And if ye doubt the tale I tell,
Steer through the South Pacific swell;
Go where the branching coral hives
Unending strife of endless lives,
Where, leagued about the 'wildered boat,
The rainbow jellies fill and float;
And, lilting where the laver lingers,
The starfish trips on all her fingers;
Where, 'neath his myriad spines ashock,
The sea-egg ripples down the rock;
An orange wonder dimly guessed,
From darkness where the cuttles rest,
Moored o'er the darker deeps that hide
The blind white Sea-snake and his bride
Who, drowsing, nose the long-lost ships
Let down through darkness to their lips.
_The Palms_.
Once a priest, always a priest; once a mason, always a mason; but
once a journalist, always and for ever a journalist.
There were three of us, all newspaper men, the only passengers on a
little tramp steamer that ran where her owners told her to go. She
had once been in the Bilbao iron ore business, had been lent to the
Spanish Government for service at Manilla; and was ending her days in
the Cape Town coolie-trade, with occasional trips to Madagascar and
even as far as England. We found her going to Southampton in ballast,
and shipped in her because the fares were nominal. There was Keller,
of an American paper, on his way back to the States from palace
executions in Madagascar; there was a burly half-Dutchman, called
Zuyland, who owned and edited a paper up country near Johannesburg;
and there was myself, who had solemnly put away all journalism,
vowing to forget that I had ever known the difference between an
imprint and a stereo advertisement.
Ten minutes after Keller spoke to me, as the _Rathmines_ cleared Cape
Town, I had forgotten the aloofness I desired to feign, and was in
heated discussion on the immorality of expanding telegrams beyond a
certain fixed point. Then Zuyland came out of his cabin, and we were
all at home instantly, because we were men of the same profession
needing no introduction. We annexed the boat formally, broke open the
passengers' bath-room door--on the Manilla lines the Dons do not
wash--cleaned out the orange peel and cigar-ends at the bottom of the
bath, hired a Lascar to shave us throughout the voyage, and then
asked each other's names.
Three ordinary men would have quarrelled through sheer boredom before
they reached Southampton. We, by virtue of our craft, were anything
but ordinary men. A large percentage of the tales of the world, the
thirty-nine that cannot be told to ladies and the one that can, are
common property coming of a common stock. We told them all, as a
matter of form, with all their local and specific variants which are
surprising. Then came, in the intervals of steady card-play, more
personal histories of adventure and things seen and suffered: panics
among white folk, when the blind terror ran from man to man on the
Brooklyn Bridge, and the people crushed each other to death they knew
not why; fires, and faces that opened and shut their mouths horribly
at red-hot window frames; wrecks in frost and snow, reported from the
sleet-sheathed rescue-tug at the risk of frost-bite; long rides after
diamond thieves; skirmishes on the veldt and in municipal committees
with the Boers; glimpses of lazy tangled Cape politics and the
mule-rule in the Transvaal; card-tales, horse-tales, woman-tales, by
the score and the half hundred; till the first mate, who had seen
more than us all put together, but lacked words to clothe his tales
with, sat open-mouthed far into the dawn.
When the tales were done we picked up cards till a curious hand or a
chance remark made one or other of us say, 'That reminds me of a man
who--or a business which--' and the anecdotes would continue while
the _Rathmines_ kicked her way northward through the warm water.
In the morning of one specially warm night we three were sitting
immediately in front of the wheel-house, where an old Swedish
boatswain whom we called 'Frithiof the Dane' was at the wheel,
pretending that he could not hear our stories. Once or twice Frithiof
spun the spokes curiously, and Keller lifted his head from a long
chair to ask, 'What is it? Can't you get any steerage-way on her?'
'There is a feel in the water,' said Frithiof, 'that I cannot
understand. I think that we run downhills or somethings. She steers
bad this morning.'
Nobody seems to know the laws that govern the pulse of the big
waters. Sometimes even a landsman can tell that the solid ocean is
atilt, and that the ship is working herself up a long unseen slope;
and sometimes the captain says, when neither full steam nor fair
wind justifies the length of a day's run, that the ship is sagging
downhill; but how these ups and downs come about has not yet been
settled authoritatively.
