Chapter VIII: Land

But for Imogene having overheard his conversation with Van Vogelaar, I should never have been able to guess that there was any change in Vanderdecken's resolution respecting me; I mean any change in his intention to carry me to Europe in his ship. There was the same uniformity in the variety of his moods; he was sullen, haughty, morose, often insanely fierce, sometimes talkative, then falling into trances, in all such exhibitions as heretofore. In Van Vogelaar, however, there was a slight alteration. At moments I caught him peering at me with a look in his eyes that might have answered very well as a dark malicious merriment of soul of which the countenance was capable of expressing the villainous qualities only, I mean, not the mirth also. Sometimes he would make as though to converse; but this I cut short, repelling him very fearlessly now that I understood his and his captain's plans, and that I had nothing to fear this side the execution of it.

On my side, I was extremely wary, walking cautiously in all I said and did, and never venturing a remark to Imogene, even when we had reason to believe we were absolutely alone, without sinking my voice after a careful probing glance around as if I expected to see an human ear standing out on any beam or bulkhead my sight went to.

I busied myself in certain preparations in which I got Imogene to help me. Since, in any case, our escape to the land would have to be profoundly secret, 'twas necessary we should get ready a small stock of food to carry away with us, and I told Imogene to make some bags out of the stoutest stuff she could come at to store it in, and to privately convey to me such provisions as I indicated, which she, as well as I, was to secrete when alone, during Prins' absence, when the table was prepared.

I said: "You have needles and thread?" for she had told me that some of the apparel Vanderdecken lent or gave her she had been obliged to alter. "We shall require three or four bags. Linen will do for the material."

"There is plenty of linen," said she. "I will make the bags. But what is your project, Geoffrey? Tell me your full scheme--I may be able to put something to it."

"I have two schemes," I answered: "but I will speak only of the one that concerns the shore. Vanderdecken is sure to bring up close to the land; I have little doubt of being able to swim the distance, and shall make a small frame of wood to sit about your waist on which you will float when I lower you into the water, and then I shall softly let myself down and tow you to the land by swimming."

I thought to see her countenance change, but she regarded me fearlessly, indeed with an emotion as of triumph colouring her face.

"How am I to enter the water?" she asked.

"I will lower you from the quarter-gallery outside your cabin," I replied, "the height is not great. The blackness under the counter will hide you, and I shall contrive to float us both away very quietly."

She said, gazing at me fondly and smiling: "Everything is feasible so far, Geoffrey. But now imagine us arrived on shore."

"I must carry you as far as your strength will suffer," I replied. "Of course, Vanderdecken will send in pursuit of us, but there should be no lack of dense vegetation full of hiding places. Yet in this as in all other things, my dearest, we must rely upon God's help. That given there is nothing to fear; denied--then it would be better for me if I threw myself overboard at once."

"Geoffrey," she said, "I do not question you, dear heart, for dread of what we may encounter, but merely that by letting your plans lie in my mind my girlish spirit may grow used to them and unswervingly help you when the time comes."

"Brave little woman!" I cried, "do not believe I could misjudge you. You would ask me what is to follow when this vessel quits the coast and leaves us alone there? How can I answer? We must attempt what others have successfully achieved, and struggle onwards to some settlement. I know--I know, my darling, that the outlook is black and affrighting. But consider what our choice signifies; the fate that awaits us if you remain and I am marooned; or the chances--meagre indeed, but chances, nevertheless--which offer if we escape to the land. And we shall be together, dearest!"

I kissed her brow, and her love leapt in her to my impassioned greeting; beautiful as she was, yet did she appear transfigured by the rich hue in her cheeks, her smile, the sparkle of her chaste and maidenly joy in the dark heaven of her eyes. Call me not cruel for thus deliberately preparing to bring her face to face with the horrors of the African coast--with those barbarous features which her heart had long ago recoiled from the mere thought of. She was my sweetheart--my affianced--my life's blood. Oh! how dear to me for her beauty, her sweetness, her passion for me, the miracle of our meeting, her loneliness under the sun and stars of the mighty Southern Ocean, amid shapes more spectral than ghosts, more horrible with their survival of human vices than had they been dead bodies quickened into life without soul or brain.

