For, transfiguring Abel Keeling's form as a prophet's form is transfigured in the instant of his rapture, flooding his brain with the white eureka-light of perfect knowledge, that for which he and his dream had been at a standstill had come. He knew her, this ship of the future, as if God's Finger had bitten her lines into his brain. He knew her as those already sinking into the grave know things, miraculously, completely, accepting Life's impossibilities with a nodded "Of course." From the ardent mouths of her eight furnaces to the last drip from her lubricators, from her bed-plates to the breeches of her quick-firers, he knew her—read her gauges, thumbed her bearings, gave the ranges from her range-finders, and lived the life he lived who was in command of her. And he would not forget on the morrow, as he had forgotten on many morrows, for at last he had seen the water about his feet, and knew that there would be no morrow for him in this world. . . .
And even in that moment, with but a sand or two to run in his glass, indomitable, insatiable, dreaming dream on dream, he could not die until he knew more. He had two questions to ask, and a master-question; and but a moment remained. Sharply his voice rang out.
"Ho, there! . . . This ancient ship, the Mary of the Tower, cannot steam thirty and a quarter knots, but yet she can sail the waters. What more does your ship? Can she soar above them, as the fowls of the air soar?"
"Lord, he thinks we're an aeroplane.' . . . No, she can't. . . ."
"And can you dive, even as the fishes of the deep?"
"No. . . . Those are submarines ... we aren't a submarine. . . ."
But Abel Keeling waited for no more. He gave an exulting chuckle.
"Oho, oho—thirty knots, and but on the face of the waters—no more than that? Oho! . . . Now my ship, the ship I see as a mother sees full-grown the child she has but conceived—my ship I say—oho! —my ship . . . Below there—trip that gun!"
The cry came suddenly and alertly, as a muffled sound came from below and an ominous tremor shook the galleon.
"By Jove, her guns are breaking loose below—that's her finish-- "
"Trip that gun, and double-breech the others!" Abel Keeling's voice rang out, as if there had been any to obey him. He had braced himself within the belfry frame; and then in the middle of the next order his voice suddenly failed him. His ship-shape, that for the moment he had forgotten, rode once more before his eyes. This was the end, and his master-question, apprehension for the answer to which was now torturing his face and well-nigh bursting his heart, was still unasked.
"Ho—he that spoke with me—the master," he cried in a voice that ran high, "is he there?"
"Yes, yes.'" came the other voice across the water, sick with suspense. "Oh, be quick!"
There was a moment in which hoarse cries from many voices, a heavy thud and rumble on wood, and a crash of timbers and a gurgle and a splash were indescribably mingled; the gun under which Abel Keeling had lain had snapped her rotten breechings and plunged down the deck, carrying Bligh's unconscious form with it. The deck came up vertical, and for one instant longer Abel Keeling clung to the belfry.
"I cannot see your face," he screamed, "but meseems your voice is a voice I know. What is your name?"
In a torn sob the answer came across the water:
"Keeling-Abel Keeling. ... Oh, my God.'"
And Abel Keeling's cry of triumph, that mounted to a victorious "Huzza!" was lost in the downward plunge of the Mary of the Tower, that left the strait empty save for the sun's fiery blaze and the last smoke-like evaporation of the mists.
From Fearful Pleasures, by A. £. Coppard, reprinted by permission of Arkham House, Publishers.
Tke Homeless One
By A. E. COPPARD
NEAR THE NORTHEAST CORNER OF THE COUNTY OF HUNTINGDON LIES a small town which once nourished an asylum for the care, retention, or reclamation of the possessed, in other words a madhouse, and within its walls dwelt an old man who had no name. So long had he been immured there that no one remembered his coming; so aged was he that no kindred were left to care for him; so quiet and well-behaved that he might have been proclaimed as a model of madhouse welfare. No record existed of when, how or why he was so incarcerated, he himself did not know, he was there, he had always been there. Where he came from, how brought, to whom he belonged, were alike unknown. A slight tang of foreignness hung about him, hard to define, and it was his lunatic whim to claim that he was now a ghost, having once upon a time hung himself because of some wickedness he had done in the far-back years. Poor old ninny! That he had now no name was his special grievance; it had been stolen from him—so he averred—in the far-back ages long ago, but if pressed about the circumstances of this misappropriation he at times grew anguished and demented, at other times he would be cunning and defensive.
Among the inmates was one with whom he became as intimate as their poor minds allowed, a cobbler with one eye, who in happier days had been a wayside preacher. Old too, though not so old as the
unknown, he was even madder, and having appointed himself to the post of Clerk to the Great Assize he trounced his comrade with harsh comminations.
"What is your name, please, what is your name? Speak up, what is your name?"
The man without a name would reply, "Infamy," this having been commended to him by the one-eyed one who insisted on a designation of some sort.
"It must go in, it must go in the pleadings, you understand. Come now, state your crime, state your crime, let us hear it all."
The other would answer, "Wickedness."
