Chapter XIX: I Witness the Captain's Entrancement

I had been on deck about a quarter of an hour when Vanderdecken, who all this time was standing motionless at the rail looking--as who shall tell with what fancies in him and what visions--at the windward sea, came down to the lee of the house as though he all along knew I was there, though I can swear he never once turned nor appeared to see me, and said--

"Is the lady in the cabin?"

"She went to her room, sir," I replied.

"Did she tell you her story?" he said, bringing his beard to its place with both hands, and viewing me with a severity that I began to think might be as much owing to the cast of his features as to his nature.

I replied that she had told me how he had met with her in an open boat, how her parents had perished, and how he had felt a father's pity and love for her and was taking her home.

"To adopt her," he exclaimed. "She shall be a child of mine. My wife will soon love her, and she will be a sister to my daughters. She has no relatives, and such beauty and sweetness of heart as hers must be cared for, since how does the world commonly serve such graces when they meet in a friendless woman?"

Surely, thought I, he that can talk thus cannot be endevilled! And yet does not the great Milton bestow the tenderness of a sister and a daughter on Sin when she reconciles Satan and Death? Something of human nature there must ever be even in those who most strictly merit Heaven's chastisement; and the lustre of the glory in our beginning, though it wane till its glow is no brighter than the dim, fiery crawlings upon this ship's side at night, is never utterly extinguished in the blackest spirit of us all.

I had no desire to talk of Miss Dudley lest I should put him into a passion by some remark touching the number of years she had now been on board, or by blundering in some other like manner. If she was to escape through me it behoved me to keep my thoughts mighty close and secret, for let what would be the state of being he had entered into in two centuries of existence, his eyes were like a burning-glass, as though he could focus by them the fires of suspicion and scorch a hole through your body to your soul to learn what was passing there. So putting on an easy manner and throwing a glance aloft and around, I said, "I fear, mynheer, you find weather of this kind strain your ship a good deal."

"Like all vessels she will work in such seas as this," he replied.

"How often is she careened?" I asked.

"How often should she need it, think you?" he replied, with sudden temper.

I said, warily, "I cannot imagine."

"I have commanded the Braave for five voyages," said he, softening a little, "and only once--that is during the second voyage--did she prove leaky. But this voyage she has been troublesome, and I have had to careen her twice."

Twice only, thought I; but you could see that his memory had been shaped so as to fit his doom, and that remembrance of all that befell him and his crew from the time when his sentence was first pronounced faded almost as swiftly as they happened, like clouds upon the blankness of the heavens, so that the very changes that would illustrate the passage of time to you or me, such as the alteration in the rigs and shapes of the ships he met, or the growth into womanhood of the girl he had rescued, would be as unmeaning to him and his fellows as to men without memory. Yet was it manifestly part of the Curse that he should have a keen and bright recollection of his house, his family, Amsterdam, the politics and wars of his age and the like. For if the faculty was wholly dead in him, he would be but as a corpse without that craving for home which perpetuates his doom.

"Is there any good spot for careening on the coast, east of the Cape?" said I, eager to gather all I could touching the practices and inner life of this wondrous ship without appearing inquisitive.

He answered, "Yes, there is one good place, 'tis in a bay; I cannot name it, but it is to be found by the peculiar shape of the mountains at its back. If ever you should be in these seas and need to careen, choose that place, for besides that you may refresh your crew with, and lay in a good store of--when in season--oranges, plums, wild apricot, lemons, plantains, and other fruits, with abundance of such fish as cod, hake, and mullet, and comforts and dainties such as plovers, partridges, guinea-fowl, and bustards; you will there find a salt spring, the water of which, on boiling, yields salt enough for any quantity of curing, and what should not be less useful to you as a mariner to know is, that about the shore you find scattered a kind of munjack which, when boiled with sand and tempered with oil, is as good as pitch for paying your seams with."

So, thought I, and thither, then, is it that you are led when your ship needs to be overhauled or when your provisions run low. With oakum worked from such ropes as he would find on abandoned ships, and the munjack he spoke about, he would have no trouble in keeping the frame of the vessel tight, more especially as the supernatural quality that was in his own life was in that of his ship likewise, so that the timber stood as did his skin, albeit the one would often need repairs just as the body of the other was sustained by meat and drink.

"I thank you for your information, captain," said I.

"If," he continued, "you let the plantain dry it will crush into an excellent flour. The cakes we had at breakfast were formed of plantain-flour."

"It is wonderful," said I, "how the mariner forces the sea and the land that skirts it to supply his needs."

"Ay," he exclaimed. "It is as you say. But no sailors surpass the Dutch in this particular direction."

It seemed as if he would go on speaking, but, looking, that I might attend to his words, I observed that the whole man, with amazing suddenness, appeared to undergo a change. He stood motionless, gazing at the leeward sea, his features fixed, not the faintest working in them, and nothing stirring but his beard. He was like one in a fit, save for the frightful vitality he got from the glare in his eyes, which were rooted as though they beheld a phantom. I drew away from him with a shudder, for his aspect now was the most terrible revelation of his monstrous and unearthly existence that had been made to me. The change was of the violence of a catalepsy, and this quick transition from the intelligent, if death-like, looks of a man, speaking of homely matters to a mute, petrified figure, to which the fire of the eyes imparted an inexpressible element of horror, so terrified me that I felt the sweat-drops in the palms of my hands. As to reasoning on this condition of his, why, I could make nothing of it. It looked as if the death that was in his flesh and bones, finding his spirit, or whatever it was that informed him, languid, as the senses became through grief or sickness, asserted its powers till it was driven into its hiding-place again by the re-quickening of the supernatural element that possessed him. It was also apparent that this unnatural gift of life did but give vitality to a corpse; and that even as a disinterred body that still wears the very tint of life, as though but just dead, falls into dust on the air of Heaven touching it, so do I strictly believe that Vanderdecken and his crew would instantly crumble into ashes, which the wind would disperse, were the power that keeps them intelligent and capable of moving suspended. By which I mean that they would not decay slowly, as the dead in Nature do, but that they would dissolve into dust as men who deceased a hundred years ago.

These thoughts are not gay. But what think you of the reality? Never could I so fully compass all the horror of the Curse as now, when I turned my gaze from the figure at my side, majestic in his marble motionlessness and alive in the eyes only, to the strained, grey, streaming ancient ship, tossing her forking bowsprit to the sullen gloom on high, bringing her aged, patched and dingy courses, groaning at their tacks, with a sulky thunder against the screaming gale, as though their hollows dimly reverberated yet the cannonading of the vanished fleets of Blake and Tromp; washed by seas which fled in snow-storms over her forward decks, heavily and dismally rolling broadside to the wind that was blowing her with diabolic stubbornness back along the liquid path that she had so lately sailed over! Think of such a life as this, never-ending! Great Mercy! Would not even a year of such a struggle prove to us distracting. Oh, 'tis a merciful provision indeed that these poor wretches should have had all sense of time killed in them, and that their punishment should lie in a perpetual cheating of hope too short-lived as a remembrance to break their hearts. Yet there were now two persons in this Death Ship to whom such solace as was permitted to the accurst crew would not be granted, and who, if they could not get away from the vessel, would have to lead a more terrible life than even that of the Dutch mariners, unless they destroyed themselves as Captain Skevington had. And for some time I could think of nothing but how I was to rescue Miss Dudley and make my own escape, for one thing I had already resolved: never to leave the girl alone in this ship.