While trying to get out of that gulf, Codgett was in so much of a hurry that the jaw snapped shut of its own accord and he remained a prisoner. He was gripped by a terrible fear; he thought he had been swallowed by a living whale and collapsed, almost unconscious, on the cetacean’s baleens.
Meanwhile, Farandoul took a roll-call and established his disappearance. Tournesol recalled that he had been beside him before the fog came down, but had not heard him since. Codgett was lost! Perhaps he had walked toward the rear of the shoal and fallen into the midst of the cachalots!
Farandoul told everyone to shout loudly.
“Ahoy! Ahoy! Cod…gett! Cod…gett!”
“Ahoy, you old porpoise!”
“Over here, you freshwater shark! Ahoy!”
Everyone cocked an anxious ear, but no sound came in reply. Inside his whale, however, Codgett could hear perfectly. He had come round, surprised not to be dead yet; having no understanding of the situation, he judged it prudent not to move, in order not to give the whale the idea of finishing its work. He made himself very small, and refrained from replying to the calls of the mariners.
In the end, Farandoul concluded that the solicitor had gone back to the cabin and thought of doing likewise—but as they had turned to all points of the compass in order to hail Codgett, they had lost the way, and when the time came to leave they could no longer determine the direction of the cabin in the fog. Which way should they go? Forwards, backwards, right or left? No one could tell. They set off at hazard, holding hands. After ten minutes, Farandoul, who was in the lead, put his foot in the water and realized that he had reached the shore of the floating island, one of the flanks of the shoal.
They moved backwards and took another direction at hazard. The sound of jaws and seething water indicated with no possibility of error that they had returned to their point of departure, to the place attacked by the cachalots.
They made an about-turn and walked straight ahead. Another quarter-hour of marching through the fog, and the sea again! They were lost again. If it had not been for Mandibul, who had extremely sensitive olfactory nerves, the marches and counter-marches might have gone on for a long time, but he suddenly scented a very distinct emanation of grilled herring. Taking charge of the troop, he marched straight towards the source of the emanation, and after ten minutes, bumped his head on the cabin door. The master cook was there, tending the fire.
“Come on!” cried Farandoul. “Light another lantern, and let’s get back out there!”
The castaways made a few observations, and claimed to be exhausted.
“It doesn’t matter! It’s necessary to keep moving anyway. In this terrible cold, inaction would be fatal. We’ll go in search of the unfortunate Codgett and our barrels of oil. When we come back, I promise the men a nice swig of rum and the women as many herrings as they want. Forward!”
The fog was still as thick and the lantern, at three paces, was a mere red stain. This time, however, they did not go astray; after a quarter of an hour’s march, they ran into the chloroformed whale again.
The four barrels full of whale-oil were there. It only remained to find the unfortunate Codgett.
The unfortunate Codgett was still in his whale, where he as awaiting developments, fainting and coming round by turns. More ahoys were shouted nearby without his daring to reply. People were already accusing the innocent cachalots of having eaten him between two mouthfuls of herring when Mandibul, on going around the whale, picked up a fur bonnet, which everyone recognized as having belonged to the solicitor.
Damn! Mandibul said to himself. If our whale weren’t chloroformed, I’d suspect it of having sequestered Codgett. Mechanically, he introduced the butt of his rifle into the monster’s mouth to lift it up slightly. “Uh oh!” he said, taking a step back. “What’s that?”
Farandoul handed him the lantern. Mandibul slid it cautiously into the open mouth. “A boot!” he cried. “Our unfortunate companion has been swallowed! The whale wasn’t entirely dead!”
Handing the lantern back to the seamen, Mandibul seized the boot and tugged violently. A muffled groan emerged from the gulf; the boot came out with a confused mass attached.
“Alive! He’s still alive!”
Everyone pressed forward, and the haggard solicitor Codgett, his hair bristling on one side and stuck down on the other, was set on his feet, with considerable difficulty. When he had been thoroughly rubbed, cleaned and shaken, they were forced to conclude that he had sustained no damage. A loud discussion followed. Codgett claimed that he had been well and truly swallowed, and left no delay in laying claim to a further indemnity.
