by John Gardner
“ ‘That’s a very strange story to be telling a friend, Billy More,’ says I.
“ ‘So it is,’ he tells me with his cherub smile.
“ ‘Surely you never was fooled by such trifles.’
“Again, as innocent as a babe, he smiles. ‘Ah, but I was, mate, and am to this day. When you come right down to it, I’m a superstitious fool.’
“I laughed. He too laughed. I’d put away, for the time, that nagging fear, and my doubts about Augusta. The day was wide and beatific, with no possibility of evil or ominous mystery in it. Even the diamond glint of icebergs, even the merely philosophical possibility of death had no trace of evil in it: The world was music—white birds around us— a hymn of natural process shading heavenward. ‘But I saw the two paintings, ye see, Jonathan, and I talked with the mate from the Grampus’ crew, only man of the lot who hadn’t set off on another whaling voyage. More important, for the purpose, I sat with our Captain in his big white house, along with first mate Knight and the rest and three gentlemen the Captain brought down from Philadelphia. Scientists they were, or two of them were scientists. The other was a specialist in spiritualist trickery, a master swindler in his own right, some claimed. He’d taken an interest because the picture was of him. Dirge was a great admirer of the man, Dirge being, as ye know, a follower of things praeternatural. It was a picture supposed to have some curious power. It never occurred to me to doubt that the sinking of the Jerusalem had happened exactly as the witnesses said it had, in some way or other, nor did it occur to the others there neither—not after those men from the Society was through. All we ever wondered was how and why.’ He blew on his hands to warm them, then went back to work. He seemed to have talked all he cared to, for the time. But I could hardly leave the matter hanging like that. ‘So you decided, the lot of you, to come down and have a look.’
“He laughed. ‘Not exactly. The Captain and the three from the Society went off to another room and talked. Sometimes they called in one or another of us to question. The rest of us, we joked about the thing, with a shiver of ice now and then along our spines, but no one suggested we search the myst’ry out. We joked and drunk rum and had a bit of hot soup the Captain’s daughter cooked up, and we talked about it all in the Captain’s big house looking down on the Cove till it’s nearly dawn. It was the first time most of us had seen the place. It was lovely, I can tell you. A house to rule an empire from, so enormous you couldn’t get warm in it, yet so crammed with brass and silver and gold it would keep a dead Eskimo sweating for fright of thieves.
“ ‘So dawn came, ye see, and because of the drinking, or Lord knows what, we begun to sink deeper in the weirdness of it. The Captain and the men from the Society came back to the parlor and joined us. Sober as judges, those three men were. We still had the paintings there, the real and whatever ye’d call that other, and that other one seemed to be rotting by the second, like a butterfly sent out of heaven to earth’s heavy air.’
“ ‘Billy More, ye’re a scoundrel and a liar,’ says I.
“ ‘So it sounds,’ says he, and smiles. ‘Well, there was those that declared it was an omen—about half the crew, it was—and swore they’d never put to sea again. I was ready to join with ’em. It was a reasonable theory, the only half-reasonable theory we had. The Captain encouraged us to do as we believed, with a glance at ‘is friends from the Society; and those of the crew that was certain got up and went home.
