Chapter IX: We Bring Up in a Bay

I could not at that time know what part of the South African coast was this we had made, but I have since learnt that it lies a few miles to the eastward of the meridian of twenty-two degrees, and about an hundred and sixty miles from Cape Agulhas. When it first came into sight, as I have said, it was but a faint, long-drawn shade in the light blue of the sky over the horizon, with such a fairy tincture of flanking eminence beyond that the whole was as delicately tender as the visionary shore of a dream.

But before the dinner-hour had come round we had stolen nearly two leagues closer to it, and the coast lay plain enough and very brave with colours, the green of several dyes, the mountain sky-lines of an exquisite clearness of cutting in the radiant atmosphere and against the hard azure brilliance of the heavens, and the tracts of white sand low down as lustrous as the foam of a dissolving surge.

Soon after the land had hove into view, Imogene joined me. She had kept her feelings under whilst near Vanderdecken. Now, by my side, she stood with twenty emotions working in her, her nostrils quivering, her lips pale, the colour coming and going in her cheeks, the bright light that a passing hope flashed into her eyes dying out to the tearful shadowing of some bitter fear.

I said to her, very softly, and keeping my face as expressionless as my inward agitation would permit--for Vanderdecken and his mates conferred together near us, sometimes stopping close, sometimes pacing--"If this pace holds our anchor should be down by dusk."

"What will they do?" she asked.

"I have been asking that question of myself," I replied. "Were they human--of this earth--I could foretell their movements. No sooner were they come to an anchor than they would turn to and get the guns and cargo over to one side, that by listing the ship they might bring the leak out of water and save themselves this starving job of pumping. But we have to base conjecture upon men who are neither dead nor alive, who are Dutchmen besides, I mean of a dull and apathetic habit, and they may wait for daylight and so obtain rest, of which they should get as much as they want with the reliefs they are able to send to the pump."

"What should best fit your project, Geoffrey?"

"Oh," said I, under my breath, "if we are to escape we shall need a deserted deck and a sleeping ship."

"If this should come about to-night will you make the venture?"

"I cannot tell. Put it thus: if they shift the cargo after coming to an anchor with the idea of raising the leak clear, the work may occupy them all night. So all night long the ship will be alive and busy, and there will be no chance for me."

"But the ship will also be alive if they continue to ply the pump, which must be done if she is not to sink."

"Yes," said I, "so I may have to wait till to-morrow night."

She cried, with a quick blanching of her face that cruelly proved her stock of strength but slender, "If they careen the ship to-night they will be able to repair the leak in the morning, and be ready to sail before the evening."

"I do not fear that."

"Yet it might happen, Geoffrey! They will put you on shore before sailing----" She stopped, bringing her hands together with a passionate clasp.

"I do not fear that," said I again. "Much will depend on where the leak is. If it be low down they may not be able to come at it without discharging cargo, which, seeing that they have but those two boats yonder to work with, and that they will have to make tents ashore and protect themselves against the natives--if any there here be--should keep them on the move for a long month. No, dearest, I do not fear that they will get away by to-morrow night--not if they were ten times as numerous and as nimble; nor is it probable that Vanderdecken would suffer me to be marooned till the ship is ready to start. My one anxiety is just now the weather. There is tranquility in that dark blue sky over us; the wind weakens as we approach the land, and there is promise of a calm night. May God help me to achieve my purpose before another twelve hours have rolled by."

She looked at me with eagerness and alarm. "To-night!" she cried. "If this ship lies here for days, as you imagine, how, when we are ashore, dare we hope to escape the strenuous search Vanderdecken is certain to make for us?" I smiled; she continued, with a feverish whisper: "Consider, dearest! If we are captured--he will have your life! God knows into what barbarities his rage may drive him!"

"Dearest," said I, gently, "let us first get out of the ship."