In the end, Mandibul got annoyed.
“You claim to have been eaten by a living whale? Very well, I agree with you; by virtue of that fact you claim an indemnity of 1000 pounds from Madame Hatteras. Perfect! I agree with you again! But for your part, you must agree that I have extracted you from the bosom of that whale, and you’ll agree with me that in claiming a salvage fee of an equal sum of 1000 pounds, I’m not asking too much! You’re worth more than that!”
James Codgett made a face and did not say another word.
“Let’s see to our oil now,” Mandibul went on.
They had brought two or three saucepans and a few smaller receptacles. Farandoul had them filled with oil, fitted them with wicks improvised with spare clothes and disposed these lamps at intervals on the edge of the shoal.
“Now our shoal of herrings is illuminated, at least we won’t get lost again. Now, back to the cabin!”
Leaving this unusual illumination behind them, the entire troop went back to the cabin, rolling the barrels of oil. The promised grog awaited them; after that had been ingurgitated, Farandoul busied himself making an enormous signal-light, which was hoisted on to a little mast on top of the cabin.
Night came, and with it more intense cold. Mandibul, consulting the thermometer, found it to be minus 48 degrees!
“A little more fire!” ordered Farandoul.
Further armfuls of herrings were thrown on the fire. The flames sprang up, along with swirls of brown smoke. The castaways of the fair sex gave voice to further exclamations of protest.
“There’s no middle way,” Mandibul told them. “It’s freeze or be smoked!”
“Or get back to the gymnastics,” Farandoul put in.
“Let’s burn everything here that will burn!” cried one of the ladies. “There’s the piano, which is no use to us…”
“I beg your pardon, but the piano serves us as a buffet; it’s in its flanks that we’ve arranged what green stuff we were able to bring away from the Pole. Those salads, carefully, managed, will enable us to avoid scurvy!”
“Well, put the salads somewhere else—in an iron buoy, for instance—and burn the piano.”
“Wretched child!” cried Mandibul. “That piano whose combustion you’re demanding won’t furnish us with more than five minutes of fire; it’s a ridiculous piece of furniture from which we can’t extract anything…but in the present circumstances, it’s precious to us as a buffet. Then again, in the case of a further shipwreck, remember that its case, being perfectly watertight, would become a lifeboat for one person.”
The piano was saved once more; the ladies resigned themselves to being smoked in silence until dinner-time. The meal, less whimsical than the breakfast, was primarily characterized by its abundant solidity. Enormous whale-meat steaks formed its main course, and herrings were only invoked as hors-d’oeuvres and dessert.
“Minus 49!” cried Mandibul, on leaving the table. “Quickly! Don’t get numb, my lads—extreme gymnastics!” And, matching example to speech, he engaged in a skillful bout of boxing with the solicitor Codgett.
Everyone understood the absolute necessity of these violent exercises; it resulted in a general mêlée in which slaps and shoves were liberally distributed and joyfully received. The circulation of the blood was soon reestablished; the numbness disappeared. Then the pushes and punches were accepted less p
hilosophically; a few grimaces and little squeals accompanied their reception. A momentary respite was granted; numerous bruises were observed and, on the person of the solicitor Codgett, a black eye, which he claimed to owe to the solicitude of Mrs. Hatteras.
The gymnastics and the boxing having become tiresome for the moment, it was necessary to find something else.
“Dancing,” suggested one of the female castaways.
“Adopted!” replied Farandoul. “But we have no orchestra and you know very well that the piano is empty.”
The master cook leapt upon an iron buoy, and his assistants precipitated themselves on two saucepans. The orchestra was found. It immediately launched into a portentous piece with a magisterial beat, in which César Picolot—who had an ear for music—claimed to recognize one of the most remarkable of Beethoven’s symphonies.
“Isn’t that the Pastoral Symphony that you’re playing?” he asked the leader of the orchestra.
The master cook, nonplussed, looked at his pupils, who shook their heads in embarrassment. The poor devils were playing the Pastoral Symphony without knowing it!
“We won’t play reveries or ballads to the Moon,” César Picolot went on. “It’s not what the situation calls for. We need uplifting music—something catchy….”
