IMOGENE AND I ARE MUCH TOGETHER.
So far I have been minute, accounting for every hour and all things
which happened therein since I was picked up by the mate of the Death
Ship and put aboard her. My first impressions were keen and strong,
and I have sought to lay them before you in the order in which they
occurred. But to pursue this particularity of narrative, to relate
every conversation, to regularly notice the striking of the clock, the
movements of the skeleton, and the hoarse comminatory croak of the
parrot, would be to speedily render this tale tedious. Therefore let me
speak briefly for a little space.
The storm blew with steady fury for six days, driving the tall fabric
to leeward to a distance of many leagues every twenty-four hours, the
course of the drift being as I should suppose--for it was impossible to
put much faith in the compasses--about south-east by east, the larboard
tacks aboard and the ship "ratching" nothing. It was so continuous
and heavy, this gale, that it began to breed a feeling of despair in
me, for I felt that if such weather lasted many weeks it would end in
setting us so far south that we should be greatly out of the road taken
by ships rounding the Cape, and so remote from the land, that should
Vanderdecken desire to careen or water his vessel it would occupy us
months to fetch the coast, so that the prospect of escaping with Miss
Imogene grew small and gloomy. Added to which was the melancholy of the
cell-like cabin in which it was my lot to sleep, the fiery crawlings,
the savage squeakings of great rats, the grinding, groaning and
straining noises of the labouring structure, likewise the sickening,
sweeping, soaring, falling motions of the high light vessel, movements
which, as we drove further south, where the seas were swollen into
mountains by the persistent hardness of the gale and the vastness of
the liquid plain along which they coursed, furious with the fiendish
lashing of the thongs of the storm, grew at times so insupportable
that, sailor as I was and used to the sea in all its moods, I would
often feel faint and reel to a sensation of nausea.
But Imogene was never in the least degree discomposed. She was so used
to the ship that its movements were to her what the steadiness of dry
land is to other women. She seldom came on deck however. Indeed, the
gusts and guns were often so fierce--coming along like thunderbolts
through the gale itself--that any one of them catching her gown might
have carried her light figure overboard. Moreover, twenty-four hours
after the gale set in, it drew up thick as mud; the horizon was brought
within reach of a musket-shot; and out of this thickness blew the rain,
in straight lines, mixed with the showering off the heads of the seas;
the sky hung steady, of the colour of slate--no part lighter or darker
than another, but so low that it appeared as if a man could whip his
hand into it from our masthead whenever those reeling spars came plumb.
As it gave me no pleasure to linger on deck in such weather, you may
suppose that Miss Imogene and I were much together below. Often a whole
morning or afternoon would pass without a soul entering the cabin where
we sate. Whether Vanderdecken was pleased to think that Imogene had a
companion--a fellow-countryman, with whom she could converse, and so
kill the time which he would suspect from her recent fit of weeping
hung heavy on her spirits; or that, having himself long passed those
marks which time sets up as the boundaries of human passions, he was
as incapable of suspecting that Imogene and I should fall in love, as
he clearly was of perceiving the passage of years; 'tis certain he
never exhibited the smallest displeasure when, perchance, he found us
together, albeit once or twice on entering the cabin when we were there
he would ask Imogene abruptly, but never with the sternness his manner
gathered when he addressed others, what our talk was about, as if he
suspected I was inquiring about his ship and cargo; though if, indeed,
this was so, I don't doubt the suspicion was put into his head by Van
Vogelaar, who, I am sure, hated me as much because I was an Englishman
as because our panic-stricken men had fired upon him.
It takes a man but a very short time to fall in love, though the
relation of the thing, if the time be very short, is often questioned
as a possibility, sometimes heartily laughed at as an absurdity, when
deliberately set down in writing. Why this should be I do not know. I
could point to a good many men married to women with whom they fell
in love at a dance, or by seeing them in the street, or by catching
sight of them in church and the like. I have known a man to become
passionately enamoured of a girl by beholding her picture. And what
says Marlowe?
"Who ever loved that loved not at first sight?"
Depend upon it, when passion is of slow growth and cultivated
painfully, you may suspect a deficiency somewhere. Either the girl is
not delightful of face and shape and her virtues and good qualities are
hard to come at, or she is a tease and a coquette, and, in a manner
of speaking, puts her foot down upon a man's heart and prevents the
emotion there from shooting. There will be something wanting, something
wrong, I say. Association may indeed lengthily induct one into a habit
of affection, but the sort of love I have in my mind springs like a
young god into a man's intelligence from a maiden's eyes.
