passage. Now, since his finding you dates nearly five years back, and you tell me that he has only memory for what happened within the past few months, how does it fall out that he recollects your story, which he certainly does, for he asked me if you had related it to me?"

"It must be," she answered, "because he is constantly alluding to it in speaking of the reception his wife and daughters will give me. It is also impressed upon him by my presence, by my frequent asking him to put me on board a homeward-going ship, and so it is kept in his mind as a thing constantly happening--continually fresh."

"Suppose I should stay in this ship say for six months, never speaking of the Saracen nor recalling the circumstance of my coming on board, you believe his memory would drop the fact, and that he would view me as one who happened to be in the ship, and that's all, his mind stopping at that?"

"How he would view you I cannot say; but I am certain he would forget how you came here, unless there was incessant reference to the Saracen and to her men shooting at Van Vogelaar. But time would bear no part in this sort of recollection: he would still be living in the year of God 1653, and sailing home from Batavia; and if he thought at all he'd imagine it was in that year that you came on board his ship."

Well, here was a piece of metaphysics a touch above my intelligence and above this sweet creature's too, for she could only speak as she believed, without being able to account for the miraculous conditions of this ship's life and of that of her crew. And indeed I should not have teased her with such questions but for a great craving to obtain a just conception of the amazing character who has been, and must ever remain, the terror of all mariners; whilst beyond this again was a secret dread lest this fair enchanting woman should have been chosen to play a part in the marine tragedy; which I would have a right to fear if I found Vanderdecken's relations with her, as regards his memory for instance, different from what they were in all other directions. Plainly I mean this: that if she were being used as a Divine instrument, then it was certain that I should not be suffered to deliver her from the Death Ship--an insupportable reflection at any time, but a mortal blow now that I had come to love her.

Meanwhile, the giant figure of the Dutch captain stood motionless near the binnacle; close to him was the second mate, himself like a statue. The tiller-tackles, grasped by the helmsman, swayed him with every blow of the sea upon the rudder, yet even his movements had a lifelessness in them that was as apparent as though the man had been stricken dead at his post, and swung there against the dancing stars.

A quick jerk of the ship causing Imogene to lose her balance, she grasped my arm to steady herself by, and I took care she should not release me. Indeed, from almost the first hour of our meeting there had been a yearning towards me, a wistfulness of a mute sort underlying her demeanour, and this night I found assurance of it by her manner, that was not indeed clinging, having more of nestling in it, as if I was her refuge, her one hope. She may have guessed I loved her. I cannot tell. My eyes may have said much, though I had not spoken. But there was that in her, as she stood by my side, with her hand under my arm, that persuaded me her heart was coming to mine, and haply more quickly because of our sole mortality amid the substantial shadows of the Death Ship's crew. You felt what that bond meant when you looked around you and saw the dimly-looming figure of Vanderdecken beside the compass, the ghostly darkness of the second mate's form, the corpse-like swaying of the helmsman, as of an hanging body moved by the wind, and thought of the amazing human mysteries lost in the darkness forward, or slumbering in the hammocks, if, indeed, sleep was ever permitted to visit eyes which death was forbidden to approach. 'Twas as if Imogene stood on one side a grave, I on the other, and clasped hands for the courage we found in warm and circulating blood, over a pit filled with a heart-freezing sight.

"We shall escape yet--fear not!" said I, speaking out of the heat of my own thoughts as though we were conversing on that subject.

"May our Saviour grant it!" she exclaimed. "See how black the white water around the ship makes her in spite of the strange fires which glow everywhere!"

I felt her shiver as she cried, "The vessel seems to grow more terrible to my fancy. It may be because we have talked so much of her, and your views of Vanderdecken and the crew have raised terrifying speculations in me."

"We shall escape yet!" I repeated, hotly, for the very sense of our imprisonment and the helplessness of our condition for the time being, that might be long in terminating, was a thought so maddening that I felt in a temper to defy, scorn and spit in the face of the very Devil himself was he to appear. But I had her right hand pressed to my heart; 'twas sure she felt the comfort of it, and together for some while in silence we stood viewing the ship, the fabric of whose hull stood out as though lined with India ink upon the ashen tremble of froth that seemed to embrace her length like shadowy-white arms, as the wind blowing mildly into her sails forced her to break the water at her stern as she slided athwart the swell. She made a sight to shrink from! The sailor's heart within me sank to this feebly-luminous mystery of aged yet imperishable hull, holding within her creatures so unnatural that the eye of man can view the like of them nowhere else, and raising her structure of ancient sail and masts to the stars which glided in blue and green and white along the yards with the rolling of her. Little wonder that she should affright the mariner who meets her amid the lonely paths of the vast ocean she haunts.

I clasped my brow with bewilderment in my brain.

"Surely," I cried to my companion, "I am dreaming. It cannot be that I at this moment am standing on the deck of the Death Ship!"

She sought to soothe me, but she was startled by my behaviour, and that perception enabled me to rally. If she as a weak and lonely maiden could bravely support five years of life amid this crew, what craven was I to have my brain confused by only seven days' association, spent mainly in her company? Heaven forgive me. But methinks I realised our condition--all that it might hereafter signify--with a keenness of insight, present and prophetic, which would be impossible in her whose knowledge of the sea was but a child's when she fell into Vanderdecken's hands.

"We must have patience, courage and hope, Mr. Fenton," she said, softly. "Look at that starry jewel yonder," and she turned up her face to the cross that hung above the mizzen topmast-head, gleaming very gloriously in a lake of deep indigo betwixt two clouds. "It shines for me! and often have I looked up at it with full eyes and a prayer in my heart. It shines for you, too! It is the emblem of our redemption, and we must drink in faith that God will succour us from it."

She continued to gaze at it, and there was sheen enough to enable me to see a tender smile upon her upturned face. How sweet did she then appear, fairer than the "evening air clad in the beauty of a thousand stars," as the poet wrote. I looked up to that sparkling Cross and thought how strange it was that the Sentence pronounced upon this ship should doom her to sail eternally over waters above which there nightly rises the lustrous symbol of Compassion and Mercy.

"Take my arm, my child; 'tis chilly work standing," said the deep voice of the captain.

Again had he come upon us unawares, but this time he found us silent, together gazing at the Cross of stars. She withdrew her hand quickly from my arm and took his, showing wisdom in her promptness, as I was quick to see. Then, being alone, I went to the quarter-deck and fell to walking briskly. For Vanderdecken was right, the wind came bleak.