Then we came to the Little Willelm and he at once began to complain that it was insufficiently armed and pointed out the maze of stitching on the fore-topsail where English musket-fire had peppered it to a sieve. Together with all his other qualities, he is a great coward and I felt myself blush as he ranted on in the hearing of one of the ship’s officers. Then, with my hand to his elbow, he went aboard, stepping down on the deck as if it were a single floating plank and not secure.
The Little Willelm, being but a smallish barquentine, could offer only a tiny cabin next to the surgeon’s; but at least it was clean which flattered Mynheer Tripp unwarrantably.
‘Go away, Vaarlem!’ he mumbled, and crawled on to the bunk—for the motion of the ship at its moorings was already unsettling his stomach. So I left him and went out on to the maindeck in the sunny air and watched the crew go about their business in the rigging and on the yards.
‘How come a fine-looking lad like you goes about with an old rag-bag like him?’
Mynheer Leyden—an officer of good family—was standing by me.
I answered: ‘Sir—he’s a great man, whatever you may think, and will be remembered long after you and me are forgot.’
After all, one has one’s pride!
Mynheer Leyden would have answered, but Captain Kuyper began shouting from the quarter-deck to cast off and Mynheer Leyden shrugged his smooth shoulders and went about his duties. These seemed to consist in putting his hands behind his back and pacing the larboard rail, nodding to the crowd of fishwives and early clerks who always throng the harbour in the mornings to watch the glorious ships heave and puff out their sails like proud white chests and lean their way into the dangerous sea.
Once out of the harbour, the foresail was set and I went below to inform Mynheer Tripp he was missing a very wonderful sight, for there was not much wind and the great spread of canvas seemed to be but breathing against invisible, creaking stays. But he was already up and about—and in a more cheerful mood. He’d had intelligence that the Little Willelm was to sail west by south-west to lure enemy vessels into pursuit, when they’d be blown out of the water by our own great ships which would be following on the next tide. His cheerfulness arose from the discovery that the Little Willelm was the swiftest vessel in the Channel and was not intended to fight.
‘A clean pair of heels, eh? Ha-ha!’ he kept saying . . . and grinning in a very unwholesome manner. It was the only time I’d ever known him take a real pleasure in cleanliness. Later on, his spirits rose high enough for him to behave in his usual way. He began soliciting guilders from the officers to portray them prominently in the battle-piece. Full of shame—for he was earning a good deal of contempt—I warned him he’d be prosecuted for false pretences.
‘Why?’ he muttered angrily—the wind catching the soft brim of his black hat and smacking his face with it.
‘Because they won’t be larger than thumb-nails, sir!’
‘You mind your own business, Vaarlem!’ he snarled, quite beside himself where guilders were concerned. ‘If those little tinsel nobodies tell their dough-faced relatives that such and such blob of paint is their darling—well? Why not? What’s wrong with a little family pride? Immortal, that’s what they’ll be! So keep your middle-class nose out of my affairs, Master Vaarlem . . . or I’ll paint you as an Englishman!’
He stalked away, holding his hat with one hand and his filthy shawls and oil-stained coat with the other. But soon after, he sidled back again and remarked ingratiatingly, ‘No need to tell your papa everything I say, Roger, dear lad . . . words spoke in haste . . . no need for misunderstandings; eh? Dear boy . . .’
He was so mean, he was frightened my father would withdraw me as his pupil—and with me would go guilders. I looked at him coldly, while he bit his lip and brooded uneasily on whether he’d cut off his nose to spite his face; not that either would have been the loser.
I was more offended than I cared to let him know, so I obliged by keeping my nose out of his affairs for the remainder of the day. Which wasn’t difficult, as he kept to the great cabin with the surgeon. Not that he was really ill—God forbid!—but he was cunningly picking the surgeon’s wits relative to every ache and pain that plagued him. While all the while, the simple surgeon was happily imagining himself in the forefront of the Town Hall’s battle-piece, a hero for ever. (Mynheer Tripp did indeed make a small sketch of him: a very wonderful piece of work—for somehow he caught a look of bewilderment and embarrassment in the surgeon’s eyes as if God had too often stared them out.)