But whether this swift passion is more lasting than the affection that
is formed by slower mental processes, and which of them is the safer
to trust to, is no riddle for such as I to bother over. And in sober
verity, I am sorry to have been led into these remarks, which certainly
should be omitted if they were not necessary as an apology.
For the truth must be told, and it is this: that the very first morning
I met Imogene I fell in love with her beauty, while the long days of
the storm which threw us greatly together confirmed the first movement
of my heart by acquainting me with the extraordinary sweetness,
innocence, gentleness and purity of her nature. These qualities, unlike
the enchanting hue and brightness of her eyes, the golden falls of her
hair, and her many other fairy graces, were not quickly discoverable,
but they stole out during our many conversations. Who that has been to
sea knows not how speedily character is discovered on shipboard? And
I say that before that gale was ended I was so much in love with this
fair and tender girl that I could have laid down my life to serve her.
This I should not have confessed, nor indeed made any reference to my
love-passage, if it did not concern the influence exercised by the
Death Ship on the lives and fortunes of those who have relations with
her.
In this time our conversation was about all sorts of things--her
parents, her home, her childhood, the loss of her father's ship, the
friendless condition she would be in on her arrival in England should I
manage to deliver her from Vanderdecken. Though when she came to that,
I begged her to dismiss her fears at once and for ever, by assuring
her that my mother would gladly receive her and cherish her as her
own daughter, having but me to love, who was always absent. At which a
faint blush sweetened her cheeks as though she suspected what was in
my mind; but I was careful to hurry away from the subject, since I did
not wish her then to suppose I loved her, for fear that, not having
had time, as I believed, to love me, she might fall into a posture
of mind calculated to baffle my hopes of carrying her away from the
Braave. I told her all about myself, of the famous Fenton from whom I
was descended, of my voyages, of the Saracen, whose passage to India I
feared would have an ill issue now that she had met the Dutchman, and
I talked again of Captain Skevington's amazing, and, as I supposed,
accurate theories touching the living-dead who navigated this ship.
She had much to tell me of Vanderdecken and his ship; of unsuspecting
vessels they had fallen in with, which had sold them tobacco, butter,
cheese, and the like. Of others that had backed their topsails to
speak, then taken fright and sailed away in hot haste.
I asked her if it was true that the captain hailed passing ships for
the purpose of sending letters home. She answered no; it was not true;
that was the general belief as she had heard from her father; but,
as Vanderdecken did not know that he was curst--as he went on year
after year, firmly believing that next time he should be successful
in rounding the Cape--why should he desire to send letters home, more
particularly as he regarded the Braave as one of the swiftest vessels
afloat. She added, "I have never seen him write a letter, and I am
certain he has never endeavoured to send one."
"But if he finds a ship willing to speak, he will send a boat?"
"Yes, always; but merely for necessaries of which he is constantly
in want. Now it is tobacco; another time it will be spirits. Some
few weeks since we met a ship, from which he purchased several cases
of marmalade and some hams, for which Van Vogelaar paid in coin that
scared them, when they put the age of the money and the appearance of
this ship together; for they threw the mate overboard, and instantly
made off."
"I suppose Van Vogelaar could not be drowned?" said I.
"No," said she; "he, like the rest, have no other business in life than
to live. They had put the hams and marmalade into the boat, and when
they threw him in the sea, he swam very quietly to his companions."
"What was the ship?" I asked.
"A Spaniard," she replied. "After they had put the ship before the wind
I saw a number of them on the poop on their knees crossing themselves."
"I cannot understand," said I, "why this ship should be termed
a Phantom. What could be more real than these timbers and the
requirements of the people who navigate her?"
"Besides," exclaimed Imogene, "if she is a Phantom, how could
Vanderdecken write those letters in her which he is supposed to desire
to send home? If you have a real letter, such as a person can put into
his pocket and deliver, you must have real materials to produce it,
ink, pens, paper, wafers, and something hard to sit upon, or kneel
upon, or write upon."
"Certainly!" said I. "Of a Phantom the whole must be phantasmal.
Suppose a ghost dressed, its attire must be as unsubstantial as the
essence it covers."
