"But why is it so impossible," I ask, "if you go to Italy upon a
magnolia branch?"
The smile fades from her eyes.
"I went a shorter voyage than that," she answered; "it was only to
Mr. Bourne's."
I walked slowly out of the house, and overtook Titbottom as I went. He
smiled gravely as he greeted me, and said:
"I have been asked to invite you to join a little pleasure party."
"Where is it going?"
"Oh! anywhere," answered Titbottom.
"And how?"
"Oh! anyhow," he replied.
"You mean that everybody is to go wherever he pleases, and in the way
he best can. My dear Titbottom, I have long belonged to that pleasure
party, although I never heard it called by so pleasant a name before."
My companion said only:
"If you would like to join, I will introduce you to the party. I
cannot go, but they are all on board."
I answered nothing; but Titbottom drew me along. We took a boat, and
put off to the most extraordinary craft I had ever seen. We approached
her stern, and, as I curiously looked at it, I could think of nothing
but an old picture that hung in my father's house. It was of the
Flemish school, and represented the rear view of the _vrouw_ of a
burgomaster going to market. The wide yards were stretched like
elbows, and even the studding-sails were spread. The hull was seared
and blistered, and, in the tops, I saw what I supposed to be strings
of turnips or cabbages, little round masses, with tufted crests; but
Titbottom assured me they were sailors.
We rowed hard, but came no nearer the vessel.
"She is going with the tide and wind," said I; "we shall never catch
her."
My companion said nothing.
"But why have they set the studding-sails?" asked I.
"She never takes in any sails," answered Titbottom.
"The more fool she," thought I, a little impatiently, angry at not
getting nearer to the vessel. But I did not say it aloud. I would as
soon have said it to Prue as to Titbottom. The truth is, I began to
feel a little ill, from the motion of the boat, and remembered, with a
shade of regret, Prue and peppermint. If wives could only keep their
husbands a little nauseated, I am confident they might be very sure of
their constancy.
But, somehow, the strange ship was gained, and I found myself among as
singular a company as I have ever seen. There were men of every
country, and costumes of all kinds. There was an indescribable
mistiness in the air, or a premature twilight, in which all the
figures looked ghostly and unreal. The ship was of a model such as I
had never seen, and the rigging had a musty odor, so that the whole
craft smelled like a ship-chandler's shop grown mouldy. The figures
glided rather than walked about, and I perceived a strong smell of
cabbage issuing from the hold.
But the most extraordinary thing of all was the sense of resistless
motion which possessed my mind the moment my foot struck the deck. I
could have sworn we were dashing through, the water at the rate of
twenty knots an hour. (Prue has a great, but a little ignorant,
admiration of my technical knowledge of nautical affairs and phrases.)
I looked aloft and saw the sails taut with a stiff breeze, and I
heard a faint whistling of the wind in the rigging, but very faint,
and rather, it seemed to me, as if it came from the creak of cordage
in the ships of Crusaders; or of quaint old craft upon the Spanish
main, echoing through remote years--so far away it sounded.
Yet I heard no orders given; I saw no sailors running aloft, and only
one figure crouching over the wheel: He was lost behind his great
beard as behind a snow-drift. But the startling speed with which we
scudded along did not lift a solitary hair of that beard, nor did the
old and withered face of the pilot betray any curiosity or interest as
to what breakers, or reefs, or pitiless shores, might be lying in
ambush to destroy us.
Still on we swept; and as the traveller in a night-train knows that he
is passing green fields, and pleasant gardens, and winding streams
fringed with flowers, and is now gliding through tunnels or darting
along the base of fearful cliffs, so I was conscious that we were
pressing through various climates and by romantic shores. In vain I
peered into the gray twilight mist that folded all. I could only see
the vague figures that grew and faded upon the haze, as my eye fell
upon them, like the intermittent characters of sympathetic ink when
heat touches them.
Now, it was a belt of warm, odorous air in which we sailed, and then
cold as the breath of a polar ocean. The perfume of new-mown hay and
the breath of roses, came mingled with the distant music of bells, and
the twittering song of birds, and a low surf-like sound of the wind in
summer woods. There were all sounds of pastoral beauty, of a tranquil
landscape such as Prue loves--and which shall be painted as the
background of her portrait whenever she sits to any of my many artist
friends--and that pastoral beauty shall be called England; I strained
my eyes into the cruel mist that held all that music and all that
suggested beauty, but I could see nothing. It was so sweet that I
scarcely knew if I cared to see. The very thought of it charmed my
senses and satisfied my heart. I smelled and heard the landscape that
I could not see.
Then the pungent, penetrating fragrance of blossoming vineyards was
wafted across the air; the flowery richness of orange groves, and the
sacred odor of crushed bay leaves, such as is pressed from them when
they are strewn upon the flat pavement of the streets of Florence, and
gorgeous priestly processions tread them under foot. A steam of
incense filled the air. I smelled Italy--as in the magnolia from
Bourne's garden--and, even while my heart leaped with the
consciousness, the odor passed, and a stretch of burning silence
succeeded.