And here we broke off, for our whispering had lasted long enough. Soon after this we went below to dinner. At the start we none of us spoke, our behaviour and perhaps our appearance answering very exactly to the poet's description of a party in a parlour who sat--

"All silent and all damned!"

Outside, the sun shone gloriously, and the blue air had the purity of polished glass; but only a small portion of light found admission through the small windows in the cabin front, and we ate and gazed upon one another in a sullen atmosphere as gloomy as the expression on Vanderdecken's face. At this moment I see him plain, as on that day; his beard falling to his waist, his head slightly bowed, and his glance travelling in a gaze that would often stop and become fixed, his skin bleak and high and drawn with pallor. He was attired in a sort of blouse of dark-green cloth, confined about his waist by a yellow belt fastened by a small metal clasp, that would have given him a romantic and buccaneering look but for the austere majesty and fateful character of his appearance, which inevitably neutralised every suggestion that did not accord with the solemn, horrible mystery of his being.

We sat for some time, as I have said, as silent as the dead; but on reflecting that there was nothing, in reason, I could say likely to procure me a harder fate than that already designed by these men, I determined to ask a question or two, and said: "Has your carpenter ascertained in what part of the ship the leak is, mynheer?"

He turned his eyes round upon me slowly. He was indeed stately in all he did. I never beheld him glance quickly nor start, and the only time in which his dignity fell, torn in rags from him, was that night when he acted over the scene of the Curse in his sleep.

He answered, "Yes."

"Is it far down?" said Imogene.

"The ship will need heeling to four strakes," he replied.

I dropped my knife on to the deck for the excuse to pick it up that I might hide the delight in my face. A list of four strakes would prove but a very small matter to bring about, and my fears that the vessel would linger for days, perhaps for a month, on this coast vanished.

"I hope," said I, "it may not prove worse than a started butt-end."

"It is that, and no more," said he.

"How much more would you have, Herr Fenton?" exclaimed Van Vogelaar, in his ugliest manner. "Dost suppose our pump can deliver half the great South Sea with every stroke?"

"It should take us four days of easy working," said I, "to careen, repair, and start afresh snugly stowed."

"You are in a hurry to get home, sir, no doubt?" exclaimed Van Vogelaar.

"Sir," said I, "I am addressing the captain."

"Skipper!" cried the man; "Herr Fenton is in a hurry to get home! We should put him in the way of making a speedy passage."

"I expect to return in this ship," said I, speaking with my eyes on Vanderdecken. "I am well satisfied. Nothing stauncher floats. Consider, mynheer, how nobly she has acted in the gales we have encountered. It would please me to entreat you to use such poor skill as I have as a mariner in helping your men; but your courtesy is magnanimous--of the form that is to be met in highest perfection in the Hollander of lineage--and I will not risk my own civility by further requests."

He motioned with his hand, contenting himself with whatever answer the gesture signified. I perceived there was no further information to be obtained from him--from Van Vogelaar nothing but sneers and insults--and so held my peace. Yet I had learnt something.

When, after dining, I went on deck, the land looked as near again as it had when I went below. This was owing to the amazing transparency and purity of the atmosphere, insomuch that every twenty fathoms the ship measured was like adding a fresh lens to a perspective glass. Yet it was not until four o'clock that the coast lay so clear as to render every detail of it a visible thing, and then the sight was helped by the sun being on the larboard side and showering his glory aslant, which, mingling with the golden splendour rising out of his wake in the sea, put an extraordinary shining into the atmosphere, but without the lustrous haze that had been rising when he was right over the land and kindling the water under our bows. 'Twas a picture of a bay with a shelving beach thickly green with bushes and trees, in and out of which there winded lengths and lines of exceeding white sand that trembled to the sunshine with the shivering metallic sheen of frosted silver. The sea went blue as the sky to the shore and tumbled into foam, in some places leaping up in creamy dartings, in others making a small crystal smoke with its boiling, elsewhere lapping tenderly and expiring in ripples. The azure heights beyond, which had seemed to closely flank the coast when first beheld, drew inland with our approach, marking their remoteness by the retention of their lovely atmospheric delicacy of colour, and their height by the lengths of vapour that clung to their mighty slopes at various altitudes, like fragments of great silken veils or cloths of pale gold which had been rent whilst blowing along. The seaboard went in a rugged line east and west by the compass, sometimes coming very low down, sometimes soaring into great forelands, plentifully covered with wild growths, as you saw by the several dyes of green that coated it, and in one place--about a league from the bay--a pale blue smoke rising up denoted a bush-fire, and, as it was easy to suppose, the presence of natives.

