Abel Keeling reached the pipkin and looked into it. It was nearly a third full of fresh water. Good. If Bligh, the mate, was dead, so much the more water for Abel Keeling, master of the Mary of the Tower. He dipped two fingers into the pipkin and put them into his mouth. This he did several times. He did not dare to raise the pipkin to his black and broken lips for dread of a remembered agony, he could not have told how many days ago, when a devil had whispered to him, and he had gulped down the contents of the pipkin in the morning, and for the rest of the day had gone waterless . . . Again he moistened his fingers and sucked them; then he lay sprawling against the mast, idly watching the drops of water as they fell.
It was odd how the drops formed. Slowly they collected at the edge of the tallowed collar, trembled in their fullness for an instant, and fell, another beginning the process instantly. It amused Abel Keeling to watch them. Why (he wondered) were all the drops the same size? What cause and compulsion did they obey that they never varied, and what frail tenuity held the little globules intact? It must be due to some Cause . . . He remembered that the aromatic gum of the wild frankincense with which they had parcelled the seams had hung on the buckets in great sluggish gouts, obedient to a different compulsion; oil was different again, and so were juices and balsams. Only quicksilver (perhaps the heavy and motionless sea put him in mind of quicksilver) seemed obedient to no law . . . Why was it so?
Bligh, of course, would have had his explanation: it was the Hand of God. That sufficed for Bligh, who had gone forward the evening before, and whom Abel Keeling now seemed vaguely and as at a distance to remember as the deep-voiced fanatic who had sung his hymns as, man by man, he had committed the bodies of the ship’s company to the deep. Bligh was that sort of man; accepted things without question; was content to take things as they were and be ready with the fenders when the wall of rock rose out of the opalescent mists. Bligh, too, like the waterdrops, had his Law, that was his and nobody else’s . . .
There floated down from some rotten rope up aloft a flake of scurf, that settled in the pipkin. Abel Keeling watched it dully as it settled towards the pipkin’s rim. When presently he again dipped his fingers into the vessel the water ran into a little vortex, drawing the flake with it. The water settled again; and again the minute flake determined towards the rim and adhered there, as if the rim had power to draw it . . .
It was exactly so that the galleon was gliding towards the wall of rock, the yellow and green weeds, and the monkeys and parrots. Put out into mid-water again (while there had been men to put her out) she had glided to the other wall. One force drew the chip in the pipkin and the ship over the tranced sea. It was the Hand of God, said Bligh . . .
Abel Keeling, his mind now noting minute things and now clouded with torpor, did not at first hear a voice that was quakingly lifted up over by the forecastle – a voice that drew nearer, to an accompaniment of swirling water.
O Thou, that Jonas in the fish
Three days didst keep from pain,
Which was a figure of Thy death
And rising up again –
It was Bligh, singing one of his hymns:
O Thou, that Noah keptst from flood
And Abram, day by day,
As he along through Egypt passed
Didst guide him in the way –
The voice ceased, leaving the pious period uncompleted. Bligh was alive, at any rate . . . Abel Keeling resumed his fitful musing.
Yes, that was the Law of Bligh’s life, to call things the Hand of God; but Abel Keeling’s Law was different; no better, no worse, only different. The Hand of God, that drew chips and galleons, must work by some method; and Abel Keeling’s eyes were dully on the pipkin again as if he sought the method there . . .
Then conscious thought left him for a space, and when he resumed it was without obvious connection.
Oars, of course, were the thing. With oars, men could laugh at calms. Oars, that only pinnaces and galliasses now used, had had their advantages. But oars (which was to say a method, for you could say if you liked that the Hand of God grasped the oar-loom, as the Breath of God filled the sail) – oars were antiquated, belonged to the past, and meant a throwing-over of all that was good and new and a return to fine lines, a battle-formation abreast to give effect to the shock of the ram, and a day or two at sea and then to port again for provisions. Oars . . . no. Abel Keeling was one of the new men, the men who swore by the line-ahead, the broadside fire of sakers and demi-cannon, and weeks and months without a landfall. Perhaps one day the wits of such men as he would devise a craft, not oar-driven (because oars could not penetrate into the remote seas of the world) – not sail-driven (because men who trusted to sails found themselves in an airless, three-mile strait, suspended motionless between cloud and water, ever gliding to a wall of rock) – but a ship . . . a ship . . .