'No, it is a following sea,' said Frithiof; 'and with a following
sea you shall not get good steerage-way.'
The sea was as smooth as a duck-pond, except for a regular oily
swell. As I looked over the side to see where it might be following
us from, the sun rose in a perfectly clear sky and struck the water
with its light so sharply that it seemed as though the sea should
clang like a burnished gong. The wake of the screw and the little
white streak cut by the log-line hanging over the stern were the only
marks on the water as far as eye could reach.
Keller rolled out of his chair and went aft to get a pineapple from
the ripening stock that was hung inside the after awning.
'Frithiof, the log-line has got tired of swimming. It's coming
home,' he drawled.
'What?' said Frithiof, his voice jumping several octaves.
'Coming home,' Keller repeated, leaning over the stern. I ran to his
side and saw the log-line, which till then had been drawn tense over
the stern railing, slacken, loop, and come up off the port quarter.
Frithiof called up the speaking tube to the bridge, and the bridge
answered, 'Yes, nine knots.' Then Frithiof spoke again, and the
answer was, 'What do you want of the skipper?' and Frithiof bellowed,
'Call him up.'
By this time Zuyland, Keller, and myself had caught something of
Frithiof's excitement, for any emotion on shipboard is most
contagious. The captain ran out of his cabin, spoke to Frithiof,
looked at the log-line, jumped on the bridge, and in a minute we
felt the steamer swing round as Frithiof turned her.
''Going back to Cape Town?' said Keller.
Frithiof did not answer, but tore away at the wheel. Then he beckoned
us three to help, and we held the wheel down till the _Rathmines_
answered it, and we found ourselves looking into the white of our own
wake, with the still oily sea tearing past our bows, though we were
not going more than half steam ahead.
The captain stretched out his arm from the bridge and shouted. A
minute later I would have given a great deal to have shouted too, for
one-half of the sea seemed to shoulder itself above the other half,
and came on in the shape of a hill. There was neither crest, comb,
nor curl-over to it; nothing but black water with little waves
chasing each other about the flanks. I saw it stream past and on a
level with the _Rathmines_' bow-plates before the steamer hove up
her bulk to rise, and I argued that this would be the last of all
earthly voyages for me. Then we lifted for ever and ever and ever,
till I heard Keller saying in my ear, 'The bowels of the deep, good
Lord!' and the _Rathmines_ stood poised, her screw-racing and
drumming on the slope of a hollow that stretched downwards for a good
half-mile.
We went down that hollow, nose under for the most part, and the air
smelt wet and muddy, like that of an emptied aquarium. There was a
second hill to climb; I saw that much: but the water came aboard and
earned me aft till it jammed me against the wheel-house door, and
before I could catch breath or clear my eyes again we were rolling to
and fro in torn water, with the scuppers pouring like eaves in a
thunderstorm.
'There were three waves,' said Keller; 'and the stokehold's flooded.'
The firemen were on deck waiting, apparently, to be drowned.
The engineer came and dragged them below, and the crew, gasping,
began to work the clumsy Board of Trade pump. That showed nothing
serious, and when I understood that the _Rathmines_ was really on the
water, and not beneath it, I asked what had happened.
'The captain says it was a blow-up under the sea--a volcano,' said
Keller.
'It hasn't warmed anything,' I said. I was feeling bitterly cold, and
cold was almost unknown in those waters. I went below to change my
clothes, and when I came up everything was wiped out in clinging
white fog.
'Are there going to be any more surprises?' said Keller to the
captain.
'I don't know. Be thankful you are alive, gentlemen. That's a tidal
wave thrown up by a volcano. Probably the bottom of the sea has been
lifted a few feet somewhere or other. I can't quite understand this
cold spell. Our sea-thermometer says the surface water is 44°, and
it should be 68° at least.'
'It's abominable,' said Keller, shivering. 'But hadn't you better
attend to the fog-horn? It seems to me that I heard something.'