The sky was catching a tinge of brassy hardness from the westering sun, and the complexion of it where the mountain heights were somehow made you think of measureless miles of hot and cloudy sand glowing yellowly up into that feverish reflection. The weak swell that lifted us rolled in wind-wrinkled folds into the bay, which yawned unsheltered to the south. I knew from experience that it needs no great wind on this coast to raise a monstrous sea, and it was with unspeakable eagerness and anxiety that I directed my eyes from the land to the sky overhead and on our quarters. But the promise of tranquility seemed to deepen with the drawing down of the sun. It was sheer sapphire in the south, melting eastwards into violet, and the sea that way was like an English lake, and to the left of the sun there floated a few purple clouds, which I watched some time with attention but could not tell that they moved, though a breeze was still about us, humming pleasantly aloft, keeping our old sails rounded, and sending the aged structure gliding at four knots an hour as quietly through it as a seagull paddling in the level water of an harbour.

But for the tedious clanging of the pump and the fountain-sounds of its discharge, the stillness on board would have been as deep as the hush upon the land. Still, lovely as was that afternoon, I very well remember wishing it had been a month earlier or later than this. We were in the stormy time of the year in these parts, though it was summer at home, and a violent change might quickly come. If it came, Vanderdecken would have to put to sea, leak or no leak, for it was not to be supposed that mere hemp could partake of the Curse; and the cables which I saw some of the crew getting up out of the hold and bending to the anchors at the bows were assuredly not going to hold this lump of a craft, high out of water and as thick as a tower aloft, for twenty solid minutes in a seaway and in the eye of a stout wind.

Therefore it was, when I was alone with Imogene, the coast being then about a league distant and the sun low, that I said to her: "Dearest, I have made up my mind to make a desperate effort to get away with you to-night."

"I am ready," she answered, instantly; "you need but tell me what to do."

"We must make use of this noble weather," I continued; "it is a fickle season, a change may come in half-a-dozen hours and force Vanderdecken to sea with his pump going. Imogene, it must not find us aboard."

"No."

"There will be no moon till eleven; we must be away before she rises, for she will glow brightly in that sky."

"Dearest, I am ready," she repeated. "But, Geoffrey, risk nothing on the mere chance that the weather will change. You might imperil your life by haste--and to-morrow night may be as reposeful as this that approaches, and with a later moon too!"

"Yes, but do not bid me risk nothing!" I exclaimed. "We must risk everything--our chances aboard and our chances out of the ship--or you are as good as chained to this vessel for life."

She smiled her acquiescence. I looked at her with passionate inquiry, but never did a braver and more resolved heart gaze at a lover from a maiden's eyes. I found the fearlessness of her devotion the more admirable for the dread she had expressed concerning the perils of the coast, and for her speaking thus to me with the land close to and all its wildness and melancholy visible to her, together with the distant smoke, towards which I had seen her glance again and again, and whose meaning she perfectly understood.