To Noah and his sons with him
God spake, and thus said He:
A covenant set I up with you
And your posterity –
It was Bligh again, wandering somewhere in the waist. Abel Keeling’s mind was once more a blank. Then slowly, slowly, as the water drops collected on the collar of rope, his thought took shape again.
A galliasse? No, not a galliasse. The galliasse made shift to be two things, and was neither. This ship, that the hand of man should one day make for the Hand of God to manage, should be a ship that should take and conserve the force of the wind, take it and store it as she stored her victuals; at rest when she wished, going ahead when she wished; turning the forces both of calm and storm against themselves. For, of course, her force must be wind – stored wind – a bag of the winds, as the children’s tale had it – wind probably directed upon the water astern, driving it away and urging forward the ship, acting by reaction. She would have a wind-chamber, into which wind would be pumped with pumps . . . Bligh would call that equally the Hand of God, this driving-force of the ship of the future that Abel Keeling dimly foreshadowed as he lay between the mainmast and the belfry, turning his eyes now and then from ashy white timbers to the vivid green bronze-rust of the bell above him . . .
Bligh’s face, liver-coloured with the sun and ravaged from inwards by the faith that consumed him, appeared at the head of the quarter-deck steps. His voice beat uncontrolledly out.
And in the earth here is no place
Of refuge to be found,
Nor in the deep and water-course
That passeth under ground –
2
Bligh’s eyes were lidded, as if in contemplation of his inner ecstasy. His head was thrown back, and his brows worked up and down tormentedly. His wide mouth remained open as his hymn was suddenly interrupted on the long-drawn note. From somewhere in the shimmering mists the note was taken up, and there drummed and rang and reverberated through the strait a windy, hoarse, and dismal bellow, alarming and sustained. A tremor rang through Bligh. Moving like a sightless man, he stumbled forward from the head of the quarter-deck steps, and Abel Keeling was aware of his gaunt figure behind him, taller for the steepness of the deck. As that vast empty sound died away, Bligh laughed in his mania.
‘Lord, hath the grave’s wide mouth a tongue to praise Thee? Lo, again –’
Again the cavernous sound possessed the air, louder and nearer. Through it came another sound, a slow throb, throb – throb, throb – Again the sounds ceased.
‘Even Leviathan lifteth up his voice in praise!’ Bligh sobbed.
Abel Keeling did not raise his head. There had returned to him the memory of that day when, before the morning mists had lifted from the strait, he had emptied the pipkin of the water that was the allowance until night should fall again. During that agony of thirst he had seen shapes and heard sounds with other than his mortal eyes and ears, and even in the moments that had alternated with his lightness, when he had known these to
be hallucinations, they had come again. He had heard the bells on a Sunday in his own Kentish home, the calling of children at play, the unconcerned singing of men at their daily labour, and the laughter and gossip of the women as they had spread the linen on the hedge or distributed bread upon the platters. These voices had rung in his brain, interrupted now and then by the groans of Bligh and of two other men who had been alive then. Some of the voices he had heard had been silent on earth this many a long year, but Abel Keeling, thirst-tortured, had heard them, even as he was now hearing that vacant moaning with the intermittent throbbing that filled the strait with alarm . . .
‘Praise Him, praise Him, praise Him!’ Bligh was calling deliriously.
Then a bell seemed to sound in Abel Keeling’s ears, and, as if something in the mechanism of his brain had slipped, another picture rose in his fancy – the scene when the Mary of the Tower had put out, to a bravery of swinging bells and shrill fifes and valiant trumpets. She had not been a leper-white galleon then. The scroll-work on her prow had twinkled with gilding; her belfry and stern-galleries and elaborate lanterns had flashed in the sun with gold; and her fighting-tops and the war-pavesse about her waist had been gay with painted coats and scutcheons. To her sails had been stitched gaudy ramping lions of scarlet saye, and from her mainyard, now dipping in the water, had hung the broad two-tailed pennant with the Virgin and Child embroidered upon it . . .