"Ah, take care, my lord defendant, I am warning you!"
"Wickedness, Sir."
"Was you guilty or not guilty? Speak up and shame the devil." Then the poor wretch would sigh, "Only the ghost of it, Sir, only the ghost."
"Come, come, now!" the cobbler would threaten; "Your insides are naked; do you wear your heart in a nightgown or your tongue in a canister?"
"Only the ghost of it," would be the hazed reply.
That was the general gist and limit of the cross-examination, but the mad cobbler would rehearse him again and again until the culprit confessed to having hung himself, on a tree, in an orchard, and imploringly added: "Forgive me again, aye, but this once and no more. Amen."
In this matter, although the poor wretch could remember nothing else, his grim recollection had some truth in it; not the whole truth, but truth as far as it could range in his benighted soul. For once upon a time, in an age dropped far under the horizon of his years, he had thought to commit suicide.
What an agony of mind must have dogged one who thus incurs eternal damnation! To be so stricken that an infinity of torment, in whatever guise to follow, would seem to be a lesser evil! For if ease is not to be attained here, why should it be found there—or anywhere? Howbeit, this fellow had fastened rope to tree, drawn noose upon neck, had leapt to his doom, and at the crunch which severed soul from body his soul had launched into space with the ferocity of a rocket searching the sky, but searching without sound.
And it did not pause or falter or swerve, or break into soft drops of colour, nor did it leave a golden trail. Eyeless and bereft of knowledge, without body or any substance at all, an awareness of flight alone possessed his soul as, all ignorant of direction, it sought a goal.
But what goal? Where? And what way could be his, what true path in the boundless uncharted beyond our world of known brightness? No inkling of direction guided it, for thought and instinct were extinguished or left far behind in that body from which they had grown—and that body was now dead. This Something that had inspired a mortal form to laugh, toil, weep, love and betray, doing as all must do, this marrow of life, phantom spur and proctor of dues, was lost in the huge Shade. Like a wisp of gossamer in the vortex of a flying train it was swept past colossal tundras and pale aerial oceans without a bourne into a void of blackness where no light ever fell and time was sunk in the original sleep.
Do you imagine that even here upon earth time has any reality? It has not. A clock measures the den
oted minutes and hours, calendars record the days, weeks, months and years, but this lapse and these divisions are not time itself, they mark only the movement of the globe spinning alternate night and day as it voyages round the sun. Did we always face the sun and were never moved away from its beam we should have no more awareness of time than sleeping cats or fish at the bottom of a well. Time is but a name for a garment of the world, a habit never changed; unmoving and measureless it enfolds a past that had no beginning and a futurity that can never end. It is life, not time, that is on the move; clocks and calendars may notify what they will, but time is one for ever. It is we who fly, using twilight for our magnificent dreams, darkness and dawn to drowse in, and the glory of day for matters of no moment. Our flight is of life, not time, and he who goes far must fly fast; knowing his goal, and being worthy of it, he wins quickly home; but to be unworthy and know not the goal is to be lost indeed, as was this poor ghost, this thread of invisible gossamer, swept past sun, moon and stars into solitudes beyond the reach of our thought. Being ghost it had only a ghost's awareness, had lost all mortal clues. A dog knows its kennel, the wounded mouse creeps to its hole again, blood flows from the heart of man and returns to his heart, but for the mindless disembodied soul there is no such refuge. A prisoner, inescapably sterile, it was one with the blind black aimless pattern of eternity, through which ages and ages lapsed like unnoted afternoons.
And thus, for half a million days and many more, it scoured in celestial zones, far from any realms of bliss, far from the warm bosom of the senses, lapped in oblivion. Not in death, for the soul is not destroyed though it leave a body corrupting in the world. Not in life either, for that is experience, sensation, relish, love; maybe, too, it is fortitude and high endeavour, as well as treason and greed.
To be diverted from this everlasting orbit by the collapse of a nebular system was an event the soul could neither see nor be aware of. Yet it happened so. A fringe of stars glimmering an age away loomed and whirled across its path; unseeing, unknowing, the ghost was streaming towards a tornado of spheres and leaping moons, cracked stars colliding, vast orbs dissolving, pouring their livid dust in a chorale of flames that transcribed immortal glory. At its approach the elements swarmed and united hugely to repel that jot of alien fuel and wafted it violently away. Spurned and thrown back in a wayward arc it veered towards earth again.
Long, long the journey, yet in the end it swung once more into the range of the world, no longer the slave of its own speed but floating high in clouds, borne on draughts of polar air from mountains always white. Skimming the seas it drifted into a tangle of the forests of Finland, and thence scudding aerially along a wild shore was caught against the prong of a half-buried rusty anchor and there stayed.
The eternal gates were unbarred and the prisoner freed!
