In an ill-lit ancient tavern that I know, are many tales of the sea;
but not without the wine of Gorgondy, that I had of a private bargain
from the gnomes, was the tale laid bare for which I had waited of an
evening for the greater part of a year.
I knew my man and listened to his stories, sitting amid the bluster of
his oaths; I plied him with rum and whiskey and mixed drinks, but
there never came the tale for which I sought, and as a last resort I
went to the Huthneth Mountains and bargained there all night with the
chiefs of the gnomes.
When I came to the ancient tavern and entered the low-roofed room,
bringing the hoard of the gnomes in a bottle of hammered iron, my man
had not yet arrived. The sailors laughed at my old iron bottle, but I
sat down and waited; had I opened it then they would have wept and
sung. I was well content to wait, for I knew my man had the story, and
it was such a one as had profoundly stirred the incredulity of the
faithless.
He entered and greeted me, and sat down and called for brandy. He was
a hard man to turn from his purpose, and, uncorking my iron bottle, I
sought to dissuade him from brandy for fear that when the brandy, bit
his throat he should refuse to leave it for any other wine. He lifted
his head and said deep and dreadful things of any man that should dare
to speak against brandy.
I swore that I said nothing against brandy but added that it was often
given to children, while Gorgondy was only drunk by men of such
depravity that they had abandoned sin because all the usual vices had
come to seem genteel. When he asked if Gorgondy was a bad wine to
drink I said that it was so bad that if a man sipped it that was the
one touch that made damnation certain. Then he asked me what I had in
the iron bottle, and I said it was Gorgondy; and then he shouted for
the largest tumbler in that ill-lit ancient tavern, and stood up and
shook his fist at me when it came, and swore, and told me to fill it
with the wine that I got on that bitter night from the treasure house
of the gnomes.
As he drank it he told me that he had met men who had spoken against
wine, and that they had mentioned Heaven; and therefore he would not
go there--no, not he; and that once he had sent one of them to Hell,
but when he got there he would turn him out, and he had no use for
milksops.
Over the second tumbler he was thoughtful, but still he said no word
of the tale he knew, until I feared that it would never be heard. But
when the third glass of that terrific wine had burned its way down his
gullet, and vindicated the wickedness of the gnomes, his reticence
withered like a leaf in the fire, and he bellowed out the secret.
I had long known that there is in ships a will or way of their own,
and had even suspected that when sailors die or abandon their ships at
sea, a derelict, being left to her own devices, may seek her own ends;
but I had never dreamed by night, or fancied during the day, that the
ships had a god that they worshipped, or that they secretly slipped
away to a temple in the sea.
Over the fourth glass of the wine that the gnomes so sinfully brew but
have kept so wisely from man, until the bargain that I had with their
elders all through that autumn night, the sailor told me the story. I
do not tell it as he told it to me because of the oaths that were in
it; nor is it from delicacy that I refrain from writing these oaths
verbatim, but merely because the horror they caused in me at the time
troubles me still whenever I put them on paper, and I continue to
shudder until I have blotted them out. Therefore, I tell the story in
my own words, which, if they possess a certain decency that was not in
the mouth of that sailor, unfortunately do not smack, as his did, of
rum and blood and the sea.
You would take a ship to be a dead thing like a table, as dead as bits
of iron and canvas and wood. That is because you always live on shore,
and have never seen the sea, and drink milk. Milk is a more accursed
drink than water.
What with the captain and what with the man at the wheel, and what
with the crew, a ship has no fair chance of showing a will of her own.
There is only one moment in the history of ships, that carry crews on
board, when they act by their own free will. This moment comes when
all the crew are drunk. As the last man falls drunk on to the deck,
the ship is free of man, and immediately slips away. She slips away at
once on a new course and is never one yard out in a hundred miles.
It was like this one night with the Sea-Fancy. Bill Smiles was there
himself, and can vouch for it. Bill Smiles has never told this tale
before for fear that anyone should call him a liar. Nobody dislikes
being hung as much as Bill Smiles would, but he won't be called a
liar. I tell the tale as I heard it, relevancies and irrelevancies,
though in my more decent words; and as I made no doubts of the truth
of it then, I hardly like to now; others can please themselves.
It is not often that the whole of a crew is drunk. The crew of
the Sea-Fancy was no drunkener than others. It happened like this.
The captain was always drunk. One day a fancy he had that some spiders
were plotting against him, or a sudden bleeding he had from both his
ears, made him think that drinking might be bad for his health. Next
day he signed the pledge. He was sober all that morning and all the
afternoon, but at evening he saw a sailor drinking a a glass of beer,
and a fit of madness seized him, and he said things that seemed bad to
Bill Smiles. And next morning he made all of them take the pledge.
For two days nobody had a drop to drink, unless you count water, and
on the third morning the captain was quite drunk. It stood to reason
they all had a glass or two then, except the man at the wheel; and
towards evening the man at the wheel could bear it no longer, and
seems to have had his glass like all the rest, for the ship's course
wobbled a bit and made a circle or two. Then all of a sudden she went
off south by east under full canvas till midnight, and never altered
her course. And at midnight she came to the wide wet courts of the
Temple in the Sea.
People who think that Mr. Smiles is drunk often make a great mistake. And
people are not the only ones that have made that mistake. Once a
ship made it, and a lot of ships. It's a mistake to think that old Bill
Smiles is drunk just because he can't move.
Midnight and moonlight and the Temple in the Sea Bill Smiles clearly
remembers, and all the derelicts in the world were there, the old
abandoned ships. The figureheads were nodding to themselves and
blinking at the image. The image was a woman of white marble on a
pedestal in the outer court of the Temple of the Sea: she was clearly
the love of all the man-deserted ships, or the goddess to whom they
prayed their heathen prayers. And as Bill Smiles was watching them,
the lips of the figureheads moved; they all began to pray. But all at
once their lips were closed with a snap when they saw that there were
men on the Sea-Fancy. They all came crowding up and nodded and nodded
and nodded to see if all were drunk, and that's when they made their
mistake about old Bill Smiles, although he couldn't move. They would
have given up the treasuries of the gulfs sooner than let men hear the
prayers they said or guess their love for the goddess. It is the
intimate secret of the sea.
The sailor paused. And, in my eagerness to hear what lyrical or
blasphemous thing those figureheads prayed by moonlight at midnight in
the sea to the woman of marble who was a goddess to ships, I pressed
on the sailor more of my Gorgondy wine that the gnomes so wickedly
brew.
I should never have done it; but there he was sitting silent while the
secret was almost mine. He took it moodily and drank a glass; and with
the other glasses that he had had he fell a prey to the villainy of
the gnomes who brew this unbridled wine to no good end. His body
leaned forward slowly, then fell on to the table, his face being
sideways and full of a wicked smile, and, saying very clearly the one
word, "Hell," he became silent for ever with the secret he had from
the sea.