canvas set, to help the engines. But by itself the sail power was not
enough to keep way on her. When the propeller went the ship broached-to
at once, and the masts got whipped overboard.
The disadvantage of being dismasted consisted in this, that they had
nothing to hoist flags on to make themselves visible at a distance. In
the course of the first few days several ships failed to sight them; and
the gale was drifting them out of the usual track. The voyage had been,
from the first, neither very successful nor very harmonious. There had
been quarrels on board. The captain was a clever, melancholic man, who
had no unusual grip on his crew. The ship had been amply provisioned for
the passage, but, somehow or other, several barrels of meat were found
spoiled on opening, and had been thrown overboard soon after leaving
home, as a sanitary measure. Afterwards the crew of the Borgmester Dahl
thought of that rotten carrion with tears of regret, covetousness and
despair.
She drove south. To begin with, there had been an appearance of
organisation, but soon the bonds of discipline became relaxed. A sombre
idleness succeeded. They looked with sullen eyes at the horizon. The
gales increased: she lay in the trough, the seas made a clean breach
over her. On one frightful night, when they expected their hulk to turn
over with them every moment, a heavy sea broke on board, deluged the
store-rooms and spoiled the best part of the remaining provisions. It
seems the hatch had not been properly secured. This instance of neglect
is characteristic of utter discouragement. Falk tried to inspire some
energy into his captain, but failed. From that time he retired more into
himself, always trying to do his utmost in the situation. It grew worse.
Gale succeeded gale, with black mountains of water hurling themselves on
the Borgmester Dahl. Some of the men never left their bunks; many became
quarrelsome. The chief engineer, an old man, refused to speak at all to
anybody. Others shut themselves up in their berths to cry. On calm days
the inert steamer rolled on a leaden sea under a murky sky, or showed,
in sunshine, the squalor of sea waifs, the dried white salt, the rust,
the jagged broken places. Then the gales came again. They kept body and
soul together on short rations. Once, an English ship, scudding in a
storm, tried to stand by them, heaving-to pluckily under their lee. The
seas swept her decks; the men in oilskins clinging to her rigging looked
at them, and they made desperate signs over their shattered bulwarks.
Suddenly her main-topsail went, yard and all, in a terrific squall; she
had to bear up under bare poles, and disappeared.
Other ships had spoken them before, but at first they had refused to be
taken off, expecting the assistance of some steamer. There were very few
steamers in those latitudes then; and when they desired to leave this
dead and drifting carcase, no ship came in sight. They had drifted south
out of men’s knowledge. They failed to attract the attention of a lonely
whaler, and very soon the edge of the polar ice-cap rose from the sea
and closed the southern horizon like a wall. One morning they were
alarmed by finding themselves floating amongst detached pieces of ice.
But the fear of sinking passed away like their vigour, like their hopes;
the shocks of the floes knocking against the ship’s side could not
rouse them from their apathy: and the Borgmester Dahl drifted out again
unharmed into open water. They hardly noticed the change.
The funnel had gone overboard in one of the heavy rolls; two of their
three boats had disappeared, washed away in bad weather, and the davits
swung to and fro, unsecured, with chafed rope’s ends waggling to the
roll. Nothing was done on board, and Falk told me how he had often
listened to the water washing about the dark engine-room where the
engines, stilled for ever, were decaying slowly into a mass of rust, as
the stilled heart decays within the lifeless body. At first, after the
loss of the motive power, the tiller had been thoroughly secured by
lashings. But in course of time these had rotted, chafed, rusted,
parting one by one: and the rudder, freed, banged heavily to and fro
night and day, sending dull shocks through the whole frame of the
vessel. This was dangerous. Nobody cared enough to lift a little finger.
He told me that even now sometimes waking up at night, he fancied he
could hear the dull vibrating thuds. The pintles carried away, and it
dropped off at last.
The final catastrophe came with the sending off of their one remaining
boat. It was Falk who had managed to preserve her intact, and now it
was agreed that some of the hands should sail away into the track of the
shipping to procure assistance. She was provisioned with all the food
they could spare for the six who were to go. They waited for a fine day.
It was long in coming. At last one morning they lowered her into the
water.
Directly, in that demoralised crowd, trouble broke out. Two men who
had no business there had jumped into the boat under the pretence of
unhooking the tackles, while some sort of squabble arose on the deck
amongst these weak, tottering spectres of a ship’s company. The
captain, who had been for days living secluded and unapproachable in the
chart-room, came to the rail. He ordered the two men to come up on board
and menaced them with his revolver. They pretended to obey, but suddenly
cutting the boat’s painter, gave a shove against the ship’s side and
made ready to hoist the sail.