How could I leave her? How could I endure the idea of my being forced ashore--alone--and of her sailing away forever from me in this grisly company? I had considered all these things; how if we gained the beach she would have to walk, as far as her limbs suffered, in drenched clothes and her delicate flesh chilled to the bone; how in our hiding-place the dews of a deadly climate would fall upon her by night, with creeping abominations of reptile and vermin swarming in the tangle where she lay--enough! I say that all perils which experience or imagination could crowd into such a deliverance as that I had in my mind and was steadfastly working out had been present to me from the beginning--but to what purpose? Only to make me feel with the power of every instinct, with the impulse and strength of all-influencing and heated passions, that my fortune must be hers and that we could not part!

A sailor will wonder perhaps to hear me speak of three or four bags of provisions, and wonder also that I should not see that if there was the least movement in the water when I lowered Imogene with these bags about her into it, the provisions would be spoiled by the wet. But 'tis proper to say here that this proposal to float her in a frame and tow her ashore by swimming was but an alternative scheme which, at all hazards, I would go through with, if the other and less perilous venture should prove impracticable, and in case this should be so, I said nothing to her about it, that by her growing accustomed to the dismal and dangerous project she would not tremble and shrink if it came, as I feared it might, to our having to escape ashore. Three small bags secured about my darling's shoulders, well out of the water, were less likely to be wetted than one big one that must needs hang low, trice it as I might; and anyway the three would be as good as one, let the manner of our escape be what it would.

She made me these bags, and I hid them in my cabin, along with some biscuit which had been taken from the wreck, a few pieces of salted meat cooked, a small jar of flour, a little silver cup for drinking, and other compact and portable things, such as the flat banana cakes the cook sent to the cabin, a bottle of marmalade of the size of a small pickle jar, and the like. These things she and I took from the table by degrees, and they were not missed. I would have given a finger for a musket and powder and balls; but if there was an arms-chest on board neither she nor I knew where to find it. And suppose it had been possible to me to have secreted a musket--what they used, I believe, for shooting game and cattle were match-locks with barrels about three and a half feet long, and the bore of the bigness of a horse-pistol, and cartridges in small hollow canes, each holding a charge of powder--ammunition was not to be had without asking.

She stitched me four bags, but three I found when loaded would be as heavy a load as it was prudent to put upon her; because when I came to look about me for wood for a frame for her to float in I could only meet with five small pieces, and even the purloining of these was attended with prodigious anxiety and trouble, as you will judge when I say that to get them I had to watch till I was unobserved and then kick a piece, as if by accident, under a gun, or to any corner where it might lie until I could carry it below under cover of the night.

All these things I hid under the bed-place in my cabin, where I had very little fear of their being found; for the good reason that, to my knowledge, no one ever entered the berth.

Meanwhile, the wind held bravely, with--on the third day--but a few hours of stagnant atmosphere and a flat and brilliant sea, followed by a shift into the westward of south that worked into a hearty wind, before which the Death Ship drove under all cloths, the clear water gushing from her scuppers to the clanking and spouting of her pump. Bearing in mind our situation after the tempest, as given me by Vanderdecken, and narrowly, if furtively, observing the courses we made, I kept a dead reckoning of our progress--for by this time I could measure the vessel's pace with my eye as correctly as ever the log could give it--and when the fifth day arrived I knew that at eight o'clock that morning either we were some twelve leagues distant from the African coast or that Vanderdecken was amazingly wrong in his calculations.

My excitement bade fair to master me. It needed a power of will such as I could never have supposed I possessed to subdue my demeanour to that posture of calmness which the captain and his mates were used to see in me. Happily, Imogene was at hand to control any exhibition of impatience or anxiety.

"Let them suspect nothing in your manner," she would say. "Van Vogelaar watches you closely; the least alteration in you might set him conjecturing. Who knows what fancies his base and malignant mind is capable of? His heart is bent on your destruction, and though he hopes that must follow your being left alone on the coast, yet a change in your ordinary manner might fill his cruel soul with fear that you had some plan to escape with your life, in which case I fear, Geoffrey, he would torment and enrage Vanderdecken into slaying you either here or on shore."

