Among the spectators, however, resentment arose over the self-satisfied demeanour of the Leiden gentlemen which they had experienced as mockery and blasphemy. The most sombre among them, who knew the eyes of the saint to be directed at them, feared that now something terrible had been provoked and they averted their gaze; others, more practical folk, thought that intervention was necessary and they directed their hopes towards the lord and the bailiff, with impatient expectancy. These, however, had fallen prey to paralysing doubt. Dousa in particular, though this was in his nature, for his spirit was like a blind man who feels his way with soft fingers; but the bailiff, this otherwise so punctual and in his punctuality, in a way, so simple a man: he too was at his wit's end, beset by the confusing feeling that the King of Spain had let him down.
With dull helplessness, Dousa and Woutersz were obliged to watch as resentment in the people flared up into anger which, through lack of direction, caused confusion. There were those who demanded that the whale be towed back to sea with the help of nets and horses; others believed it would be better if the whale were to be killed because, in their eyes, death was the only effective solution. In all the zest of their anger they were apparently forgetting their fear of a judgement from God, for one of them even went so far as to declare the saint with the dogcart to be the guilty one. In so doing, he did bring down the indignation of others upon himself, it is true, but it had been said, nevertheless.
And so, each had his own opinion; there were those who had a number of opinions and some even had contradictory ones.
There was one person who remained quietly on the sidelines. He was the Admiral. He had been standing here from morning, free from the frightened curiosity that had held the others in its grip. And now, too, now they were brandishing their axes and crying for nets and horses, he stood apart for he knew that this was all irrelevant. At most he was surprised that it had come about like this. And in a curious way he had been proud as well: proud that God had sent the feared Leviathan for him, a humble fisherman. The Admiral waited for a sign and there had been a moment when he had thought that it was there. This had been when the beast of vengeance had laughed. Nobody who had seen this had understood it, except he. It had laughed at the saint on the dunetop and it would not have surprised the Admiral if, in a secret understanding between them, they had also winked at one another. The Admiral had not been afraid then either, for in his opinion he deserved to be punished, not only for the theft of statuary and heresy, or for what he had inflicted on his wife, but especially because he could no longer believe in the truth.
He was tired and he wanted to sit down, but he thought: they will be coming to fetch me soon, so he continued to stand. He was very tired and did not understand why the others made such a fuss. He could not care less: he regarded everything from a great distance. Perhaps he was already dead. He had thought this that morning, too, when he had crept out into the open from his cellar: that he had died and that his soul no longer had a body to carry him. He would indeed not be surprised if he had died already, and in that case he thought he was entitled to go and sit down. He sat there and it occurred to him that it might be more pleasant to lie down. This was why he let himself slip over backwards in the wet sand. It was cold, but not unpleasant. He felt himself grow stiff and without sensation, the sounds became dull and far away, and above him was the sky, dull and far away, too - he thought of the candles in the sea chapel, how beautifully they glowed, and then he slipped away.
It no longer concerned him that the others had decided to fetch nets and cart horses. Humpkin, who had been sent on ahead, wanted to greet his father, but because he was lying there asleep, he let him be instead.
Not long after Humpkin had left, the North-Westerly began to roar. This did not necessarily signify much, but the people had become jittery. Dousa and Woutersz, too, thought it advisable to break up the gathering. Only the ones from Leiden hesitated: they had written their calculations in the sand and they did not know how they were to take them along. There they stood, at the high water mark, bent over their figures, rehearsing: Six hundred, threescore and six; six hundred, threescore and six - that is what it sounded like. Dousa would have liked best of all to have left that little lot behind, but he felt obliged to call them. They mounted and went at walking pace past the throng going laboriously up the dune path.
Nobody thought of the Admiral lying asleep on the beach, left alone with the whale, while the saint stood on top of the dunes, looking on.