“Shoot, sir! Shoot them down!” cried Falk-“and I will jump overboard to
regain the boat.” But the captain, after taking aim with an irresolute
arm, turned suddenly away.
A howl of rage arose. Falk dashed into his cabin for his own pistol.
When he returned it was too late. Two more men had leaped into the
water, but the fellows in the boat beat them off with the oars, hoisted
the boat’s lug and sailed away. They were never heard of again.
Consternation and despair possessed the remaining ship’s company,
till the apathy of utter hopelessness re-asserted its sway. That day a
fireman committed suicide, running up on deck with his throat cut from
ear to ear, to the horror of all hands. He was thrown overboard. The
captain had locked himself in the chart-room, and Falk, knocking vainly
for admittance, heard him reciting over and over again the names of his
wife and children, not as if calling upon them or commending them to
God, but in a mechanical voice like an exercise of memory. Next day the
doors of the chart-room were swinging open to the roll of the ship, and
the captain had disappeared. He must during the night have jumped into
the sea. Falk locked both the doors and kept the keys.
The organised life of the ship had come to an end. The solidarity of
the men had gone. They became indifferent to each other. It was Falk
who took in hand the distribution of such food as remained. They boiled
their boots for soup to eke out the rations, which only made their
hunger more intolerable. Sometimes whispers of hate were heard passing
between the languid skeletons that drifted endlessly to and fro, north
and south, east and west, upon that carcase of a ship.
And in this lies the grotesque horror of this sombre story. The last
extremity of sailors, overtaking a small boat or a frail craft, seems
easier to bear, because of the direct danger of the seas. The confined
space, the close contact, the imminent menace of the waves, seem to draw
men together, in spite of madness, suffering and despair. But there
was a ship--safe, convenient, roomy: a ship with beds, bedding, knives,
forks, comfortable cabins, glass and china, and a complete cook’s
galley, pervaded, ruled and possessed by the pitiless spectre of
starvation. The lamp oil had been drunk, the wicks cut up for food, the
candles eaten. At night she floated dark in all her recesses, and full
of fears. One day Falk came upon a man gnawing a splinter of pine wood.
Suddenly he threw the piece of wood away, tottered to the rail, and fell
over. Falk, too late to prevent the act, saw him claw the ship’s side
desperately before he went down. Next day another man did the same
thing, after uttering horrible imprecations. But this one somehow
managed to get hold of the broken rudder chains and hung on there,
silently. Falk set about trying to save him, and all the time the man,
holding with both hands, looked at him anxiously with his sunken eyes.
Then, just as Falk was ready to put his hand on him, the man let go his
hold and sank like a stone. Falk reflected on these sights. His heart
revolted against the horror of death, and he said to himself that he
would struggle for every precious minute of his life.
One afternoon--as the survivors lay about on the after deck--the
carpenter, a tall man with a black beard, spoke of the last sacrifice.
There was nothing eatable left on board. Nobody said a word to this; but
that company separated quickly, these listless feeble spectres slunk
off one by one to hide in fear of each other. Falk and the carpenter
remained on deck together. Falk liked the big carpenter. He had been the
best man of the lot, helpful and ready as long as there was anything to
do, the longest hopeful, and had preserved to the last some vigour and
decision of mind.
They did not speak to each other. Henceforth no voices were to be heard
conversing sadly on board that ship. After a time the carpenter tottered
away forward; but later on, Falk going to drink at the fresh-water pump,
had the inspiration to turn his head. The carpenter had stolen upon him
from behind, and, summoning all his strength, was aiming with a crowbar
a blow at the back of his skull.
Dodging just in time, Falk made his escape and ran into his cabin. While
he was loading his revolver there, he heard the sound of heavy blows
struck upon the bridge. The locks of the chartroom doors were slight,
they flew open, and the carpenter, possessing himself of the captain’s
revolver, fired a shot of defiance.
Falk was about to go on deck and have it out at once, when he remarked
that one of the ports of his cabin commanded the approaches to the
freshwater pump. Instead of going out he remained in and secured the
door. “The best man shall survive,” he said to himself--and the other,
he reasoned, must at some time or other come there to drink. These
starving men would drink often to cheat the pangs of their hunger. But
the carpenter too must have noticed the position of the port. They were
the two best men in the ship, and the game was with them. All the rest
of the day Falk saw no one and heard no sound. At night he strained his
eyes. It was dark--he heard a rustling noise once, but he was certain
that no one could have come near the pump. It was to the left of his
deck port, and he could not have failed to see a man, for the night was
clear and starry. He saw nothing; towards morning another faint noise
made him suspicious. Deliberately and quietly he unlocked his door. He
had not slept, and had not given way to the horror of the situation. He
wanted to live.