Dawn had come to the world, the wind blew; tides rolled, flowed out, came in. At noon it was cold and grey and the roaring waters dressed the sea with sombre foliage. At eve the tides lapsed and withdrew from ridges of pebbles across floors of wrinkled sand. No eye had seen, no eye could see, that ancient filament blown against a half-buried anchor—for who has ever seen the soul? But the miracle had happened, it was there upon the earth again after centuries of voyaging beyond unknown offings and was lodged upon a rusty anchor. Still unaware, and ignorant of its fortune, it was shaken free and bumbled like a pappus across continent and sea until, faring one day over the flats of Huntingdon it came to rest indeed, to life again, sensation and awareness again, for it clung to a human body, warm and receptive.
There in an orchard again, a body hung from a tree again, a noose about its neck again. Some other piteous soul had just launched in the selfsame way upon the selfsame journey, and at that very moment the long-wandering one drifted into the vacant breast, there to cling with mad unity, aware at once of human being, of noise, sight, touch, smell, danger, joy, but noise most of all of men shouting and thrusting as they severed the rope and tumbled the half-choked body to the grass. They slapped the face, they chafed the hands and limbs.
"Hey, man, hey!" several voices were crying "What a to-do! Are ye living? Whatever made ye 'tempt to hang yourself! Who are ye? Where from?"
The noise their tongues made was like the babble of evening birds. He was dazed, he could not understand them. It was not the world he had known. Strange beings surrounded him, uncouth admonishing faces peered against his, he was in terrible fear. When he opened his mouth and spoke they could not make head or tail of the mysterious sounds that issued from his lips; the gushes of meaningless intonation awed them and they drew themselves away to glance and nod wamingly together. Then one bolder than the others advanced, took him by the hand, shook him and sat him up:
"What's the matter with you? Why can't you speak proper?"
The poor alien, altogether without understanding, gazed one by one at the half-dozen countrymen jabbering around him.
"Mad, stark and staring!" they were exclaiming. "Just in time it were, but he's mad right enough. As yet he is however. It's true insanity."
Such was their opinion, and when the authorities came and took him away to enquire into the matter it was their verdict also—that he was quite mad and unaccountable. He could neither ask nor answer, he could not use or understand their slow plain speech, could utter no sounds save the queer incomprehensible syllables that rippled from his lips, so to the madhouse he must go. He was a stranger, nobody owned him, nothing was known of his antecedents, and his senseless gibble-gabble was testimony of a mind collapsed in ruins, while his mad act—as it was taken to be—gave proof of dangerous qualities; to be capable of killing one's self was surely to be capable of murder. To the madhouse he must go, there to stay until sense and civility returned to him.
Whether mad or not, he gave no trouble but settled down in the madhouse with the creatures of strange behaviour for good and all, submissive, humble and well-behaved. Long friendless years rolled by and gradually the circumstance of his coming was forgotten. In time he made some acquaintance with their language and could use it, but all remembrance was gone and he could tell nothing of himself, his history, friends, home, or his flight from the world. Despite his placability and meekness he was shunned by all except the one-eyed cobbler who, from having been a wayside preacher, was devout to mania, with large gaping holes in his intellect. Yet it was from this derelict that our lost soul gained some knowledge of the world and life and behaviour, in particular the doom and disaster that were to befall, the pit of wrath awaiting sinners, and that heavenly shield of the wise, the Saviour of mankind. With a slap of the hand upon his tattered bible the cobbler would growl:
"There be three in this book that shall not escape our vengeance. Not three only, believe you me! but three among many, and these three above all. Clearly you may perceive this. Listen! Firstly there is Eve, that tremendous trollop, source of our downfall, the original, the everlasting one! She has broken the world, but it can be mended and it will be mended. I will leam you about her."
And he taught him the story of the Fall.
"Secondly: that high and haughty Salome, whore of Herod and slayer of John Baptist. I will leam you about her."
And he told him the story of the dancer and the tetrarch and the wild prophet.
"Thirdly and lastily, I come to that cursed Judas, who betrayed the Son of Man with a villain's kiss. And all for thirty shillings! He hung himself to death on a tree, he was so cursed."
"What tree?" asked his friend.
"I heard it was an apple, but it might be walnut, or pear; it was in an orchard. All's one in the hands of the Lord." "Do you mean God?"
"I mean Jesus, the holy and innocent Saviour," the cobbler answered. "He betrayed him." "Who did?"
"That Judas fiend, Judas Iscariot, the curse of the world. But there is no escape for him." The cobbler lowered his voice and glanced apprehensively about. "Do you know, he never died! No, it is not easy for him. He goes wandering for ever, lost, lost, and rejected, but we shal
l smell him out, mark it you, we shall find him. Mark my words, O mark them!"
A ghost has no memory, only the ghost of a memory, yet the mind of the shunned wanderer began to swarm with fearful tremors.
"Was it me?" he quavered in anguish; "Was it me? Ah, dear Christ of Heaven, forgiveness! Holy and innocent Saviour, forgive me, aye, but this once—and no more. Amen."
Philip Van Doren Stern (ed) Page 55