The ship swam slowly forwards. The coast dried the wind out of the atmosphere, but so much the better, for there was enough to carry us in, and then it could not die too soon to serve my turn. All was ready with the anchors forward, and the men hung about in pallid gangs waiting for orders to take sail off the ship. The vitality of the wondrous craft seemed to lie in the pump and its automatic plyers, so deep was the silence among the crew and so still their postures; but now and again the heavy courses would swing into the masts to the soft bowing of the fabric and raise a feeble thunder-note like to the sound of bowls rolling over hollow ground. The red light in the west lay upon the head of the shaggy line of coast, and the far-off mountains that had been blue went up in a dim purple to the sky; the crimson haze seemed to float over the rugged brink and roll down the slope to the shore, so that the scene was bathed in a most exquisite delicate light--all features touched with red; a bronze as of English autumn upon the green; the white sand gleaming rosily, and great spaces of reddish rubble-like ground glowing dark as blood. But the loneliness! I figured myself ashore there--the ship gone--Imogene gone! I stood in fancy upon the beach looking out on this bare sea; an aged, perhaps worthless firelock by my side, a few cartridges, a week's store of provisions! The moan of the surf was in my ear; every creaking and rustling of the wind in the near bushes startled me. To right and left rolled the coast for endless leagues, and the vast plain of sea, whose multitudinous crying found echoes in a thousand caverns, east and west, and in the reverberating heart of giant cliffs, whose walls were best measured in parallels and meridians, went down into the heavens where the uttermost ends of the earth were.

Yet, hideous as was the prospect of that shore when I thought of myself marooned upon it, its horrors shrunk into mere perils, such as courage, patience and resolution might overcome, when my imagination put my darling by my side, and with her hand in mine, I looked round me upon the vast scene of solitude. In her weakness I found my strength; in her devotion my armour. Great God! How precious to man is Thy gift of woman's love! But for Imogene where would have been my purpose and determination? I have but to recall the condition of my spirits when I looked at the shore and thought of myself as alone there to know.

The sun had been sunk an hour, the twilight had melted into darkness, and the sky was full of stars, when the Death Ship floated in a breathless manner to abreast of the eastern bluff or foreland of the bay, and with an air as faint as the sigh of a spirit expiring upon the black drapery of her higher canvas, she slided the blotting head of coast on to her quarter, and came to a dead stand within half-a-mile of the beach.

I heard Vanderdecken tell Arents to drop the lead over the side. This was done. The captain exclaimed: "What trend hath she?"

"None, sir. The line is up and down like an iron bar."

"Clew up the topsails and topgallant-sails. Up with the courses. See all ready to let go the anchors, Van Vogelaar."

These orders were re-echoed. In a moment the decks were alive with dusky shapes of moving men; one after another the sails dissolved against the stars like clouds, amid the hoarse rumbling of blocks, the whistling of running ropes, the rattle of descending yards.

"Are you all ready forward?" cried Vanderdecken, his rich voice going in notes of deep-throated music up into the gloom.

"All ready!" answered Van Vogelaar from the forecastle.

"Then let go the anchor!"

The heavy splash of a great weight of iron was followed by a hot seething sound of cable torn through the hawse-pipe; the water boiled to the launching blow from the bow and spread out in a surface of dim green fire.

I watched to see if the vessel would swing: but there was no air, neither was there tide or current to slue her, and she hung in a shadow like that of a thunder-cloud over her own anchor, her mastheads very softly beating time to the slow lift and fall of the light swell.

"Keep all fast with the larboard anchor!" exclaimed Vanderdecken. "Overhaul the cable to the fifty fathom scope. Aloft men and stow the canvas. Carpenter!"

A hoarse voice answered, "Sir?"

"Sound the well and let me know what water there is."

In a few minutes a lantern flickered like an _ignis fatuus_ and threw out the sombre shapes of men as its gleam passed over the decks which rippled in faint sheets of phosphoric light. He who bore it was the carpenter. When he came to the pump he handed it to a seaman whilst he dropped the sounding-rod down the well. The light was yellow, and the figures of the fellows who were pumping and the stooping form of the carpenter stood out of the gloom like an illuminated painting in a crypt. A foot or two of water gushing from the pump sparkled freely to where the darkness cut it off. Against the glittering lights in the sky you saw the ink-like outlines of men dangling upon the yards, rolling up the canvas. I watched the carpenter pore upon the rod to mark the height to which the wet rose; he then came on to the poop and spoke to Vanderdecken in a voice too low for me to catch what he said.