But during the night the carpenter, without at all trying to approach
the pump, had managed to creep quietly along the starboard bulwark, and,
unseen, had crouched down right under Falk’s deck port. When daylight
came he rose up suddenly, looked in, and putting his arm through the
round brass framed opening, fired at Falk within a foot. He missed--and
Falk, instead of attempting to seize the arm holding the weapon, opened
his door unexpectedly, and with the muzzle of his long revolver nearly
touching the other’s side, shot him dead.
The best man had survived. Both of them had at the beginning just
strength enough to stand on their feet, and both had displayed pitiless
resolution, endurance, cunning and courage--all the qualities of classic
heroism. At once Falk threw overboard the captain’s revolver. He was a
born monopolist. Then after the report of the two shots, followed by a
profound silence, there crept out into the cold, cruel dawn of Antarctic
regions, from various hiding-places, over the deck of that dismantled
corpse of a ship floating on a grey sea ruled by iron necessity and with
a heart of ice--there crept into view one by one, cautious, slow, eager,
glaring, and unclean, a band of hungry and livid skeletons. Falk faced
them, the possessor of the only fire-arm on board, and the second best
man--the carpenter--was lying dead between him and them.
“He was eaten, of course,” I said.
He bent his head slowly, shuddered a little, drawing his hands over his
face, and said, “I had never any quarrel with that man. But there were
our lives between him and me.”
Why continue the story of that ship, that story before which, with its
fresh-water pump like a spring of death, its man with the weapon, the
sea ruled by iron necessity, its spectral band swayed by terror and
hope, its mute and unhearing heaven?-the fable of the Flying Dutchman
with its convention of crime and its sentimental retribution fades like
a graceful wreath, like a wisp of white mist. What is there to say that
every one of us cannot guess for himself? I believe Falk began by going
through the ship, revolver in hand, to annex all the matches. Those
starving wretches had plenty of matches! He had no mind to have the ship
set on fire under his feet, either from hate or from despair. He lived
in the open, camping on the bridge, commanding all the after deck
and the only approach to the pump. He lived! Some of the others lived
too--concealed, anxious, coming out one by one from their hiding-places
at the seductive sound of a shot. And he was not selfish. They shared,
but only three of them all were alive when a whaler, returning from her
cruising ground, nearly ran over the water-logged hull of the Borgmester
Dahl, which, it seems, in the end had in some way sprung a leak in both
her holds, but being loaded with deals could not sink.
“They all died,” Falk said. “These three too, afterwards. But I would
not die. All died, all! under this terrible misfortune. But was I too to
throw away my life? Could I? Tell me, captain? I was alone there, quite
alone, just like the others. Each man was alone. Was I to give up my
revolver? Who to? Or was I to throw it into the sea? What would
have been the good? Only the best man would survive. It was a great,
terrible, and cruel misfortune.”
He had survived! I saw him before me as though preserved for a witness
to the mighty truth of an unerring and eternal principle. Great beads
of perspiration stood on his forehead. And suddenly it struck the table
with a heavy blow, as he fell forward throwing his hands out.
“And this is worse,” he cried. “This is a worse pain! This is more
terrible.”
He made my heart thump with the profound conviction of his cries. And
after he had left me alone I called up before my mental eye the image
of the girl weeping silently, abundantly, patiently, and as if
irresistibly. I thought of her tawny hair. I thought how, if unplaited,
it would have covered her all round as low as the hips, like the hair of
a siren. And she had bewitched him. Fancy a man who would guard his
own life with the inflexibility of a pitiless and immovable fate, being
brought to lament that once a crowbar had missed his skull! The sirens
sing and lure to death, but this one had been weeping silently as if
for the pity of his life. She was the tender and voiceless siren of this
appalling navigator. He evidently wanted to live his whole conception
of life. Nothing else would do. And she too was a servant of that
life that, in the midst of death, cries aloud to our senses. She was
eminently fitted to interpret for him its feminine side. And in her own
way, and with her own profusion of sensuous charms, she also seemed
to illustrate the eternal truth of an unerring principle. I don’t know
though what sort of principle Hermann illustrated when he turned up
early on board my ship with a most perplexed air. It struck me, however,
that he too would do his best to survive. He seemed greatly calmed on
the subject of Falk, but still very full of it.
“What is it you said I was last night? You know,” he asked after some
preliminary talk. “Too--too--I don’t know. A very funny word.”
“Squeamish?” I suggested.
“Yes. What does it mean?”