I’d intended to leave him for much longer than I did; at one time in the day I’d very serious thoughts indeed of leaving him altogether and fighting for Holland. This was when we saw our first English sail and there was great activity on the lower gun-deck against the chance of an encounter. She was a handsome, warlike vessel, bosoming strongly along. ‘A seventy-four,’ remarked Mynheer Leyden briskly. ‘By tomorrow she’ll be driftwood!’ Then we outpaced her and the sea was as clean as a German silver tray.
It was a few minutes before half past eight o’clock in the evening. I’d been on deck together with several officers. The wind was gone. The air was still. A sharp-edged quarter moon seemed to have sliced the clouds into strips, so that they fell away slowly, leaving dark threads behind. Earlier, Mynheer Leyden had been urging me to speak with the captain relative to my becoming a midshipman, for I was of good family and too good for Mynheer Tripp. To be a painter was a lower-class ambition. (‘All right! He has his gift! But what’s that to you and me? God gave him sharp eyes—but He gave us good families! Vaarlem, my boy—I can’t make you out!’) Then, a few minutes before half past eight, he said quietly, ‘Vaarlem: you’d best go down and fetch him.’ Which I did.
‘Sir: you must come up on deck at once.’
Mynheer Tripp glanced at me irritably, began to mumble something, then thought better of it. He stood up and wrapped himself in the filthy shawls and coat he’d strewn about the cabin.
‘Hurry, sir!’
‘Why? The sea won’t run away . . . and if it does, I shan’t be sorry!’ He followed me on to the deck.
‘Look, Mynheer Tripp! The Englishman!’
For a proud moment, I thought he’d had enough brandy to make him behave like a Dutchman, for he stood quite still and silent. Then the brandy’s effect wore off and his own miserable spirit shone through. Every scrap of colour went from his face and he began to tremble with terror and rage!
‘Madmen!’ he shrieked—and I wished myself at the bottom of the sea and Mynheer Tripp with me. The Englishman was within half a kilometre, and still moving softly towards us, pulled by two longboats whose oars pricked little silver buds in the moonswept sea. She was as silent as the grave, and any moment now would turn, broadside on, and greet us with the roar of thirty-seven iron mouths. For she was the seventy-four.
Mynheer Tripp seized my arm and began dragging me towards the quarter-deck, shouting outrageously: ‘Move off! For God’s sake move off! We’ll all be killed! How dare you do such a thing! Look! Look! This boy . . . of a good family . . . very important! If he’s harmed I’ll be prosecuted by his father. And so will you! I demand to go back! For Vaarlem’s sake! Oh, my God! A battle!’
They must have heard him aboard the Englishman. I could only pray that no one aboard it knew Dutch! I felt myself go as red as a poppy. To be used by this villainous coward as a mean excuse—I all but fought with him!
‘You pig, Mynheer Tripp!’ I panted. ‘This time you’ve gone too far!’
‘Pig?’ he hissed, between roarings at the captain. ‘You shut your middle-class mouth, Master Vaarlem! These noodles have no right to expose me . . . us to such danger! I’ll sue—that’s what I’ll do! In the courts!’
Captain Kuyper—a man who’d faced death a hundred times and now faced it for maybe the last—stared at Mynheer Tripp as if from a great distance.
‘You are perfectly right, sir. This ship is no place for you. You will be put off in the boat an
d rowed to where you may observe the engagement in safety. Or go to Holland. Or go to Hell, sir! As for the boy—he may stay if he chooses. I would not be ashamed to die in his company.’
To my astonishment, before I could answer—and God knows what I’d have said—Mynheer Tripp burst out with: ‘How dare you, sir, put such ideas into a boy’s head! What d’you expect him to say? A boy of good family like him! Unfair, sir! Cruel! Dishonest! What can he know? I warn you, if you don’t put him off, I’ll not stir from your miserable ship! Both of us—or none! Oh, there’ll be trouble! In the courts!’
Then he turned his mean, inflamed face towards me and muttered urgently: ‘Keep quiet, Vaarlem! None of your business! Don’t you dare say a word! I forbid it!’
Captain Kuyper shrugged his shoulders and turned away. ‘Put them both in the boat, and let one man go with them to take the oars. Immediately! I want Mynheer Tripp off this ship at once. Or by God, I’ll throw him off!’
