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
carried 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 stoke-hold’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’re 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 a 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 down 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.’
‘Um. 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 hay-stack. 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.
THE LOST LEGION.
When the Indian Mutiny broke out, and a little time before the siege of
Delhi, a regiment of Native Irregular Horse was stationed at Peshawur
on the frontier of India. That regiment caught what John Lawrence
called at the time ‘the prevalent mania,’ and would have thrown in
its lot with the mutineers, had it been allowed to do so. The chance
never came, for, as the regiment swept off down south, it was headed
up by a remnant of an English corps into the hills of Afghanistan, and
there the newly-conquered tribesmen turned against it as wolves turn
against buck. It was hunted for the sake of its arms and accoutrements
from hill to hill, from ravine to ravine, up and down the dried beds
of rivers and round the shoulders of bluffs, till it disappeared as
water sinks in the sand--this officerless, rebel regiment. The only
trace left of its existence to-day is a nominal roll drawn up in
neat round hand and counter-signed by an officer who called himself
‘Adjutant, late ---- Irregular Cavalry.’ The paper is yellow with
years and dirt, but on the back of it you can still read a pencil note
by John Lawrence; to this effect: ‘See that the two native officers
who remained loyal are not deprived of their estates.--J. L.’ Of six
hundred and fifty sabres only two stood strain, and John Lawrence in
the midst of all the agony of the first months of the Mutiny found time
to think about their merits.