“ ‘I meant to leave with ’em, but I didn’t—for no reason. The scientists was talking with them of us that stayed, telling all about the Society’s work and how there was people that had a kind of sixth sense, as a man might say, and the Captain’s daughter was one of them. They’d been giving her psychic tests for years. In the right situation—in a place where the kingdoms of day and night interpenetrate, as they put it—it was possible such a person might have perceptions far keener than the ordinary. I was only half listening. It gave me the shudders. I stood undecided by the Captain’s front window, looking down at the harbor, and I got the strange idea the view had changed all at once. It was something like a dream. You know how suggestible a man can be, early in the morning with the mist on the wharves … In a kind of daydream I seemed to remember our ship’s going down. The minute I realize what it is I’m dreaming, the dream evaporates like dew. “Billy More,” says I, “it’s time ye got home to yer Mary, ye drunk!” But I saw the Cove moving. The water was moving like … It’s hard to say. Suppose the whole world was a merry-go-round, slowed down, as slow as the tumble of a nightmare. The land is the center, and the sea—the water off Nantucket—is the platform and horses. The sea’s hard and firm, not like ice but like lead in a smelter’s mold, and there’s objects in it, maybe hulks of ships. The sea moves steady and firm and the land turns with it, like a hub, the sea lead-gray, dead-gray as the sky, the objects in it black, ships soulless and dead, long dead, being ground into nothingness, and above it, birds.…
“ ‘The Captain was saying in the room behind me, “As for myself, I won’t be satisfied till I’ve tracked this thing down.” “Ah, Captain,” says Mr. Knight, “ye’d better leave it rest.” But the Captain was adamant. He kept talking about it, talking about doom, despair, predestination, the inevitable fall of Assyria and Rome. The bunkum specialist kept watching him, pulling at his mustache and scowling as if any minute he’d see through to the trick in it, but the blasted insight wouldn’t come. “Think of it,” says the Captain. He was pacing, hands clasped. He seemed hardly aware of us. “Suppose it were possible that Time could loop back—suppose there were the barest shade of truth in the hocus-pocus of table-rappers, the mesmeric ‘demonstrations’ of men like Murdstone, the trickery of Swedenborg’s clairvoyants! Suppose, that is, that by somehow passing through a crack in Time a man could discover his destiny, find out the manner and place of his death. You understand what I hint. What if these two distinct paintings here are one and the same—a single painting seen from different points in Time?” “Come, come,” says one of the scientists—brown-bearded he was and as fat as a sea-cow—“we have no reason to hypothesize …”
“ ‘But the Captain’s still talking, and the bunkum man watching him, chewing on his knuckles and pulling at his mustache fit to bust. “Is the explanation more strange than any other available? But the implications, gentlemen! How could such a man help but believe that what will be must be—in other words, that all our freedom is a ludicrous illusion? The idea’s intolerable. It would drive a poor devil stark mad!” Now the bunkum specialist was pacing too, looking downright furious that he couldn’t see through it. He looked to be suspicious of everyone in the room. There was talk of a scientific expedition, but it grounded; the Society couldn’t afford it. “But a whaling voyage,” the Captain points out,”—a whaling voyage would pay for itself, and, as a kind of side interest, between good hunts …”
“ ‘Why not just quietly accept what God gives? Why worry such questions?” says Mr. Knight.
“ ‘But the Captain’s eyes was all aglint like when he lowers away (or like when he lowered away before his sickness). He nailed us with them. If he’d told me I couldn’t move my hand—that trick of the animal magnetists—I swear to heaven my hand would have turned to stone. “One of two things is true,” says he. “Either the future is predetermined, in which case, down we’ll go, as we’ve done already, or anyway as our Shadows have done—down we’ll go then and there no matter how we connive to shun those waters—or else we can escape it, even if we visit the place of our possible destruction a thousand times. It’s a place of mighty strange sights and sounds, the South Pole is; everything south of the Vanishing Isles is outside corpuscular experience. It’s made men prophets, visionaries.” Again the fat one tried to interrupt, but to no avail. “For myself,” says Dirge, “I mean to haunt those waters and know what there is to know.”
“ ‘Before you knew it, what little was left of the crew was with him, the same as in the longboat, vowing they’d get to the trut
h of the matter if it’s the last thing they do, which it would be, seemed to me. And there was I, mate, swearing my soul to perdition along with the best of them. Even the scientists got a little excited, even the specialist in bunkum, in spite of all he knew. Someone mentions a blind old seaman by the name of Jeremiah they’d like to see aboard. A man they say is downright uncanny. But Mr. Knight sits solemn in his polished chair and shakes his head and says, “Captain, ye’ll never get a crew in this world.” “I’ve got half a crew right here,” says Dirge. His daughter pokes her head out from the kitchen and throws a look at Mr. Knight that’d wither a crocodile. “You get yourself a full crew,” says Mr. Knight, “and I’ll be the foremost of the lot!” “And Billy More too,” shouts I, and so do some more of ‘em. “You swear to that on yer immortal souls?” We swear and swear. He makes a mighty fuss of it, and before we know it we’re shouting to the sky and drinking to damnation like maniacs—’ He stopped abruptly, grinning. ‘Aye, that was a night, lad. That was a night.’