Quite sick with shame, I followed Mynheer Tripp, who’d scuttled to the boat and hopped into it, clutching his sketchbooks and horrible clothes about him—in a panic that the captain would do him a mischief.
The sailor who rowed us was a tall, silent fellow by the name of Krebs. For about twenty minutes he said nothing but rowed with a seemingly slow, but steady stroke. Mynheer Tripp, his head hunched into his shoulders, grasped my wrist and stared at the diminishing bulk of the Little Willelm which lay between us and the huge Englishman. Implacably, the Englishman came nearer and nearer and still did not turn. We could no more see the longboats . . . but the men in them must have had nerves of iron, for they were within musket range of the Little Willelm and could have been shot to pieces.
‘Faster! Faster!’ urged my master, as the bowsprit of the Englishman appeared to nod above the Willelm’s deck. There looked to be no more than fifty metres between them. Then she began to slew round . . . ponderously . . . malignantly . . .
‘Will you watch from here, sirs?’ Krebs had stopped rowing. There was nothing contemptuous in the way he spoke. He simply wanted to know.
‘Is it . . . is it safe?’
Krebs eyed the distance. ‘Most likely . . . yes, sir.’
The two ships now lay side by side—the Englishman’s aft projecting beyond the Willelm. Her after-castle, much gilded and gleaming under three lanterns, rose nearly as high as the Willelm’s mizzen yard. A very unequal encounter. Perhaps she thought so? And was waiting for a surrender?
Krebs shipped his oars and stuck his chin in his great hands. Calmly he stared at the dark shape of his own ship, outlined against the sombre, spiky brown of her enemy. Though the shrouds and yards must have been alive with marksmen, nothing stirred to betray them.
‘Thank God we ain’t aboard!’ he remarked at length. Mynheer Tripp nodded vigorously. He’d begun to make sketches by the light of a small lantern. Approvingly, Krebs glanced at them. Very workmanlike. I began to feel cold and lonely. Was I the only one who wished himself back aboard the Little Willelm?
The beginnings of a breeze. The great ghostly sails of the Englishman began to shift, but not quite to fill. The Willelm’s sails being smaller, bellied out more fatly. The bold little Dutchman and the skinny Englishman began to move. Masts, which had seemed all of one ship, began to divide—to part asunder . . .
There seemed to be a moment of extraordinary stillness—even breathlessness—when suddenly a huge yellow flower of fire grew out of the side of the Englishman. (Beautiful Dutch lady—take my murdering bouquet!)
And then enormous billows of reddish smoke roared and blossomed up, blundering through the rigging and fouling the sails and sky. The engagement was begun.
A faint sound of screaming and shouting reached us, but was instantly drowned in the roar of the Willelm’s broadside. Then the Englishman fired again—this time with grapeshot, which makes an amazing, shrieking sound as it flies.
‘The mainmast! D’you see? They’ve got the mainmast!’ muttered Krebs, his face white even in the reddish glare of the encounter. ‘Shrouds and halyards cut through—murder, for them on deck! Slices them in two and three parts! Murder, it is!’
The Willelm was still firing—but not full broadsides. Half her ports must have been shattered.
‘They’ve got to heave the dead out of the way!’ Krebs said very urgently—as if it was his immediate task. ‘Can’t get to the powder quick enough with all them dead tangling up the trunnions . . . got to heave ’em out . . . Cap’n’ll be down there now—he’ll be doing the right thing—’
Another flash and roar from the Englishman: not so vast as the first. Was she disabled, too?
‘Quarter-deck cannon,’ mumbled Krebs, suddenly scowling. ‘Now you’ll see—’ Again, she roared. ‘Upper deck cannon . . . fourteen killers there!’ A third blaze and roar. Krebs nodded. ‘Lower-deck. They know what they’re at. Give no chance . . . no chance at all . . .’
The Willelm seemed to have stopped firing. ‘Look! Poor devils up in the cross-trees. D’ye see? Firebrands! Nought else left! But they’ll never reach to the Englishman. Poor devils! Oh, God! She’s afire herself! Keep your heads down, sirs! She’ll be going up in a minute! A-ah!’