Well, as I have said, at eight o'clock that morning I reckoned we were some twelve leagues distant from the coast. The breeze had slackened somewhat, but it still blew a fresh air, and the water being quiet and such small swell as there was, together with the billows, chasing us, our speed was a fair five and a half knots. Yet there was no sign to advertise us of the adjacency of land. A few Cape hens flew along with us on our starboard beam, but this kind of sea-fowl had accompanied the ship when we were as far south as ever we were driven since I had been in her, and they could not be supposed to signify more than that we were "off" the South African headland--which term may stand for the measure of a vast extent of sea. The ocean was of as deep and glorious a blue as ever I had beheld it in the middle of the Atlantic. My suspense grew into torment; anxiety became anguish, the harsher and fiercer for the obligation of restraint. There was no dependence to be placed on Vanderdecken's reckoning. For several days he had been hove-to, and his log would certainly neither tell him his drift nor how the currents served him. My only hope then was in the supernatural guiding of the ship. I might believe, at least, that the instincts of the sea-bird would come to one whose dreadful and ghostly existence lay in an aimless furrowing of the mighty waters, and that he would know how to steer when the occasion arose, as does the ocean-fowl whose bed is the surge as its pinion is its pillow, but whose nest must be sought in rocky solitudes, leagues and leagues below that sea-line in whose narrow circle you find the creature flying.

I dared not seem to appear to stare earnestly ahead; the part I had to play was that of extreme indifference; yet, swift as were the looks I directed over either bow, my eyes would reel with the searching, passionate vehemence of my stare, and the blue horizon wave to my sight as though it swam upon a swooning view.

Shortly after twelve o'clock, I was standing alone on the forward end of the poop, when I observed a clear shade of blue haze upon the horizon directly ahead. I watched it a little while, believing it no more than a darkening in the dye of the sky that way; but on bringing my eyes to it a second time, I found a fixity in the atmospheric outlining of the shadow that was not to be mistaken for anything but the blue faintness and delicate dim heads of a distant hilly coast. I turned, with a leap of heart that was a mingling of rapture and dread, to win Imogene by my manner to view the land, too; but she stood with Vanderdecken near the tiller, with her back upon me, apparently watching the motions of a bird that steadily flew along with us, some three cables' length on our larboard quarter, flying no faster than we sailed, yet going through the air as straight as a belated homeward-bound rook. One of the men forward saw the azure shadow, and seemed to call the attention of two or three others to it in that voiceless, mechanical way, which furnished a ghostlier and grislier character to the bearing and movements of the crew than ever they could have taken from the paleness of their faces, and the glittering, unreal vitality of their eyes only; and they went towards the beak to look, dropping whatever jobs they might have been upon, with complete disregard of discipline.

Broad as the day was, abounding as the scene with the familiar and humanising glory of the blessed golden sunshine and the snow-topped peaks of shallow liquid sapphire ridges, yet the figures of those men, showing under the swelling and lifting foot of the foresail, peering under the sharp of their hands against their foreheads, silent in postures of phlegmatic observation, gave the whole picture of the ship a wild and dismal colour and appearance, and the black melancholy, the cold unholiness of it, stole biting as polar frost-smoke to the senses through the genial splendour of the noon-tide. Yet, like those men, did I stand looking with my hand against my brow, for there was a wonderful and almost blinding magnificence of light upon the shivering waters under the sun that was now floated north, but the resplendent haze did not dim the substantial line that was growing with a deepening hue into the atmosphere, and already methought I could discern the curve and sweep of inland airy altitudes with the dainty silver of clouds streaking them.

"Land, Herr Fenton!" cried a voice in my ear.

I started. Van Vogelaar stood close beside me, pointing with a pale leathern forefinger, his harsh and rugged face smileless, though his eyes grinned with malice as they lay fastened upon mine.

"I see it, mynheer," I replied, coldly.

"It should rejoice your English soul," he exclaimed. "Your countrymen will not count you as a mariner of theirs if you love not the land! See! Remote and faint though it be, how substantial even in its blue thinness doth it show! No sea-sickness there, Herr Fenton! No hollow seas yawning black as vaults!"

Had this man been of the earth I needed but to catch him by the scroff and breech and bring his spine to my knee to kill him. And he looked so much as if I could have served him so that it was hard to regard him without pity. I said, quietly, "Will that be the land the captain desires to make?"

"Ay," he answered, snarlingly, "the Dutch are sailors."

I thought to myself, yes, when they have the Devil for a sea-cunny they will hit their port.

"You will be glad to step ashore if but for half-an-hour?" said he, looking at me.

"That is a matter that concerns your master," I answered, turning from him. A low ha! ha! broke from him, muffled as the sound of a saw worked under deck, as musical too, and as mirthless. Yet Imogene's quick ear caught it, and she turned swiftly to look. And methought it had penetrated further yet, for upon the heels of it, there rose up, as an echo, from the cabin, that harsh and rusty cry, "Wy zyn al Verdomd!"