Then suddenly a voice about him seemed to be saying, ‘And a half-seven – and a half-seven – ’ and in a twink the picture in Abel Keeling’s brain changed again. He was at home again, instructing his son, young Abel, in the casting of the lead from the skiff they had pulled out of the harbour.
‘And a half-seven!’ the boy seemed to be calling.
Abel Keeling’s blackened lips muttered: ‘Excellently well cast, Abel, excellently well cast!’
‘And a half-seven – and a half-seven – seven – seven –’
‘Ah,’ Abel Keeling murmured, ‘that last was not a clear cast – give me the line – thus it should go . . . ay, so . . . Soon you shall sail the seas with me in the Mary of the Tower. You are already perfect in the stars and the motions of the planets; tomorrow I will instruct you in the use of the backstaff . . . ’
For a minute or two he continued to mutter; then he dozed. When again he came to semi-consciousness it was once more to the sound of bells, at first faint, then louder, and finally becoming a noisy clamour immediately above his head. It was Bligh. Bligh, in a fresh attack of delirium, had seized the bell-lanyard and was ringing the bell insanely. The cord broke in his fingers, but he thrust at the bell with his hand, and again called aloud.
‘Upon an harp and an instrument of ten strings . . . let Heaven and Earth praise Thy Name! . . . ’
He continued to call aloud, and to beat on the bronze-rusted bell.
‘Ship ahoy! What ship’s that?’
One would have said that a veritable hail had come out of the mists; but Abel Keeling knew those hails that came out of the mists. They came from ships which were not there. ‘Ay, ay, keep a good look-out, and have a care to your lode-manage,’ he muttered again to his son . . .
But, as sometimes a sleeper sits up in his dream, or rises from his couch and walks, so all of a sudden Abel Keeling found himself on his hands and knees on the deck, looking back over his shoulder. In some deep-seated region of his consciousness he was dimly aware that the cant of the deck had become more perilous, but his brain received the intelligence and forgot it again. He was looking out into the bright and baffling mists. The buckler of the sun was of a more ardent silver; the sea below it was lost in brilliant evaporation; and between them, suspended in the haze, no more substantial than the vague darknesses that float before dazzled eyes, a pyramidal phantom-shape hung. Abel Keeling passed his hand over his eyes, but when he removed it the shape was still there, gliding slowly towards the Mary’s quarter. Its form changed as he watched it. The spirit-grey shape that had been a pyramid seemed to dissolve into four upright members, slightly graduated in tallness, that nearest the Mary’s stern the tallest and that to the left the lowest. It might have been the shadow of the gigantic set of reed-pipes on which that vacant mournful note had been sounded.
And as he looked, with fooled eyes, again his ears became fooled.
‘Ahoy there! What ship’s that? Are you a ship? . . . Here, give me that trumpet – ’ Then a metallic barking. ‘Ahoy there! What the devil are you? Didn’t you ring a bell? Ring it again, or blow a blast or something, and go dead slow!’
All this came, as it were, indistinctly, and through a sort of high singing in Abel Keeling’s own ears. Then he fancied a short bewildered laugh, followed by a colloquy from somewhere between sea and sky.
‘Here, Ward, just pinch me, will you? Tell me what you see there. I want to know if I’m awake.’
‘See where?’
‘There, on the starboard bow. (Stop that ventilating fan; I can’t hear myself think.) See anything? Don’t tell me it’s that damned Dutchman – don’t pitch me that old Vanderdecken tale – give me an easy one first, something about a sea-serpent . . . You did hear that bell, didn’t you?’
‘Shut up a minute – listen –’
Again Bligh’s voice was lifted up.