“That you exaggerate things--to yourself. Without inquiry, and so on.”
He seemed to turn it over in his mind. We went on talking. This Falk was
the plague of his life. Upsetting everybody like this! Mrs. Hermann was
unwell rather this morning. His niece was crying still. There was nobody
to look after the children. He struck his umbrella on the deck. She
would be like that for months. Fancy carrying all the way home, second
class, a perfectly useless girl who is crying all the time. It was
bad for Lena too, he observed; but on what grounds I could not guess.
Perhaps of the bad example. That child was already sorrowing and crying
enough over the rag doll. Nicholas was really the least sentimental
person of the family.
“Why does she weep?” I asked.
“From pity,” cried Hermann.
It was impossible to make out women. Mrs. Hermann was the only one he
pretended to understand. She was very, very upset and doubtful.
“Doubtful about what?” I asked.
He averted his eyes and did not answer this. It was impossible to make
them out. For instance, his niece was weeping for Falk. Now he (Hermann)
would like to wring his neck--but then... He supposed he had too
tender a heart. “Frankly,” he asked at last, “what do you think of what
we heard last night, captain?”
“In all these tales,” I observed, “there is always a good deal of
exaggeration.”
And not letting him recover from his surprise I assured him that I knew
all the details. He begged me not to repeat them. His heart was too
tender. They made him feel unwell. Then, looking at his feet and
speaking very slowly, he supposed that he need not see much of them
after they were married. For, indeed, he could not bear the sight of
Falk. On the other hand it was ridiculous to take home a girl with her
head turned. A girl that weeps all the time and is of no help to her
aunt.
“Now you will be able to do with one cabin only on your passage home,” I
said.
“Yes, I had thought of that,” he said brightly, almost. “Yes! Himself,
his wife, four children--one cabin might do. Whereas if his niece
went...”
“And what does Mrs. Hermann say to it?” I inquired.
Mrs. Hermann did not know whether a man of that sort could make a girl
happy--she had been greatly deceived in Captain Falk. She had been very
upset last night.
Those good people did not seem to be able to retain an impression for a
whole twelve hours. I assured him on my own personal knowledge that
Falk possessed in himself all the qualities to make his niece’s future
prosperous. He said he was glad to hear this, and that he would tell his
wife. Then the object of the visit came out. He wished me to help him to
resume relations with Falk. His niece, he said, had expressed the hope I
would do so in my kindness. He was evidently anxious that I should,
for though he seemed to have forgotten nine-tenths of his last night’s
opinions and the whole of his indignation, yet he evidently feared to
be sent to the right-about. “You told me he was very much in love,” he
concluded slyly, and leered in a sort of bucolic way.
As soon as he had left my ship I called Falk on board by signal--the
tug still lying at the anchorage. He took the news with calm gravity,
as though he had all along expected the stars to fight for him in their
courses.
I saw them once more together, and only once--on the quarter-deck of the
Diana. Hermann sat smoking with a shirt-sleeved elbow hooked over the
back of his chair. Mrs. Hermann was sewing alone. As Falk stepped over
the gangway, Hermann’s niece, with a slight swish of the skirt and a
swift friendly nod to me, glided past my chair.
They met in sunshine abreast of the mainmast. He held her hands and
looked down at them, and she looked up at him with her candid and
unseeing glance. It seemed to me they had come together as if attracted,
drawn and guided to each other by a mysterious influence. They were a
complete couple. In her grey frock, palpitating with life, generous of
form, olympian and simple, she was indeed the siren to fascinate that
dark navigator, this ruthless lover of the five senses. From afar I
seemed to feel the masculine strength with which he grasped those hands
she had extended to him with a womanly swiftness. Lena, a little pale,
nursing her beloved lump of dirty rags, ran towards her big friend; and
then in the drowsy silence of the good old ship Mrs. Hermann’s voice
rang out so changed that it made me spin round in my chair to see what
was the matter.
“Lena, come here!” she screamed. And this good-natured matron gave me a
wavering glance, dark and full of fearsome distrust. The child ran
back, surprised to her knee. But the two, standing before each other in
sunlight with clasped hands, had heard nothing, had seen nothing and no
one. Three feet away from them in the shade a seaman sat on a spar, very
busy splicing a strop, and dipping his fingers into a tar-pot, as if
utterly unaware of their existence.
When I returned in command of another ship, some five years afterwards,
Mr. and Mrs. Falk had left the place. I should not wonder if Schomberg’s
tongue had succeeded at last in scaring Falk away for good; and,
indubitably, there was a tale still going about the town of a certain
Falk, owner of a tug, who had won his wife at cards from the captain of
an English ship.
THE END