It was an oppressive zone of heat--oppressive not only from its
silence, but from the sense of awful, antique forms, whether of art or
nature, that were sitting, closely veiled, in that mysterious
obscurity. I shuddered as I felt that if my eyes could pierce that
mist, or if it should lift and roll away, I should see upon a silent
shore low ranges of lonely hills, or mystic figures and huge temples
trampled out of history by time.
This, too, we left. There was a rustling of distant palms, the
indistinct roar of beasts, and the hiss of serpents. Then all was
still again. Only at times the remote sigh of the weary sea, moaning
around desolate isles undiscovered; and the howl of winds that had
never wafted human voices, but had rung endless changes upon the sound
of dashing waters, made the voyage more appalling and the figures
around me more fearful.
As the ship plunged on through all the varying zones, as climate and
country drifted behind us, unseen in the gray mist, but each, in turn,
making that quaint craft England or Italy, Africa and the Southern
seas, I ventured to steal a glance at the motley crew, to see what
impression this wild career produced upon them.
They sat about the deck in a hundred listless postures. Some leaned
idly over the bulwarks, and looked wistfully away from the ship, as if
they fancied they saw all that I inferred but could not see. As the
perfume, and sound, and climate changed, I could see many a longing
eye sadden and grow moist, and as the chime of bells echoed distinctly
like the airy syllables of names, and, as it were, made pictures in
music upon the minds of those quaint mariners--then dry lips moved,
perhaps to name a name, perhaps to breathe a prayer. Others sat upon
the deck, vacantly smoking pipes that required no refilling, but had
an immortality of weed and fire. The more they smoked the more
mysterious they became. The smoke made the mist around them more
impenetrable, and I could clearly see that those distant sounds
gradually grew more distant, and, by some of the most desperate and
constant smokers, were heard no more. The faces of such had an apathy,
which, had it been human, would have been despair.
Others stood staring up into the rigging, as if calculating when the
sails must needs be rent and the voyage end. But there was no hope in
their eyes, only a bitter longing. Some paced restlessly up and down
the deck. They had evidently been walking a long, long time. At
intervals they, too threw a searching glance into the mist that
enveloped the ship, and up into the sails and rigging that stretched
over them in hopeless strength and order.
One of the promenaders I especially noticed. His beard was long and
snowy, like that of the pilot. He had a staff in his hand, and his
movement was very rapid. His body swung forward, as if to avoid
something, and his glance half turned back over his shoulder,
apprehensively, as if he were threatened from behind. The head and the
whole figure were bowed as if under a burden, although I could not see
that he had anything upon his shoulders; and his gait was not that of
a man who is walking off the ennui of a voyage, but rather of a
criminal flying, or of a startled traveller pursued.
As he came nearer to me in his walk, I saw that his features were
strongly Hebrew, and there was an air of the proudest dignity,
fearfully abased, in his mien and expression. It was more than the
dignity of an individual. I could have believed that the pride of a
race was humbled in his person.
His agile eye presently fastened itself upon me, as a stranger. He
came nearer and nearer to me, as he paced rapidly to and fro, and was
evidently several times on the point of addressing me, but, looking
over his shoulder apprehensively, he passed on. At length, with a
great effort, he paused for an instant, and invited me to join him in
his walk. Before the invitation was fairly uttered, he was in motion
again. I followed, but I could not overtake him. He kept just before
me, and turned occasionally with an air of terror, as if he fancied I
were dogging him; then glided on more rapidly.
His face was by no means agreeable, but it had an inexplicable
fascination, as if it had been turned upon what no other mortal eyes
had ever seen. Yet I could hardly tell whether it were, probably, an
object of supreme beauty or of terror. He looked at everything as if
he hoped its impression might obliterate some anterior and awful one;
and I was gradually possessed with the unpleasant idea that his eyes
were never closed--that, in fact, he never slept.
Suddenly, fixing me with his unnatural, wakeful glare, he whispered
something which I could not understand, and then darted forward even
more rapidly, as if he dreaded that, in merely speaking, he had lost
time.
Still the ship drove on, and I walked hurriedly along the deck, just
behind my companion. But our speed and that of the ship contrasted
strangely with the mouldy smell of old rigging, and the listless and
lazy groups, smoking and leaning on the bulwarks. The seasons, in
endless succession and iteration, passed over the ship. The twilight
was summer haze at the stern, while it was the fiercest winter mist at
the bows. But as a tropical breath, like the warmth of a Syrian day,
suddenly touched the brow of my companion, he sighed, and I could not
help saying:
"You must be tired."
He only shook his head and quickened his pace. But now that I had
once spoken, it was not so difficult to speak, and I asked him why he
did not stop and rest.
He turned for moment, and a mournful sweetness shone in his dark eyes
and haggard, swarthy face. It played flittingly around that strange
look of ruined human dignity, like a wan beam of late sunset about a
crumbling and forgotten temple. He put his hand hurriedly to his
forehead, as if he were trying to remember--like a lunatic, who,
having heard only the wrangle of fiends in his delirium, suddenly in a
conscious moment, perceives the familiar voice of love. But who could
this be, to whom mere human sympathy was so startlingly sweet?
Still moving, he whispered with a woful sadness, "I want to stop, but
I cannot. If I could only stop long enough to leap over the bulwarks!"