It was the strangest wedding-feast, they say, that ever was held on
Marken: with the black tempest beating outside, and all the lamps in
the big room lighted--although the day still was on the morning side
of noon. Young Jan de Jong--the same who is old Jan de Jong now, and
who now keeps the tavern--remembers it all well, and tells how his
mother was for bundling the whole company out of doors. Such doings
would bring bad luck upon the house, she said--and went up-stairs and
locked herself into her room and took to praying when her husband told
her that bad luck never came with good money, and that what Krelis was
willing to pay for Krelis should have.
But it was the wife who was right that time--as the husband knew a
very little later on. For that night Krelis's boat was one of those
swept away from their moorings and foundered, and Krelis's fine house
was undermined by the water and went out over the Zuyder Zee in
fragments--and so the wedding-feast never was paid for at all. And she
always said that but for her prayers their son would have been lost to
them too. Old Jan was very grave when he told me about this--and from
some of the others I learned that it was because of what happened to
him that night that he gave over the wild life that he had been leading
and became a steady man.
At first, what with the blackness of the storm and the ringing in
everybody's ears of old Jaap's curse, the company was a dismal one.
But the plentiful hot gin-and-water that Krelis ordered--and led in
drinking--soon brought cheerfulness back again. As for Geert, she
had no need of gin-and-water: her high spirits held from first to
last. Seated on Krelis's right--just as she had been seated only a
little while before on the day of Marretje's funeral--she rattled away
steadily with her gay talk; and every now and then, they say, turned to
Krelis with a look that brought fire into his eyes!
The walk after breakfast was out of the question. As the afternoon went
on the storm raged more and more tumultuously. There was nothing for it
but to have the room cleared of the chairs and table and go straight on
to the dancing; and that they did--excepting some of the weaker-headed
ones, whose legs were too badly tangled for such gay exercise and who
sat limply on the benches against the wall.
This time it was not by favour but by right that Geert led the dance
with Krelis--her black eyes shining and her face all of a rich red
glow. And as she took her place at the head of it she said to Jaantje
de Waard: "Who's got him now, this lover of mine you said I'd lost,
Jaantje? Didn't I tell you that it's one thing to lay the net, but
it's another to haul it in?" And away she went, caught close to
Krelis, with a laugh on those red lips of hers and a brighter sparkle
in her black eyes. Jaantje said--it was she who told me, an old woman
now--that somehow this speech of Geert's, and the sudden thought that
it brought of dead Marretje out there in the graveyard, made her
feel so queasy in her stomach that she left the dance and went home
bare-headed through the storm.
The dancing, with plenty of drink between whiles, went on until
evening; and after night-fall the company grew still merrier--partly
because of the punch, but more because the feast lost much of its
grewsomeness when they all knew that the darkness outside was the
ordinary darkness of black night and not the strange darkness of that
black day. But there was no break in the storm; and now and then,
when a fierce burst of wind fairly set the house to rocking on its
foundations, and sent the rain dashing in sheets against the windows,
there would be anxious talk among those of the dancers who came from
the Kerkehof or the Kesbeurt as to how they were to get home. From time
to time one of the men would open the door a little and take a look
outside--and would draw in again in a hurry and go straight to the
punch-bowl for comforting: for none of them had seen any storm like
that on Marken in all their lives.
And so, when at last the storm did lull a little--this was about eight
o'clock in the evening, close upon the moonrise--there was a general
disposition to take advantage of the break and get away. And Krelis did
not urge his guests to stay longer, for he was of the same mind with
them--being eager to carry off homeward his Geert with the flashing
eyes.
But when the men went out of doors together to have a look about them
they were brought up suddenly with a round turn. It is only a step from
Jan de Jong's tavern to the head of the path that dips downward and
leads across the marshes to the other villages. But when they had taken
that step no path was to be seen! Close at their feet, and stretching
away in front of them as far as their eyes could reach through the
night-gloom, was to be seen only tumultuous black water flecked here
and there with patches of foam. Everywhere over Marken, save the
graveyard mound and the knolls on which stood the several villages,
the ocean was in possession: right across the island were sweeping the
storm-lashed waves of the Zuyder Zee!