THE DUTCHMEN OBTAIN REFRESHMENTS.
Above an hour passed before the big boat, deeply laden, was towed by
the little one from the wreck. Of what a proportion of her freight was
composed I could not tell, much of it being in parcels and casks. They
had made sure of the tobacco by bringing away, at once, all that they
could find. I observed a number of hams stitched up in canvas, and some
sacks of potatoes, two bags of which were lost by the bottoms bursting
whilst they were being hoisted, on which Van Vogelaar broke into
several terrible oaths in Dutch, though 'twas like a dramatic rehearsal
of a ranting and bullying scene, for Vanderdecken took no notice and
the men went on hoisting and lowering away in the old phlegmatic
mechanic fashion as though they were deaf. There were likewise other
kinds of provisions of which I need not tease you with the particulars.
I believe that all the loading of the boat--in this her first trip,
I mean--consisted of articles of food; for some of the parcels which
puzzled me proved to contain cheeses and the others might therefore as
well represent stores of a like kind.
"Is it their custom to bring away the provisions first," I asked
Imogene.
"As a rule," she answered, "they take whatever comes to hand, that is,
if the articles be such as may be of use. What they chiefly secure as
soon as possible is tobacco and spirits; then provisions and clothing;
and then any treasure they may come across, and afterwards any portion
of the cargo they may fancy that is light to handle, such as silks,
pottery, and so forth."
"But they cannot take very much," said I, "or a few meetings of this
kind would sink their ship for them with overloading."
"There are many of us," she replied, "and the provisions they bring
away do not last very long. The pottery they use and it is soon broken.
Silk and such materials as they bring are light; and then, my dear,
they do not meet wrecks every day, nor of the wrecks they meet may you
count one in five that yields enough to sink this ship by a foot."
"I am heartily sorry," said I, "that they should find so much to eat
aboard yonder hulk. With so goodly a store of provisions, Vanderdecken
will not require to run into the land to shoot; and until this ship
brings up I see no chance for ourselves."
She sighed and looked sadly into the water, insomuch that she suggested
an emotion of hopelessness; but in an instant she flashed out of her
expression of melancholy weariness into a smile and gave me the deep
perfections of her violet eyes to look into, as if she knew their power
over me and shaped their shining influence for my comfort and courage.
When the boat was discharged of her freight, the men's dinner was
passed over the side for the fellows to eat in snatches, working the
while to save time. The wind remained weak and quiet, but it was
inevitable that the hamper we showed aloft should give us a drift
beyond the send of the swell; and to remedy this Vanderdecken clewed
up his topsails and took in all his canvas, leaving his ship to tumble
under bare poles, and by this means he rendered the drift of the vessel
down upon the wreck extremely sluggish and scarcely perceptible.
All day long the big boat was towed to and fro, making many journeys
and regularly putting off from the wreck very deep with freight.
Vanderdecken ate his dinner on deck. You would have found it hard
to reconcile any theory of common human passions such as cupidity,
rapacity and the like, with his bloodless face and grave-yard aspect;
and yet it was impossible to mistake the stirring of the true Dutch
instincts of the patient but resolved greed in the air he carried
whilst he waited for the return of the boat, in his frequent levelling
of the telescope at the wreck as one who doubted his people and kept
a sharp eye on them, in the eagerness his posture indicated as he
hung over the rail watching the stuff as it was handed up or swayed
by yard-arm tackles over the side, and the fierce peremptoriness of
the questions he put to Van Vogelaar as to what he had there, how
much more remained, and so on, though nothing that the mate answered,
satisfactory as must have been the account he gave, softened the
captain's habitual savageness or in any degree humanised him. Of the
majesty of his deportment I have spoken; likewise of the thrilling
richness of his voice, the piercing fire of his fine eyes and of his
mien and bearing, so haughtily stately in all respects as to make one
think of him, after a Pagan fashion, as of some god fallen from his
high estate; but for all that he was a Dutchman at heart, dead-alive
as he was; as true to his Holland extraction in 1796 as he had been an
hundred and fifty years earlier, when he was trading to Batavia and
nimbly getting money, and saving it, too, with as sure a hand as was
ever swung in Amsterdam.