'Heard! Good heavens!' said the captain from the bridge, 'I should
think you did.' He pulled the string of our fog-horn, which was a
weak one. It sputtered and choked, because the stoke-hold was full of
water and the fires were half drowned, and at last gave out a moan.
It was answered from the fog by one of the most appalling steam
sirens I have ever heard. Keller turned as white as I did, for the
fog, the cold fog, was upon us, and any man may be forgiven for
fearing a death he cannot see.
'Give her steam there!' said the captain to the engine-room. 'Steam
for the whistle, if we have to go dead slow.'
We bellowed again, and the damp dripped off the awnings on to the
deck as we listened for the reply. It seemed to be astern this time,
but much nearer than before.
'The _Pembroke Castle_ on us!' said Keller; and then, viciously,
'Well, thank God, we shall sink her too.'
'It's a side-wheel steamer,' I whispered. 'Can't you hear the
paddles?'
This time we whistled and roared till the steam gave out, and the
answer nearly deafened us. There was a sound of frantic threshing in
the water, apparently about fifty yards away, and something shot past
in the whiteness that looked as though it were gray and red.
'The _Pembroke Castle_ bottom up,' said Keller, who, being a
journalist, always sought for explanations. 'That's the colours of a
Castle liner. We're in for a big thing.'
'The sea is bewitched,' said Frithiof from the wheel-house. 'There
are _two_ steamers!'
Another siren sounded on our bow, and the little steamer rolled in
the wash of something that had passed unseen.
'We're evidently in the middle of a fleet,' said Keller quietly. 'If
one doesn't run us down, the other will. Phew! What in creation is
that?'
I sniffed, for there was a poisonous rank smell in the cold air--a
smell that I had smelt before.
'If I was on land I should say that it was an alligator. It smells
like musk,' I answered.
'Not ten thousand alligators could make that smell' said Zuyland; 'I
have smelt them.'
'Bewitched! Bewitched!' said Frithiof. 'The sea she is turned upside
down, and we are walking along the bottom.'
Again the _Rathmines_ rolled in the wash of some unseen ship, and a
silver-gray wave broke over the bow, leaving on the deck a sheet of
sediment--the gray broth that has its place in the fathomless deeps
of the sea. A sprinkling of the wave fell on my face, and it was so
cold that it stung as boiling water stings. The dead and most
untouched deep water of the sea had been heaved to the top by the
submarine volcano--the chill still water that kills all life and
smells of desolation and emptiness. We did not need either the
blinding fog or that indescribable smell of musk to make us
unhappy--we were shivering with cold and wretchedness where we stood.
'The hot air on the cold water makes this fog,' said the captain; 'it
ought to clear in a little time.'
'Whistle, oh! whistle, and let's get out of it,' said Keller.
The captain whistled again, and far and far astern the invisible twin
steam-sirens answered us. Their blasting shriek grew louder, till at
last it seemed to tear out of the fog just above our quarter, and I
cowered while the _Rathmines_ plunged bows under on a double swell
that crossed.
'No more,' said Frithiof, 'it is not good any more. Let us get away,
in the name of God.'
'Now if a torpedo-boat with a _City of Paris_ siren went mad and
broke her moorings and hired a friend to help her, it's just
conceivable that we might be carried as we are now. Otherwise this
thing is----'
The last words died on Keller's lips, his eyes began to start from
his head, and his jaw fell. Some six or seven feet above the port
bulwarks, framed in fog, and as utterly unsupported as the full moon,
hung a Face. It was not human, and it certainly was not animal, for
it did not belong to this earth as known to man. The mouth was open,
revealing a ridiculously tiny tongue--as absurd as the tongue of an
elephant; there were tense wrinkles of white skin at the angles of
the drawn lips, white feelers like those of a barbel sprung from the
lower jaw, and there was no sign of teeth within the mouth. But the
horror of the face lay in the eyes, for those were sightless--white,
in sockets as white as scraped bone, and blind. Yet for all this the
face, wrinkled as the mask of a lion is drawn in Assyrian sculpture,
was alive with rage and terror. One long white feeler touched our
bulwarks. Then the face disappeared with the swiftness of a blindworm
popping into its burrow, and the next thing that I remember is my own
voice in my own ears, saying gravely to the mainmast, 'But the
air-bladder ought to have been forced out of its mouth, you know.'