5
As Humpkin chased along with the wind in his back, and he thought he was going somewhere and did not realise that in fact he was leaving something, and when the procession, too, had moved on a good way, that is to say on the way back, the fishermen noticed that their leader was not among them. They would have preferred to keep this to themselves for, being in the protection of the others and especially of the grand gentlemen who seemed actually to protect them with the mighty flanks of their great horses, no one felt like sacrificing himself by going the other way through the cold and the wind. People continued on their way and it seemed the Admiral would be left to his fate. It was being said that he had already gone on ahead, though nobody had seen him go on ahead - nor did anyone believe it, but things were easier that way. In the end, more from impatience over the indecisiveness of them all than out of concern for their boss, two reported for duty, a one-eyed one and one who still had both. They turned round and went in search. The wind, which turned out to be a storm when you had it against you, and the rain beat their faces. The one clenched both his eyes shut, the other his single one. Thus they diminished their view; it was as if they were inside, inside themselves, peering out through a crack. They did not see much and this was a good thing, for that which surrounded them was too spacious for them anyway. Behind their backs, the procession withdrew and were they to realise it, they could feel they were being deserted. But they merely continued because they continued, and they were going to do something because they had to; they were cold because it was cold. They did not feel deserted because they did not think about such things.
Thus, these two went one way and the rest went the other - and all had the conviction that it was the right way, the way they were going.
The weather turned even grimmer. It seemed as if the storm was trying to sweep the countryside empty and that the rain gushed across the land to erase the last traces. Seen in this light, those going along the road - both the few going the one way as the many going the other - gave the impression in their doggedness of resisting with full commitment their disappearance.
One might also say, however, that, going along the road, they were already disappearing.
When the great exodus reached beyond the village by the sea, the survivors left their houses and their dead and joined the trek, pot luck. They did not think of it as disappearing: they thought they were on their way somewhere.
Those on foot got sorely in the way of the horsemen; time and again, the gentlemen had to rein in their horses - something they did with reluctance for, best of all, they would have preferred to have left those superfluous and useless dolts to their fate, but one thought that the other thought it was their duty as gentlemen to stay here and to watch over the rearguard of mankind. Dousa was surprised that these people - who could not read nor write and therefore had to be thought of as equal to the horse he was sitting on, less than that even, perhaps, taken that at least you could still ride a horse - could force their way into his life, just like that, as if his spirit was a hostelry where one might barge in, muddy feet and all, no questions asked. Like an ugly word in a poem, this was the way one ought to be able to scratch out all those ugly and superfluous people. What was he to do with that little lot? Woutersz, more businesslike (in the case where his lord's thinking might best be compared to a bird, probably a crow, his thinking might best be said, if it had to be a bird, to resemble a chicken scuttling about round the house, trained on the low-down-to-earth and not realising that it had been able
to fly at one time), this good bailiff thought that the obtrusive refugees might be housed in the convent of Saint Barbara. This was, it was true, a wreck without a roof, since the heretics had set fire to it, but for those fishermen, who according to him were all heretics, it was good enough. He thought that was just the thing for fishermen to do, to fall into heresy: on the boundless sea, which was no one's and therefore no rule of law applied there, the divine did not reveal itself in sacred forms and appearances so that it was almost understandable that those seamen began to get all kinds of ideas into their heads. Perhaps there were a few among the populace getting under their feet here, who had defiled the convent at the time and had decapitated the Saint of Noordwijk. In that case it would even be an act of justice to have them spend the night in the ruin of their own creation.
Dousa just let the bailiff talk. And when the latter fell silent, he assented with a slight, absentminded nod of the head. He had already forgotten his irritation as regards the homeless again. The sight of the whale had made his thoughts heavy so that these sank away repeatedly into the depths of his thinking where it was dark and oppressive like in a cellar or a deep pit, and where he could no longer hear the bailiff.
