I
As Abel Keeling lay on the galleon's deck, held from rolling down it only
by his own weight and the sun-blackened hand that lay outstretched upon
the planks, his gaze wandered, but ever returned to the bell that hung,
jammed with the dangerous heel-over of the vessel, in the small
ornamental belfry immediately abaft the mainmast. The bell was of cast
bronze, with half-obliterated bosses upon it that had been the heads of
cherubs; but wind and salt spray had given it a thick incrustation of
bright, beautiful, lichenous green. It was this colour that Abel
Keeling's eyes liked.
For wherever else on the galleon his eyes rested they found only
whiteness--the whiteness of extreme eld. There were slightly varying
degrees in her whiteness; here she was of a white that glistened like
salt-granules, there of a greyish chalky white, and again her whiteness
had the yellowish cast of decay; but everywhere it was the mild,
disquieting whiteness of materials out of which the life had departed.
Her cordage was bleached as old straw is bleached, and half her ropes
kept their shape little more firmly than the ash of a string keeps its
shape after the fire has passed; her pallid timbers were white and clean
as bones found in sand; and even the wild frankincense with which (for
lack of tar, at her last touching of land) she had been pitched, had
dried to a pale hard gum that sparkled like quartz in her open seams. The
sun was yet so pale a buckler of silver through the still white mists
that not a cord or timber cast a shadow; and only Abel Keeling's face and
hands were black, carked and cinder-black from exposure to his pitiless
rays.
The galleon was the _Mary of the Tower_, and she had a frightful list to
starboard. So canted was she that her mainyard dipped one of its steel
sickles into the glassy water, and, had her foremast remained, or more
than the broken stump of her bonaventure mizzen, she must have turned
over completely. Many days ago they had stripped the mainyard of its
course, and had passed the sail under the Mary's bottom, in the hope that
it would stop the leak. This it had partly done as long as the galleon
had continued to glide one way; then, without coming about, she had begun
to glide the other, the ropes had parted, and she had dragged the sail
after her, leaving a broad tarnish on the silver sea.
For it was broadside that the galleon glided, almost imperceptibly, ever
sucking down. She glided as if a loadstone drew her, and, at first, Abel
Keeling had thought it was a loadstone, pulling at her iron, drawing her
through the pearly mists that lay like face-cloths to the water and hid
at a short distance the tarnish left by the sail. But later he had known
that it was no loadstone drawing at her iron. The motion was due--must
be due--to the absolute deadness of the calm in that silent, sinister,
three-miles-broad waterway. With the eye of his mind he saw that
loadstone now as he lay against a gun-truck, all but toppling down the
deck. Soon that would happen again which had happened for five days past.
He would hear again the chattering of monkeys and the screaming of
parrots, the mat of green and yellow weeds would creep in towards the
Mary over the quicksilver sea, once more the sheer wall of rock would
rise, and the men would run....
But no; the men would not run this time to drop the fenders. There were
no men left to do so, unless Bligh was still alive. Perhaps Bligh was
still alive. He had walked half-way down the quarter-deck steps a little
before the sudden nightfall of the day before, had then fallen and lain
for a minute (dead, Abel Keeling had supposed, watching him from his
place by the gun-truck), and had then got up again and tottered forward
to the forecastle, his tall figure swaying and his long arms waving. Abel
Keeling had not seen him since. Most likely, he had died in the
forecastle during the night. If he had not been dead he would have come
aft again for water....
At the remembrance of the water Abel Keeling lifted his head. The strands
of lean muscle about his emaciated mouth worked, and he made a little
pressure of his sun-blackened hand on the deck, as if to verify its
steepness and his own balance. The mainmast was some seven or eight yards
away.... He put one stiff leg under him and began, seated as he was, to
make shuffling movements down the slope.
To the mainmast, near the belfry, was affixed his contrivance for
catching water. It consisted of a collar of rope set lower at one side
than at the other (but that had been before the mast had steeved so many
degrees away from the zenith), and tallowed beneath. The mists lingered
later in that gully of a strait than they did on the open ocean, and the
collar of rope served as a collector for the dews that condensed on the
mast. The drops fell into a small earthen pipkin placed on the deck
beneath it.
Abel Keeling reached the pipkin and looked into it. It was nearly a third
full of fresh water. Good. If Bligh, the mate, was dead, so much the more
water for Abel Keeling, master of the _Mary of the Tower_. He dipped two
fingers into the pipkin and put them into his mouth. This he did several
times. He did not dare to raise the pipkin to his black and broken lips
for dread of a remembered agony, he could not have told how many days
ago, when a devil had whispered to him, and he had gulped down the
contents of the pipkin in the morning, and for the rest of the day had
gone waterless.... Again he moistened his fingers and sucked them; then
he lay sprawling against the mast, idly watching the drops of water
as they fell.