Keller came up to me, ashy white. He put his hand into his pocket,
took a cigar, bit it, dropped it, thrust his shaking thumb into his
mouth and mumbled, 'The giant gooseberry and the raining frogs! Gimme
a light--gimme a light! Say, gimme a light. A little bead of blood
dropped from his thumb-joint.
I respected the motive, though the manifestation was absurd. 'Stop,
you'll bite your thumb off,' I said, and Keller laughed brokenly as
he picked up his cigar. Only Zuyland, leaning over the port bulwarks,
seemed self-possessed. He declared later that he was very sick.
'We've seen it,' he said, turning round. 'That is it.'
'What?' said Keller, chewing the unlighted cigar.
As he spoke the fog was blown into shreds, and we saw the sea, gray
with mud, rolling on every side of us and empty of all life. Then in
one spot it bubbled and became like the pot of ointment that the
Bible speaks of. From that wide-ringed trouble the Thing came up--a
gray and red Thing with a neck--a Thing that bellowed and writhed in
pain. Frithiof drew in his breath and held it till the red letters of
the ship's name, woven across his jersey, straggled and opened out as
though they had been type badly set. Then he said with a little cluck
in his throat, 'Ah me! It is blind. _Hur illa_! That thing is blind,'
and a murmur of pity went through us all, for we could see that the
thing on the water was blind and in pain. Something had gashed and
cut the great sides cruelly and the blood was spurting out. The gray
ooze of the undermost sea lay in the monstrous wrinkles of the back,
and poured away in sluices. The blind white head flung back and
battered the wounds, and the body in its torment rose clear of the
red and gray waves till we saw a pair of quivering shoulders streaked
with weed and rough with shells, but as white in the clear spaces as
the hairless, maneless, blind, toothless head. Afterwards, came a dot
on the horizon and the sound of a shrill scream, and it was as though
a shuttle shot all across the sea in one breath, and a second head
and neck tore through the levels, driving a whispering wall of water
to right and left. The two Things met--the one untouched and the
other in its death-throe--male and female, we said, the female
coming to the male. She circled round him bellowing, and laid her
neck across the curve of his great turtle-back, and he disappeared
under water for an instant, but flung up again, grunting in agony
while the blood ran. Once the entire head and neck shot clear of the
water and stiffened, and I heard Keller saying, as though he was
watching a street accident, 'Give him air. For God's sake, give him
air.' Then the death-struggle began, with crampings and twistings and
jerkings of the white bulk to and fro, till our little steamer rolled
again, and each gray wave coated her plates with the gray slime. The
sun was clear, there was no wind, and we watched, the whole
crew, stokers and all, in wonder and pity, but chiefly pity. The
Thing was so helpless, and, save for his mate, so alone. No human eye
should have beheld him; it was monstrous and indecent to exhibit him
there in trade waters between atlas degrees of latitude. He had been
spewed up, mangled and dying, from his rest on the sea-floor, where
he might have lived till the Judgment Day, and we saw the tides of
his life go from him as an angry tide goes out across rocks in the
teeth of a landward gale. His mate lay rocking on the water a little
distance off, bellowing continually, and the smell of musk came dawn
upon the ship making us cough.
At last the battle for life ended in a batter of coloured seas. We
saw the writhing neck fall like a flail, the carcase turn sideways,
showing the glint of a white belly and the inset of a gigantic hind
leg or flipper. Then all sank, and sea boiled over it, while the
mate swam round and round, darting her head in every direction.
Though we might have feared that she would attack the steamer, no
power on earth could have drawn any one of us from our places that
hour. We watched, holding our breaths. The mate paused in her search;
we could hear the wash beating along her sides; reared her neck as
high as she could reach, blind and lonely in all that loneliness of
the sea, and sent one desperate bellow booming across the swells as
an oyster-shell skips across a pond. Then she made off to the
westward, the sun shining on the white head and the wake behind it,
till nothing was left to see but a little pin point of silver on the
horizon. We stood on our course again; and the _Rathmines_, coated
with the sea-sediment from bow to stern, looked like a ship made gray
with terror.