“I believed him.
“He shook his head, looking out toward sea. ‘But oaths, they shrivel. Words, whatever their sweetness and juice, turn prunes at last, and eventually ashes. This world was never built for oaths. Time passes, ye find yerself far from the place that stirred yer nerves, and ye don’t know whether to laugh at the foolishness ye fell to before or play the madman and try to make foolishness sensible, come hell or high water, which they do.’ He monkeyed upwards, blowing out steam, swung out over on the yardarm to the next strapped stay.
“ ‘You regret yer oath, Billy?’
“ ‘I don’t think about it. Never let myself. Man of Faith, ye know. But look at Wilkins there. He wasn’t one of us, that night—he’d never sailed with Dirge before—but he knew our arrangement. All Nantucket knew. “Oaths are for maniacs and fools,” says Wilkins. The Captain never did get a crew together, took slaves instead—a desperate stratagem, to Wilkins’ way of thinking. Since the Captain cheated, the project’s off, so Wilkins claims. And Mr. Knight’s more ‘n half in agreement with him. He’d rather had a vote, cold sober, beginning with the question whether that painting was real or illusion. Either painting.…
“ ‘It’s broken the ship, all things considered.
“ ‘Or maybe this: We were ready to sail into the dragon’s mouth, slaves or no slaves, even with the Captain’s daughter on board—a thing we liked no better than the slaves. So in we sailed—and nothing happened. So we turned back to whaling, harpooning and slicing the physicality of things, for the moment putting off that stranger purpose; and we did pretty well—filled vials with oil and spermaceti—exactly as the Captain hoped we would, not guessing where his own best interest lay. Distract ‘em, that was the Captain’s thought. Keep the energy flowing! And so we returned a second time, and again nothing happened, and we turned back to whale. There were one or two who commenced to mutter about the Captain’s great purpose. It had been a long time ago now, ye know, since we’d set there like equals in the Captain’s big house. And, of course, we got less and less equal every day. The hold got richer. We all—some more, some less—took note of it. We could turn back early and collect small fortunes, especially considering that the slaves would get nothing, even less than the common seamen do when the owners and officers have lugged away their share. There got to be more talk about a hoax. Say it’s this: What we wanted was to do something BIG—make use of big energy for a big purpose, and do it fast—big speed—and do it, like Jesus Christ himself, at a mighty big cost. But the bigness drained out, that’s what happened, Johnny. The dream became merely the Captain’s dream. Our purpose changed, as purposes will, like any other thing in Nature. The big success had been too long coming, and the cost was beginning to seem absurd—our freedom to be each his own man, not cogs in a machine which is doing some job we’ve got no use for.’
“I could have asked him a number of things. I asked: ‘Ye’ve mentioned all this to the Captain?’
“He smiled, nodded sadly. ‘But the Captain’s got all the books.’
“ ‘The books?’
“ ‘Books, charts, theories—it’s all one thing. If we argue, the Captain makes fools of us. The swabs begin thinking: Then no more listening to reason, lads! Blind assertion is all. If it’s illogical, hurrah!’
“ ‘Ye’ve been listening too much to the grumblers,’ I said.
“He smiled. ‘I’ve been talking to them too, ye know.’
“I said, ‘Captain Dirge knows that?’
“ ‘Everybody knows.’ His smile brought suddenly back to mind his telling me to remember where Nowhere was. I saw that he was there.
“But his story had given me worse than that to worry about. I said, ‘How much did you see of the Captain’s daughter, that night?’
“ ‘Oh, she was there with us most of the time—working in the kitchen. Or it may be she went up to bed for a while. I remember she brought out soup.’
“ ‘That’s all you saw of her—when she brought out soup and when she looked out to make that face at Mr. Knight?’
“ ‘I suppose we saw her two, three times.’
“That was, of course, what I’d been afraid he’d say.