"The truth about this ship is not known," she continued, "and it never
can be known, because her influence is dreaded. Vessels on finding out
her character fly from her, and those who sell to her unsuspectingly
pass away without giving her further thought."
"Or," said I, gloomily, "perhaps are never more heard of."
In this way would we talk, and you may conceive we were at no loss
for topics. On several occasions she showed me some of the dresses
Vanderdecken had furnished her with; of which I chiefly remember a
chintz gown, spotted with roses, with sleeves swelling out like ruffs
at the elbows; a pink dress, with a girdle to bring the waist close
under the bosom; and a slate-coloured dress, with a red shawl for it,
to be worn like a sash, and a kerchief for the throat; and I also
recollect that she showed me some strange, very dainty caps, one to sit
on the back of the head, another of black velvet and a feather, which
she told me Vanderdecken had said was worn on the side of the head. She
put it on to explain its use, and a man's true darling she looked in it.
Once she came into the cabin dressed in the pink dress with the high
waist; and very sweet did she appear. But I said to her that of
all the apparel she had shown me nothing pleased me better than the
black velvet jacket in which I had first seen her, and thereafter she
constantly wore it.
In short, the clothes Vanderdecken had stocked her cabin with,
including much fine linen, lace, collars, long gloves, shoes of several
colours, and the like, were such as to suggest a costly theatrical
wardrobe by reason of the variety of the styles representing fashions
from the middle of the seventeenth century down to within twenty
years of the time in which happened what I am here relating. It has
been already explained how these things were gotten. You have only to
consider that this ship sailed from Batavia in 1653, with a large stock
of dresses, linen, jewellery, plate and so forth in her hold, besides
her cargo, which stock Vanderdecken, in whom there must still work the
thrifty instincts of the Hollander, just as he is suffered to love his
pipe and bowl, and pine for both when the tobacco and spirits have run
out, had replenished by appropriating such wares, treasure and apparel
as he had a fancy for out of the ships he encountered abandoned at sea
or cast away upon the African coast. You have only to consider this, I
say, and bear in mind the great number of years he has been afloat, and
how many scores of richly-laden merchantmen have passed and repassed
that part of the ocean to which the Curse confines him, to find nothing
to marvel at in any catalogue of the contents of the Braave that could
be offered.
Besides having all these strange and often sumptuous articles of
attire to show me and talk about, Imogene had a great deal to tell me
concerning the weary years she had spent in the vessel, wondering how
her life was to end, how she was ever to get to England or to any other
civilized country if Vanderdecken refused to let her leave him, because
of his fatherly affection for her and his conviction that he was
homeward bound, and only temporarily delayed by the north-west gales
which beat him back. She said that after a time she began to fear that
she would lose her own language and be able to speak no tongue but the
ancient Dutch in which Vanderdecken and his men conversed, to preserve
herself from which calamity she regularly perused the collection of
English poetry that the captain most fortunately had among his books.
Her grief was that the book, instead of poems, was not the Holy
Scriptures, but she knew many prayers and hymns her mother had taught
her, and these she never omitted reciting morning and night.
You would have been touched had you heard her, marked the sadness that
rendered Madonna-like the character of her fragile, delicate beauty,
observed the girlish innocence of the expression that shone with
the moisture of unwept tears in the eyes she fixed on me, and then
considered how she had been bereaved, how frightful for tediousness
and dullness, and for the association of the mysterious beings into
whose society she had been cast, must have been the five years she had
spent on the Death Ship. I remember asking if she knew what religion
Vanderdecken was of; she answered she did not know for certain,
but that she had heard him speak of his wife and family as having
worshipped in the Oude Kerk.
"Indeed, Mr. Fenton," said she, "I don't believe he is or was of any
religion at all. Van Vogelaar is a Calvinist; he told me so one evening
when I was speaking with surprise of Antony Jans being a Catholic, as
it is almost impossible to reconcile the fatness of that man with the
austerities and mortifications of his creed."
"There can be no doubt," said I, "that Vanderdecken was--when human
like you and me, without religion. His shocking defiance, and the
condemnation that followed, proved that he acted out of sheer sin in
his soul, and not out of a passing passion. And yet you would have
supposed that a Dutchman, no matter how secretly impious, would have
behaved with more discretion than this skipper."
"I dare say he would have been more discreet," said Imogene, "had he
imagined what was to follow."
It was in this way, and in such talk, that we killed those six days of
storm; and now I come to other matters.