* * * * *
'We must pool our notes,' was the first coherent remark from Keller.
'We're three trained journalists--we hold absolutely the biggest
scoop on record. Start fair.'
I objected to this. Nothing is gained by collaboration in journalism
when all deal with the same facts, so we went to work each according
to his own lights. Keller triple-headed his account, talked about our
'gallant captain,' and wound up with an allusion to American
enterprise in that it was a citizen of Dayton, Ohio, that had seen
the sea-serpent. This sort of thing would have discredited the
Creation, much more a mere sea tale, but as a specimen of the
picture-writing of a half-civilised people it was very interesting.
Zuyland took a heavy column and a half, giving approximate lengths
and breadths, and the whole list of the crew whom he had sworn on
oath to testify to his facts. There was nothing fantastic or
flamboyant in Zuyland. I wrote three-quarters of a leaded bourgeois
column, roughly speaking, and refrained from putting any journalese
into it for reasons that had begun to appear to me.
Keller was insolent with joy. He was going to cable from Southampton
to the New York _World_, mail his account to America on the same day,
paralyse London with his three columns of loosely knitted headlines,
and generally efface the earth. 'You'll see how I work a big scoop
when I get it,' he said.
'Is this your first visit to England?' I asked.
'Yes,' said he. 'You don't seem to appreciate the beauty of our
scoop. It's pyramidal--the death of the sea-serpent! Good heavens
alive, man, it's the biggest thing ever vouchsafed to a paper!'
'Curious to think that it will never appear in any paper, isn't it?
'I said.
Zuyland was near me, and he nodded quickly.
'What do you mean?' said Keller. 'If you're enough of a Britisher to
throw this thing away, I shan't. I thought you were a newspaper-man.'
'I am. That's why I know. Don't be an ass, Keller. Remember, I'm
seven hundred years your senior, and what your grandchildren may
learn five hundred years hence, I learned from my grandfathers about
five hundred years ago. You won't do it, because you can't.'
This conversation was held in open sea, where everything seems
possible, some hundred miles from Southampton. We passed the Needles
Light at dawn, and the lifting day showed the stucco villas on the
green and the awful orderliness of England--line upon line, wall upon
wall, solid stone dock and monolithic pier. We waited an hour in the
Customs shed, and there was ample time for the effect to soak in.
'Now, Keller, you face the music. The _Havel_ goes out to-day. Mail
by her, and I'll take you to the telegraph-office,' I said.
I heard Keller gasp as the influence of the land closed about him,
cowing him as they say Newmarket Heath cows a young horse unused to
open courses.
'I want to retouch my stuff. Suppose we wait till we get to London?'
he said.
Zuyland, by the way, had torn up his account and thrown it overboard
that morning early. His reasons were my reasons.
In the train Keller began to revise his copy, and every time that he
looked at the trim little fields, the red villas, and the embankments
of the line, the blue pencil plunged remorselessly through the slips.
He appeared to have dredged the dictionary for adjectives. I could
think of none that he had not used. Yet he was a perfectly sound
poker-player and never showed more cards than were sufficient to take
the pool.
'Aren't you going to leave him a single bellow?' I asked
sympathetically. 'Remember, everything goes in the States, from a
trouser-button to a double-eagle.'
'That's just the curse of it,' said Keller below his breath. 'We've
played 'em for suckers so often that when it comes to the golden
truth--I'd like to try this on a London paper. You have first call
there, though.'
'Not in the least. I'm not touching the thing in our papers. I shall
be happy to leave 'em all to you; but surely you'll cable it home?'
'No. Not if I can make the scoop here and see the Britishers sit up.'
'You won't do it with three columns of slushy headline, believe me.
They don't sit up as quickly as some people.'
'I'm beginning to think that too. Does _nothing_ make any difference
in this country?' he said, looking out of the window. 'How old is
that farmhouse?'