“A polka!” roared Mandibul.
“A jig!” shouted Kirkson.
“Sainte-Anne-d’Auray!”118 howled Trabadec. “If only I had some bagpipes!”
The galvanized musicians struck up the opening bars of “I’ve got good tobacco in my snuffbox” on their saucepans.
The dancers stopped.
“That’s not it!” cried Mandibul.
“We know what to do!” the three German scientists suddenly exclaimed, emerging from the crowd. “Give us the instruments!” And, taking possession of the saucepans and the iron buoy, the scientists produced a vibrant melody. “This is Richard Wagner!” they cried.
Mandibul had paused; a vague memory was coming back to him. He seemed to have heard it before somewhere. Suddenly, he slapped his forehead. These fragments of the Richard Wagner’s Ring were very similar to certain pieces by the quadrumane maestro Coco, had once played in the Opera mixte in Melbourne. Thus were confirmed the rumors that had circulated, according to which Richard Wagner had cruelly imprisoned the unfortunate monkey maestro in a cave at Bayreuth in order to force him to compose the music for his operas.
Horror! But there was no time for sentiment; it was necessary to devote himself to movement. Mandibul issued a gracious invitation to Mrs. Hatteras, and the two of them launched into the first steps of an idiosyncratic dance. The seamen followed his example. The cabin soon became too small and the dancers, braving the rigors of the polar cold, spilled outside.
Just then the herring shoal was brightly illuminated by a splendid aurora borealis. No opera-house chandelier or ballroom candelabra could ever have rivaled that magnificent and entirely gratuitous lighting. Mandibul, who had once regularly frequented the salons of the president of the Republic of Haiti, declared that the splendors of most the brilliant diplomatic receptions were being absolutely eclipsed, in his mind, by the dazzle of that ball of the herring shoal.
After the waltzes came the polka, and the polkas were succeeded by jigs.
“An intoxicating night!” murmured Mrs. Hatteras. “A magical ball! Ah! The pure calm of this delightful evening is even soothing the memory of my misfortunes…”
She was still talking when she found herself suddenly sitting on the ground, with Mandibul lying in front of her. The music had stopped. Most of the dancers were lying on their backs with their legs in the air, trying to figure out why they had fallen over.
Farandoul was the first to get to his feet.
“An earthquake!” cried one of the German scientists, a very eminent geologist.
“No,” retorted Farandoul, “a herring-quake! Be careful—watch out for aftershocks!”
The ground shook; a sequence of violent movements agitated the shoal to port and starboard, fore and aft. The people who had stood up had a great deal of difficulty remaining upright. A few crevasses were opening in the shoal and a huge wave was breaking almost on top of the poor castaways.
“Into the cabin!” Farandoul ordered.
The ball was over. The unfortunate dancers, ankle-deep in water, had a great deal of difficulty maintaining their equilibrium. The shocks soon diminished in intensity, though, and then came to a complete stop. The castaways dried themselves and shivered in front of the fire.
“What does it mean?” asked Mrs. Hatteras.
“It’s definitely an earthquake,” the geologist insisted. “Our shoal must have felt the repercussion of some Plutonian cataclysm….”
“Go on, then!” exclaimed Mandibul. “Are you going to tell us there’s been a volcanic eruption next? A volcano on our shoal—that would be very convenient to warm us up! Unfortunately, it’s something more serious…”
“What? What is it?”
“Our shoal is getting angry. After having supported our weight without a murmur as we came aboard, then our comings and goings, then the tax imposed by our appetite, our herrings are finally getting angry, and our ball has tipped them over the edge. Our jigs and polkas on their backs have annoyed them, and they’re letting us know it! What’s need now is gentleness and tranquility, to persuade them to endure patiently the overly numerous irritations we have caused them, for if we persevere in our agitation, the shoal will enter into all-out rebellion and—who knows?—the greatest misfortunes…”
“Oh, a revolution!” said the sailors, waving their swords “The herrings are trying to scare us…”
“That’s not the point! What we have to worry about is the dislocation of the shoal—battalions of herrings dispersing to the right and the left while we go straight down into the icy water…”
The solicitor Codgett turned abruptly to Mrs. Hatteras. “Do you hear, Madam!” he cried. “There are the pleasures of the case of Hatteras versus Hatteras! And you quibble about just compensation!”