Even as he spoke, the fire must have reached the Willelm’s powder store. There was a glare and a thunderous crackling sound like the end of the world—as indeed for many it was. With a shriek of terror, Mynheer Tripp—who’d been extraordinarily absorbed throughout the encounter, oblivious to everything but his rapid, intent drawing—flung himself to the bottom of the boat: a quaking bundle of disgusting rags. Then the great light went out of the sky and the air was full of smoke and the sharp, bitter smell of spent powder and burnt out lives. Pieces of wood began to kiss the water about us. When at last the smoke drifted up to the moon, we saw the guilty hump of the Englishman sliding away, leaving nothing more behind than a tom-up patch of sea, rough with driftwood and darknesses.
‘Oh, God! Now what’s to become of us?’ wept Mynheer Tripp. I begged him to be quiet, for things were bad enough without his assistance. Krebs had been hit in the neck by a flying piece of iron and was bleeding like a pig. If he wasn’t bandaged, he’d die. Mynheer Tripp plucked at one of his shawls—not offering it, but indicating that, if pressed, he’d part with it. It was filthy enough to have killed Krebs outright: by poisoning. There was nothing for it but to use my shirt; which I did, watched by Mynheer Tripp who snarled when I tore it into strips:
‘I hope you know that was your best linen, Vaarlem!’
Which mean remark did nothing but gain me unnecessary thanks from Krebs who could scarcely speak: his wound having severed a tendon and opened a great vessel. He lay in the bottom of the boat while I took the oars, watched by that dirty jelly in the stem. All I could see of Mynheer Tripp were his miserably reproachful eyes.
‘You’ll die of cold,’ he mumbled furiously.
‘I can keep warm by rowing, sir!’ I said, hoping to shame him. I pulled towards the Little Willelm’s grave in the frail hope of survivors, but found none. Then, under Kreb’s whispered directions, I began to row eastward, into the path of our hoped-for followers on the coming tide. But, being no craftsman of oars, we did little more than drift in that dark and hostile sea: Mynheer Tripp, Krebs, and me. For two or even three hours . . . As Mynheer Tripp had predicted, it was violently cold. I began to shiver and sweat at the same time. My hands were growing very sore and swollen. When I paused to shift my grip, I found them to be bleeding; and Mynheer Tripp, without once stopping, moaned and cursed the sea and the murdering Englishman. Which served no purpose at all. But then he’s not the best of companions in such circumstances. He hates the sea and can’t abide the sight of blood. Also, there are a million other things capable of panicking him. The chief problem is to avoid being infected by this.
At about one o’clock the breeze began to blow more briskly and in a changed direction. Long bands of cloud began to shift and obscure the moon. The darkness grew thick and formidable; Mynheer Tripp’s eyes w
ere no longer visible—but I felt their continuing reproach. Krebs was quite silent and, every now and again, I thought he’d died and had to stop rowing to put my head to his chest and be greeted with: ‘Still here . . . don’t you worry . . . keep it up, boy—’ So back I’d go to my task, abysmally cold and frightened, but not wanting to give the odious Mynheer Tripp the opportunity for gloating.
Then I thought we were saved! Lanterns glinted high up in the night ahead. Our ships at last! I shouted and waved the dim remains of our lantern. Krebs struggled up on his elbow. He said, ‘It’s the Englishman again!’
‘Douse the light, Vaarlem!’ shrieked Mynheer Tripp. But it was too late. We’d been seen. The Englishman hailed us.
‘Ahoy, there!’ Which, in Dutch, means, ‘Stand fast or we’ll pepper you with musket-fire!’
Nearer and nearer she came, a glinting, ghostly monster. Mynheer Tripp began to gabble we’d be tortured and hanged. I never felt more ashamed of him in my life. He was quaking with terror. I sweated to think of how the English would sneer . . . a craven Dutchman. Maybe I could swear he was French: or German? The great ship was alongside. The murderous cannon still poked out of their ports like blunt black teeth against the dark sky. Two English sailors came down on ropes and hoisted Krebs between them. I was surprised by how like Dutchmen they looked. We were bidden to follow, when Mynheer Tripp further disgraced our nation by being frightened of falling off the rope.
‘For God’s sake, sir!’ I hissed at him. ‘Make a good showing.’
‘What d’you mean, “for God’s sake”, Vaarlem?’ he hissed back. ‘You nasty little prig!’
Mr Corbett's Ghost Page 6