“Mr. Knight said later, gazing straight ahead in the forecastle dimness: ‘I can tell you only this, Mr. Upchurch. That phantom painting should never’ve been believed. Whatever man found it should have burnt it up at once. There are things we’re not meant to think about. The world was created sufficient for our needs. Understand things merely physical— that’s what’s required of us. The questions asked by that hellish Society—’
“ ‘Seems to me,’ I said, ‘that both are mere questions of Natural Mechanics.’
“His jaw worked, the line at the side of his mouth cutting deeper. ‘That’s a risk,’ he said. ‘The assumption that the world’s mechanical— since otherwise it can’t be studied …’ He nodded, stern. ‘That’s a risk. Aye.’
“The ship was grumbling. Billy More stood shaking his head at the sea. ‘Three things will sink us.’ The men sat silent, listening to him.
“The slaves were singing. Strange, darker voices responded from the depths.
“Later that night (that is, what would’ve been night farther north), after I’d gone through her lessons with her, I talked with Augusta on the poopdeck. Her hand laid gently on mine, she said, ‘Jonathan, you couldn’t believe the truth if I told you. I beg you not to ask again. I implore you.’ But I was silent, cool as an iceberg, waiting. The icy breeze had strange scents in it, the smell of fields, though the ship was thousands of miles from living land. Augusta was pale, more chilly than the breeze accounted for. She meant to tell me, I knew by her trembling, though how much of the truth she meant to tell me was any man’s guess. The cold made her more beautiful than ever, her coal-black hair blowing free around her white, white face, the world all around her deathly still. I half expected to hear organ music.
She turned to study me, her eyes just perceptibly widened, her lips slightly parted. It was studied, professional. She drew another deep breath, closed her eyes, and tightened her grip on my hand. ‘Oh, Jonathan,’ she whispered. On the maindeck below us, old Jeremiah gazed blindly up at us; but it was not his listening, the sightless gaze on that bearded, homely face that had drawn that cry from her. Was there any honesty at all in my little entertainer? I wondered. Was the virginal side I thought I’d seen in her merely a measure of her thespian cunning? She drew my hands to the sides of her waist, put her hand on my hips and moved her mittened hands around to the back. So we stood for a moment. Then I took her in my arms, poised, desiring and suspicious, my whole soul teetering, as usual.
“At last, calmly, Augusta said, her voice oddly raised, ‘Jonathan, believe if you can that there is a ship—a ship filled with ghosts—called the Jerusalem.’
“I squinted, waiting.
“ ‘She’s been seen many times, in many places.’ She turned away from me to look at the sea. Then, voice far away, like that of a me
dium possessed by a child from the kingdom beyond: ‘She’s appeared, off and on, for many years. Always my father, and you and I, and all of us … There’s some tragedy connected with her. There’s a painting— I’m forbidden to show it to you … It’s all that remains from a ship that went down near the Vanishing Isles, the place where a hundred years ago … But the painting … the painting—’ She caught her breath, as if frightened of saying what she’d meant to say. She began to tremble and caught her lower lip with her upper teeth. I held her more closely, eyes averted, to calm her. ‘It was the portrait of a famous theatrical man. A man named Flint.’ She bowed her head. ‘Oh, Jonathan,’ she whispered. She was shaking violently.
“I said, ‘You hung this thing in your room, Augusta? You stared at that horrible fiend every day—and became at last so inured to his evil that you even forgot to hide the picture when I came in to talk, that first afternoon?’
“I felt her muscles tense against me, trembling like fencewire. But she said, ‘I never looked at it, Jonathan. I had no need to. It was burned like a retinal scar into everything I saw. We kept it on the wall in order to learn to live with it, because …’
“At the look of horror that leaped through her features and stiffened every muscle, I spun, still holding her, to look behind me. The Captain stood ten feet from us, a form materialized from nowhere. He merely stood, humpbacked and silent, for all the world like a deadman, staring at his shoes. Despite the violent pounding of my heart, I said, ‘Tell me the rest.’
“ ‘We have come to find him, Jonathan.’
“ ‘But he’s drowned long since! The painting, the ship …’
“Crazily, staring at the motionless old man, her eyes wide, full of what might have been terror and might have been barbarous, rackety glee, Augusta said, ‘We’ve come to find him, to meet him, if possible understand him, understand … everything!