It was odd how the drops formed. Slowly they collected at the edge of the
tallowed collar, trembled in their fullness for an instant, and fell,
another beginning the process instantly. It amused Abel Keeling to watch
them. Why (he wondered) were all the drops the same size? What cause and
compulsion did they obey that they never varied, and what frail tenuity
held the little globules intact? It must be due to some Cause.... He
remembered that the aromatic gum of the wild frankincense with which they
had parcelled the seams had hung on the buckets in great sluggish gouts,
obedient to a different compulsion; oil was different again, and so were
juices and balsams. Only quicksilver (perhaps the heavy and motionless
sea put him in mind of quicksilver) seemed obedient to no law.... Why was
it so?
Bligh, of course, would have had his explanation: it was the Hand of God.
That sufficed for Bligh, who had gone forward the evening before, and
whom Abel Keeling now seemed vaguely and as at a distance to remember as
the deep-voiced fanatic who had sung his hymns as, man by man, he had
committed the bodies of the ship's company to the deep. Bligh was that
sort of man; accepted things without question; was content to take things
as they were and be ready with the fenders when the wall of rock rose out
of the opalescent mists. Bligh, too, like the waterdrops, had his Law,
that was his and nobody else's....
There floated down from some rotten rope up aloft a flake of scurf, that
settled in the pipkin. Abel Keeling watched it dully as it settled
towards the pipkin's rim. When presently he again dipped his fingers into
the vessel the water ran into a little vortex, drawing the flake with it.
The water settled again; and again the minute flake determined towards
the rim and adhered there, as if the rim had power to draw it....
It was exactly so that the galleon was gliding towards the wall of rock,
the yellow and green weeds, and the monkeys and parrots. Put out into
mid-water again (while there had been men to put her out) she had glided
to the other wall. One force drew the chip in the pipkin and the ship
over the tranced sea. It was the Hand of God, said Bligh....
Abel Keeling, his mind now noting minute things and now clouded with
torpor, did not at first hear a voice that was quakingly lifted up
over by the forecastle--a voice that drew nearer, to an accompaniment of
swirling water.
_"O Thou, that Jonas in the fish
Three days didst keep from pain,
Which was a figure of Thy death
And rising up again--"_
It was Bligh, singing one of his hymns:
_"O Thou, that Noah keptst from flood
And Abram, day by day,
As he along through Egypt passed
Didst guide him in the way--"_
The voice ceased, leaving the pious period uncompleted. Bligh was alive,
at any rate.... Abel Keeling resumed his fitful musing.
Yes, that was the Law of Bligh's life, to call things the Hand of God;
but Abel Keeling's Law was different; no better, no worse, only
different. The Hand of God, that drew chips and galleons, must work by
some method; and Abel Keeling's eyes were dully on the pipkin again as if
he sought the method there....
Then conscious thought left him for a space, and when he resumed it was
without obvious connection.
Oars, of course, were the thing. With oars, men could laugh at calms.
Oars, that only pinnaces and galliasses now used, had had their
advantages. But oars (which was to say a method, for you could say if you
liked that the Hand of God grasped the oar-loom, as the Breath of God
filled the sail)--oars were antiquated, belonged to the past, and meant a
throwing-over of all that was good and new and a return to fine lines, a
battle-formation abreast to give effect to the shock of the ram, and a
day or two at sea and then to port again for provisions. Oars ... no.
Abel Keeling was one of the new men, the men who swore by the line-ahead,
the broadside fire of sakers and demi-cannon, and weeks and months
without a landfall. Perhaps one day the wits of such men as he would
devise a craft, not oar-driven (because oars could not penetrate into the
remote seas of the world)--not sail-driven (because men who trusted to
sails found themselves in an airless, three-mile strait, suspended
motionless between cloud and water, ever gliding to a wall of rock)--but
a ship ... a ship ...
"_To Noah and his sons with him
God spake, and thus said He:
A covenant set I up with you
And your posterity_--"
It was Bligh again, wandering somewhere in the waist. Abel Keeling's mind
was once more a blank. Then slowly, slowly, as the water drops collected
on the collar of rope, his thought took shape again.
A galliasse? No, not a galliasse. The galliasse made shift to be two
things, and was neither. This ship, that the hand of man should one day
make for the Hand of God to manage, should be a ship that should take and
conserve the force of the wind, take it and store it as she stored her
victuals; at rest when she wished, going ahead when she wished; turning
the forces both of calm and storm against themselves. For, of course, her
force must be wind--stored wind--a bag of the winds, as the children's
tale had it--wind probably directed upon the water astern, driving it
away and urging forward the ship, acting by reaction. She would have a
wind-chamber, into which wind would be pumped with pumps.... Bligh would
call that equally the Hand of God, this driving-force of the ship of the
future that Abel Keeling dimly foreshadowed as he lay between the
mainmast and the belfry, turning his eyes now and then from ashy white
timbers to the vivid green bronze-rust of the bell above him....
Bligh's face, liver-coloured with the sun and ravaged from inwards by the
faith that consumed him, appeared at the head of the quarter-deck steps.
His voice beat uncontrolledly out.
_"And in the earth here is no place
Of refuge to be found,
Nor in the deep and water-course
That passeth under ground--"_