'New. It can't be more than two hundred years at the most.'
'Urn. Fields, too?'
'That hedge there must have been clipped for about eighty years.'
'Labour cheap--eh?'
'Pretty much. Well, I suppose you'd like to try the _Times_, wouldn't
you?'
'No,' said Keller, looking at Winchester Cathedral. ''Might as well
try to electrify a haystack. And to think that the _World_ would take
three columns and ask for more--with illustrations too! It's
sickening.'
'But the _Times_ might,' I began.
Keller flung his paper across the carriage, and it opened in its
austere majesty of solid type--opened with the crackle of an
encyclopædia.
'Might! You _might_ work your way through the bow-plates of a
cruiser. Look at that first page!'
'It strikes you that way, does it?' I said. 'Then I'd recommend you
to try a light and frivolous journal.'
'With a thing like this of mine--of ours? It's sacred history!'
I showed him a paper which I conceived would be after his own heart,
in that it was modelled on American lines.
'That's homey,' he said, 'but it's not the real thing. Now, I should
like one of these fat old _Times_ columns. Probably there'd be a
bishop in the office, though.'
When we reached London Keller disappeared in the direction of the
Strand. What his experiences may have been I cannot tell, but it
seems that he invaded the office of an evening paper at 11.45 a.m. (I
told him English editors were most idle at that hour), and mentioned
my name as that of a witness to the truth of his story.
'I was nearly fired out,' he said furiously at lunch. 'As soon as I
mentioned you, the old man said that I was to tell you that they
didn't want any more of your practical jokes, and that you knew the
hours to call if you had anything to sell, and that they'd see you
condemned before they helped to puff one of your infernal yarns in
advance. Say, what record do you hold for truth in this country,
anyway?'
'A beauty. You ran up against it, that's all. Why don't you leave the
English papers alone and cable to New York? Everything goes over
there.'
'Can't you see that's just why?' he repeated.
'I saw it a long time ago. You don't intend to cable then?'
'Yes, I do,' he answered, in the over-emphatic voice of one who does
not know his own mind.
That afternoon I walked him abroad and about, over the streets that
run between the pavements like channels of grooved and tongued lava,
over the bridges that are made of enduring stone, through subways
floored and sided with yard-thick concrete, between houses that are
never rebuilt, and by river steps hewn, to the eye, from the living
rock. A black fog chased us into Westminster Abbey, and, standing
there in the darkness, I could hear the wings of the dead centuries
circling round the head of Litchfield A. Keller, journalist, of
Dayton, Ohio, U.S.A., whose mission it was to make the Britishers sit
up.
He stumbled gasping into the thick gloom, and the roar of the traffic
came to his bewildered ears.
'Let's go to the telegraph-office and cable,' I said. 'Can't you hear
the New York _World_ crying for news of the great sea-serpent, blind,
white, and smelling of musk, stricken to death by a submarine
volcano, and assisted by his loving wife to die in mid-ocean, as
visualised by an American citizen, the breezy, newsy, brainy
newspaper man of Dayton, Ohio? 'Rah for the Buckeye State. Step
lively! Both gates! Szz! Boom! Aah!' Keller was a Princeton man, and
he seemed to need encouragement.
'You've got me on your own ground,' said he, tugging at his overcoat
pocket. He pulled out his copy, with the cable forms--for he had
written out his telegram--and put them all into my hand, groaning, 'I
pass. If I hadn't come to your cursed country--If I'd sent it off at
Southampton--If I ever get you west of the Alleghannies, if----'
'Never mind, Keller. It isn't your fault. It's the fault of your
country. If you had been seven hundred years older you'd have done
what I am going to do.'
'What are you going to do?'
'Tell it as a lie.'
'Fiction?' This with the full-blooded disgust of a journalist for the
illegitimate branch of the profession.
'You can call it that if you like. I shall call it a lie.'
And a lie it has become; for Truth is a naked lady, and if by
accident she is drawn up from the bottom of the sea, it behoves a
gentleman either to give her a print petticoat or to turn his face to
the wall and vow that he did not see.