“Calm down, solicitor—we’re not there yet,” Mandibul went on. “The herrings seem to have quietened down; harmony will be restored between them and us! Treat them with politeness, respect and diplomacy and I’ll answer for everything!”
“Save for meal-times,” put in one of the mariners, in a mild voice.
“At meal-times, of course, the considerations are suspended and we shall stifle the plaints of our victims in the frying-pan—but, by way of compensation, we shall fight between meals in defense of the shoal against the voracious cachalots. And now, it’s 9 p.m.; let’s forget our sufferings in sleep!”
The most complete calm soon reigned in the cabin and on the shoal. Until morning, no tremor disturbed the castaways’ slumber. At 7 a.m., Mandibul, full of joy, sounded the reveille by banging a saucepan loudly on an iron buoy.
The master cook resumed his duties and served an agreeable breakfast of herring-milk coffee. Fortunately for the castaways, the cold had diminished considerably; the thermometer marked no more than 41 degrees Centigrade below zero. When Farandoul proposed a walk in the open air, no one even dreamed of protesting; they all picked up their weapons, sealed themselves as hermetically as possible in their furs and made ready to follow him.
Outside, dawn had not yet broken, but a superb moonlight illuminated the shoal and made the distant jagged masses of numerous icebergs glitter.
“Softly, softly!” repeated Mandibul.
“And death to the cachalots!” replied the castaways. “Let’s defend our shoal!”
The rear of the shoal of herrings could not by any means pass for a domain of tranquility. The cachalots, porpoises and hammerheads, more numerous than ever, were still engaged in attacking the poor herrings. The shoal had lost seven or eight meters to the predations of these cruel enemies during the night. The inroads had been frightful, almost reaching the bowls of oil set to light the shoal.
The sailors were equipped with plank
s, which they placed as close as possible to the extreme edge of the shoal, and reached out from these moving plants with hatchets or harpoons in hand to meet the cachalots. One corner, singled out for attack by hammerheads, became the combat position of the seamen under Tournesol’s command.
The battle began: violent assaults on the part of the cachalots, prodigious kill and agility on the part of the mariners. The affair soon became more hectic, and the poor herrings enjoyed a moment of respite. Two cachalots, killed by harpoon-thrusts, were solidly moored and served, so to speak, as a forward bastion. Standing on their backs, the mariners greeted the boldest or most reckless of the cachalots with the points of harpoons, while Farandoul and Mandibul, mounted on iron buoys on the flanks, launched themselves at intervals into the midst of the assailants.
At the places attacked by porpoises and hammerheads, the castaways were also performing prodigies of valor. Mrs. Hatteras, in particular, distinguished herself by her courage and skill; in the first hour of the battle, three porpoises, a little overstuffed with herring and hindered in their movements by corpulence, ended their careers beneath her valiant hand, and six hammerheads only avoided certain death by taking cowardly flight.
In three hours, the herring shoal lost no more than a further meter and a half from the 30-meter rear, which amounted to only 45 cubic meters, or 81,000 herrings—not counting the remaining side-edges, assailed by the small fry of sharks, tuna, cod and other less significant enemies.
Everything was, therefore, going well. Just as the mariners, taking advantage of a moment of respite in the attack, were congratulating one another on their fine defense of the shoal, however, a violent shock similar to those of the night suddenly knocked them over and threw the entire company into an indescribable confusion. That first shock was followed by a series of irregular movements and intermittent shocks, during which the shoal seemed to be threatened by imminent disintegration.
When the first moment of surprise had passed, the mariners got to their feet again and looked for the cause of these unexpected phenomena. Farandoul and Mandibul understood very quickly. At the other end of the shoal, to the right and the left, immense icebergs were extending their jagged summits out of the water—and the shoal, instead of avoiding them and swimming through the more tranquil channel ahead of them seemed, on the contrary, to be launching themselves directly at their sides.
The Adventures of Saturnin Farandoul Page 62