The gentlemen, each ensnared in their own way in the unrest of incomprehensible thoughts, did not notice that they passed the place where the three hunters had last been seen. They had no eye for it, not even the ones from Leiden. In their defence, it might be put forward that there were so many empty spots that it could hardly be called negligence either that they did not see this particular one where the hunters had been and were now no longer it was a trifle hard on the hunters to have to disappear without being missed by anyone.
Meanwhile, the procession made such slow progress that it began to look more as if people were standing still. That hunch backed fisherman's brat walking out in front, he was a long way ahead already. The footsloggers shuffled through the leafmould and the puddles of rainwater. It might have been a sorry sight, but the gentlemen were not in the mood for compassion; their desire was more one of beating the hordes with sticks. As though their horses were having to drag a cart without wheels through the mud, this was what they felt like - a heavy and in fact superfluous task which only occurred because that damned cart just happened to be there.
Precisely because they could not make progress, the gentlemen thought with regret of all those things they would have been able to do if they had not been obliged to be toiling their way through the mud here, and had it not rained; and it seemed as if it was because of the mud and the rain and the others that, irritatingly, they had ended up in an incomprehensible confusion. The Leiden friends believed themselves to have been thwarted in their scientific work; they missed their numbers which they had been forced to leave behind near the whale and which now would certainly be wiped out. And the falling rain fell like a curtain, depriving them of their vision. But Dousa, too, sinking away into his thoughts as if into a deep sleep, felt uprooted and harried. He wanted to be with his books, in the shelter of their spines standing like watchmen around him and giving him cover against the unthinkable and incomprehensible that was life outside. Even the bailiff, a down-toearth man after all, was in a kind of hurry to escape. He was no man for whales and now there was nothing here he might call upon, he longed for the return of the familiar and he believed to be able to find this again were he to return to the place whence he had left, that is to say, home, where the world was but a thought, an ordered thought that was complete and with which, therefore, he no longer had to bother himself.
Thus, the gentlemen all had a place - elsewhere, yonder, over there - where truth would be. And instead of making them despondent, the notion of over there, yonder and elsewhere gave them hope and an urge to go on as if they did not know that, rather than a case of going on, this was a one of escaping, of trying to escape the hopelessness.
And the homeless followed, full of trust, and they did not know that there was no roof either in the place where they would be housed.
Further on, or further back (for this was becoming ever more difficult to distinguish) the two fishermen reached the end, or the beginning, maybe, of the road. They descended the path to the sea and arrived on the beach. The storm made them bend over like porters and this was how it came about that amidst all the empty spaces they did not notice the empty space the whale had left behind. Nor did they see the empty space on the dunes where the saint with the dogcart had been standing. The place where the Admiral was lying was, in a sense, empty too, but this the fishermen only noticed when they felt how cold death had made their leader. It gave them a shock, but not too bad a one, for one of them had already seen many go before and the other, by way of a down-payment, had already surrendered his own eye. And yet, encountering so much motionlessness, they did not know what to do. The Admiral was not stiff yet and it appeared as if he could live if he did his best to do so. Only his eyes betrayed that nothing would come of this - a gaze that did not reflect, or it would have to be that which someone dead could see. This was why his eyes were closed with careful hand, not because the deceased might thus be comforted, but so as not to have to see the empty space into which he must stare forever.