This is the cov’nant that I make:
From henceforth nevermore
Will I again the world destroy
With water, as before.
Bligh’s voice died away again in Abel Keeling’s ears.
‘Oh – my – fat – Aunt – Julia!’ the voice that seemed to come from between sea and sky sounded again. Then it spoke more loudly. ‘I say,’ it began with careful politeness, ‘if you are a ship, do you mind telling us where the masquerade is to be? Our wireless is out of order, and we hadn’t heard of it . . . Oh, you do see it, Ward, don’t you? . . . Please, please tell us what the hell you are!’
Again Abel Keeling had moved as a sleepwalker moves. He had raised himself up by the belfry timbers, and Bligh had sunk in a heap on the deck. Abel Keeling’s movement overturned the pipkin, which raced the little trickle of its contents down the deck and lodged where the still and brimming sea made, as it were, a chain with the carved balustrade of the quarter-deck – one link a still gleaming edge, then a dark baluster, and then another gleaming link. For one moment only Abel Keeling found himself noticing that that which had driven Bligh aft had been the rising of the water in the waist as the galleon settled by the head – the waist was now entirely submerged; then once more he was absorbed in his dream, its voices, and its shape in the mist, which had again taken the form of a pyramid before his eyeballs.
‘Of course,’ a voice seemed to be complaining anew, and still through that confused dinning in Abel Keeling’s ears, ‘we can’t turn a four-inch on it . . . And, of course, Ward, I don’t believe in ’em. D’you hear, Ward? I don’t believe in ’em, I say . . . Shall we call down to old A. B.? This might interest His Scientific Skippership . . . ’
‘Oh, lower a boat and pull out to it – into it – over it – through it –’
‘Look at our chaps crowded on the barbette yonder. They’ve seen it. Better not give an order you know won’t be obeyed . . . ’
Abel Keeling, cramped against the antique belfry, had begun to find his dream interesting. For, though he did not know her build, that mirage was the shape of a ship. No doubt it was projected from his brooding on ships of half an hour before; and that was odd . . . But perhaps, after all, it was not very odd. He knew that she did not really exist; only the appearance of her existed; but things had to exist like that before they really existed. Before the Mary of the Tower had existed she had been a shape in some man’s imagination; before that, some dreamer had dreamed the form of a ship with oars; and before that, far away in the dawn and infancy of the world, some seer had seen in a vision the raft before man had
ventured to push out over the water on his two planks. And since this shape that rode before Abel Keeling’s eyes was a shape in his, Abel Keeling’s dream, he, Abel Keeling, was the master of it. His own brooding brain had contrived her, and she was launched upon the illimitable ocean of his own mind . . .
And I will not unmindful be
Of this. My covenant, passed
Twixt Me and you and every flesh
Whiles that the world should last,
sang Bligh, rapt . . .
But as a dreamer, even in his dream, will scratch upon the wall by his couch some key or word to put him in mind of his vision on the morrow when it has left him, so Abel Keeling found himself seeking some sign to be a proof to those to whom no vision is vouchsafed. Even Bligh sought that – could not be silent in his bliss, but lay on the deck there, uttering great passionate Amens and praising his Maker, as he said, upon an harp and an instrument of ten strings. So with Abel Keeling. It would be the Amen of his life to have praised God, not upon a harp, but upon a ship that should carry her own power, that should store wind or its equivalent as she stored her victuals, that should be something wrested from the chaos of uninvention and ordered and disciplined and subordinated to Abel Keeling’s will . . . And there she was, that ship-shaped thing of spirit-grey, with the four pipes that resembled a phantom organ now broadside and of equal length. And the ghost-crew of that ship were speaking again . . .
The interrupted silver chain by the quarterdeck balustrade had now become continuous, and the balusters made a herring-bone over their own motionless reflections. The spilt water from the pipkin had dried, and the pipkin was not to be seen. Abel Keeling stood beside the mast, erect as God made man to go. With his leathery hand he smote upon the bell. He waited for the space of a minute, and then cried:
The Dead of Night Page 10