The threads and lines and beds of vapour extending all over the sky
served to reverberate the glory of the sunset, as the crags and peaks
of mountains fling onwards the echoes of the thunder-clap. In the east
it was all jasper and sapphire, reds and greens, and a lovely clear
blue slowly burning to a carnelian in the zenith, where the effulgence
lay in a pool of deep red with a haze of light like fine rain floating
down upon it half white, half of silver; then followed a jacinthine
hue, a lustrous red most daintily delicate, with streaks of clear
green like the beryl, till the eye came to the west, where the sun,
vastly enlarged by refraction, hung in enormous bulk of golden fiery
magnificence amid half-curtained pavilions of living splendour, where
'twas like looking at some newly-wrought fairy world robed in the
shinings of the Heaven of Christ to see the lakes and lagoons of amber
purple and yellow, the seas of molten gold, the starry flamings in the
chrysolite brows of vapour, and the sky fading out north and south in
lights and tints as fair as the reflections in the wet pearly interior
of a sea-shell gaping on a beach towards the setting sun. The small
swell traversing the great red light that was upon the sea put lines of
flowing glory under the tapestries of that sunset, and the appearance
was that of an eager shouldering of the effulgence into the grey of the
south quarter, as though old Neptune sought to honourably distribute
the glory all around, and render the western sea-board ambient.
Then it was, while the lower limb of the luminary yet sipped from the
horizon the gold of his own showering, that the picture of the wreck,
and the Death Ship heaving pale and stripped of her canvas, became the
wonder that my memory must for ever find it. How steadfastly the dead
seaman at the wheel kept watch! The quieted sea now scarce stirred
the rudder, and the occasional light movements of the figure seemed
like starts in him, motions of surprise at the Dutchmen's antlike
pertinaciousness in their stripping of the hull.
And they? In that mani-coloured western blaze they partook more of
the character of corpses, in those faces of theirs, which stared our
way or glimmered for a breath or two over the bulwarks, than ever I
had found visible in them by moonlight or lamplight or the chilling
dimness of a stormy dawn. The sun vanished and the pale grey of evening
stole like a curtain drawn by spirit-hands out of the eastern sea and
over the waning glories of the skies, with a star or two glittering
in its skirts; and the wind from the north blew with a sudden weight
and a long moaning, making the sea whence it came ashen with gushings
of foam which ran into a colour of thin blood on passing the confines
of the western reflection. Vanderdecken, seizing his trumpet, sent
a loud command through it to the wreck; but the twilight was a mere
windy glimmering under the stars, which shone very brightly among the
high small clouds by the time the boats had shoved clear of the hull
and were heading for us, and the night had come down dark, spite of
the stars and the silver paring of moon, ere the last fragment of the
freight of rope, sail, and raffle from the wreck had been passed over
the side from the big boat.
It grew into a wild scene then: the light of the lantern-candles dimly
throwing out the bleached faces and dark figures of the seamen as
they hoisted the boats and stowed them one inside the other, the ship
rolling on the swell that had again risen very suddenly as though some
mighty hand were striving to press it down and so forcing the fluid
surface into larger volumes, the heads of the seas frothing spectrally
as they coursed arching and splashing out of the further darkness,
the eastering slip of moon sliding like a sheering scythe among the
networks of the shrouds and gear, and nothing to be heard but the angry
sobbing of waters beating themselves into hissing foam against the
ship's side, and the multitudinous crying, as of a distant but piercing
chorussing of many women and boys, of the freshening wind flying damp
through the rigging.
It had been a busy day, it was still a busy time; but never throughout
the hours, if I save the occasional cursing of the mate, the captain's
few questions, his command trumpetted to the wreck, my talk with
Imogene, had human voice been heard. It was not so noticeable a thing,
this silence of the ghostly crew, in the broad blaze of sunshine and
amid an exhibition of labour that was like sound to the eye, as now,
in the darkness, with the wind freshening, sail to be made and much
to be done--much of the kind that forces merchant seamen into singing
out and bawling as they drag and pull and jump aloft. The wreck was a
mere lump of blackness tumbling out to windward upon the dusky frothing
welter, and I thought of the dead sentinel at the helm. What in the
name of the saints was there in that figure to put into the sea the
enormous solitude I found in the vast surface glimmering to where it
melted in shadow against the low stars? What was there in that poor
corpse to fling a bleakness into the night wind, to draw an echo as
chilling as a madman's cry out of the gusty moaning aloft, to sadden
the very star-beams into dull and spectral twinklings? The canvas shook
as the silent sailors sheeted it home and voicelessly mastheaded the
yards. At three bells in the first watch the Death Ship had been wore
to bring her starboard tacks aboard, and under all the canvas she had
she was leaning before a small gale with her head to the southward and
westward, her sides and decks alive with the twistings of the mystic
fires which darkness kindled in her ancient timbers, and her round
weather-bow driving the rude black surge back into boiling whiteness.