Were one to look at one deceased for a long time, one might think him lonely and helpless, the way he lay there and did not understand what had happened to him. Just take his shoes: made from sturdy leather and fit for brisk walks, but no one could tell any longer where they had been and where they had wanted to go. All had been for nothing and it seemed that this was why he lay there, so mute and lame, as if an indissoluble despondence had come over him. Each morning he had put on his shoes to go somewhere, doing this on the assumption that it served some purpose, and he had not known that his life was like that of a traveller who stays the night in a hostelry along the way: when he breaks up camp, there is nothing that remains, except perhaps for a broken shoelace, a tom-off button or a stale crust of bread. That shoelace or that button might mean something: a present from a former mistress whose passion, like the shoe and the smock, had worn out; or an heirloom, dutifully worn until threadbare, even the crust of bread might have a meaning, but there was no one who might a girl would turn up to sweep them up, a blonde girl who thought of a cheerful future; she perhaps would polish the button to a shine and keep it, but the shoelace and the crust of bread would be thrown away. Thus the deceased would have to allow that what once had been his life would fall apart into mere objects such as laces, buttons and crusts of bread which, of no use to others, were thrown away as rubbish, and that only a shiny button would remain, for instance. One might say that the deceased, through that which is taken from him, becomes another, in a way, but one might just as easily say that he can no longer be designated by words such as 'another' and that he might best be compared to a torn-off button - the button of a traveller who spent the night along the way, the button which was picked up by a blonde girl, not to sew it back onto the smock it had burst from, but because it gleamed so beautifully and - for the time being - because it was such a pity to do away with it. And yet the deceased would have to allow that even that button, dulled through neglect, would be thrown away, one day.
Something the deceased had to allow, too, was that the fishermen hauled him upright, and tried rather awkwardly to lift him, treatment under which, had he still been alive, he would definitely have felt uncomfortable. Because they were not convinced that the deceased was not aware of anything, the fishermen apologised in between their groaning and sighing. That he could no longer walk was an established fact and because of this he came off the ground, upsadaisy, by his ankles and armpits. Lugging him was no great burden to them, going across the firm, wet sand, but when they got to the dunes they were obliged to lower the corpse and they dragged it, each to an arm, through the sand. His head lolled crookedly to one side and sand got into his hair and on to his mouth and eyelids. At the top of the dunes they had to catch their breath for a moment, for the corpse was rather heavy after all. Had they not
been so busy catching their breaths there, it might have amazed them that someone deceased is just as heavy as someone living. A soul, which is life, weighs nothing. This could have been one of Dousa's thoughts, but he was further ahead and did not know that death was dogging his footsteps; he might have thought that, as a dead body weighs just as much as a living one, one has carried the burden of death along with one all that time, without knowing, and that in dying one only loses something, something weighing nothing, a trinket, perhaps even less than that, a mere trifle, something that perhaps may never have been. An incomprehensible thought, the way everything became incomprehensible were one to think about it for long enough. But the fishermen did not think. They got up again, lifted up the corpse, and continued on their way.
After some time they noticed that the corpse began to stink of excreta. Because it was stinking so badly they could have thrown the corpse into the bushes; however, they did not dare do this for they knew that the dead must be buried near a church because the soul can only wrest itself free properly in hallowed soil. Also, they were gaining sight of the procession with the horsemen so that it did not seem that far any more, even though the procession still had a goodly way to go.
The horsemen only noticed that they were being impeded in their progress; they did not know that behind them the two fishermen, stinking death between them, were coming ever closer.
Only the Leiden friends had a tendency to look back, not because they had begun to smell death, but because they knew their numbers were in the sand, defenceless. They repeated the six hundred, threescore and six, giving voice to it in three-part harmony, so that their knowledge seemed to be stored more in the tongue than in memory, the tongue hopping agilely back and forth from teeth to roof of mouth, ringing out Leiden science in an almost oracular, and in any case artful fashion. Because of the continual repetition, the numbers threatened to lose their meaning, however, which was why the Leiden gents preferred to turn back most of all: to see whether the numbers in the sand really did exist. The bailiff, too, was one who had to see a thing in order to believe it. A limiting characteristic which preserved him from inflammatory thoughts and from thoughts in general, for that matter. Now that he had not seen the whale for a while, its terrifying aspect already began to fade in his memory and it would not be long before the wondrous fish would have been reduced in his head to the neatly arranged measurements of a greasy old herring. This, too, explained his dullness: even though he had actually seen a whale, he would still speak of herrings, not out of modesty, definitely not, his character was in fact as bloated as rolmops that have been in pickle for too long, but because his thinking was incapable of containing anything larger.
The Dedalus Book of Dutch Fantasy Page 41