Imogene had left me ten minutes before, and I stood alone in the deeper shade made in the gloom upon the poop by the mizzen-rigging. The beating of my heart was painful with anxiety. From one moment to another I could not tell what the next order might be, and if ever I seemed to feel a breath of air upon my hot temples, I trembled with the fear that it was the forerunner of a breeze. As it stood, 'twas such a night to escape in that my deepest faith in God's mercy had never durst raise my hopes to the height of its beauty and stillness.

On the opposite side of the poop slowly walked Vanderdecken; in the starlight such of his skin as showed was as white as wax; he sometimes looked aloft at the men there, sometimes around at the ocean, sometimes coming to a stand to mark the gradual swinging of the ship that was now influenced by some early trickling of tide or by the motions of the small heaving in the sea, or by some ghostly whisperings of air overhead.

Ten minutes passed. Though the ship was full of business, not a sound broke from the men, and the hush you felt upon the dark line of shore would have been upon the vessel but for the clanking jerks of the pump-brake and the noise of flowing water.

A figure came up the poop-ladder and softly approached. It was Imogene. I lightly called and she came to my side in the shadow.

"What are they doing?" she asked.

"They are furling the sails; nothing more as yet," I answered.

"Will they endeavour to lift the leak out of water to-night?"

"Dearest, I am waiting to see what they mean to do."

"I will ask Vanderdecken," said she, "he always answers my questions."

I seized her hand. "No! He may suspect I sent you. Let us walk carelessly here and there. Lurking in the shadow might give an air of conspiracy to the prattle of infants to the suspicions of such a mind as his."

We moved towards the taffrail--the helm was lashed and abandoned--and then quietly to and fro, speaking under our breath.

"Geoffrey, we may find no water to drink when we get on shore; have you provided for that?" she said.

I started. I had thought of all things, as I fancied; yet I had overlooked the most essential of our certain needs.

"No, I have not provided for that," I exclaimed. "How now to manage?"

"I thought of it just now in my cabin. There is a pitcher there and the sight of it put it into my head to ask if you had included water in your stock of provisions. It holds about two gallons. It has a narrow neck and may be easily corked. But how can we convey it ashore. My weight and the bags and it would sink a bigger frame than the one that is to float me."

I said: "Is there fresh water in it?"

"It is nearly full. Prins keeps it replenished."

I said: "Are bottles to be had?"

She reflected and answered: "There are jars in which wine is kept, but I do not know where to find them."

'Twas my turn to think. I then cried: "There is a silver flagon in the box under the table; that which Prins took away last week and brought back filled with sherry for Vanderdecken. Can you get it?"

"Yes."

"We may not need it; if so we will leave it. Vanderdecken shall not say that we have plundered him though we must risk a graver charge even than that if there be occasion. Dearest, convey that flagon to your cabin. Fill it with fresh water in readiness. We shall find fresh water sweeter than the richest wine. Also contrive to have the pitcher filled to the brim. Prins will do that and suspect nothing. You will invent a reason, and when it is filled cork it as securely as possible and bind the head with stout rag that what you use as a cork may not fall out."

She said she would go and see about it at once.

"A moment," I whispered. "Is the window of your quarter-gallery open?"

"No; but I will open it."

"Do so; stand at it till you hear me cough. Then grasp a rope that I will let hang against the window and coil it away as you pull it in."

She understood me with the readiness of a sailor's child and a sailor's sweetheart, and left me. The mizzen-yard was lowered; the sail had been stowed some time. Rove through a small block at the end of the yard was a length of thin line termed signal halliards used for the showing of colours. I waited till Vanderdecken came to a stand at the head of the ladder that was, of course, at the forward end of the poop, and then with a mariner's swiftness overhauled the halliards through the block, catching the end as it fell that it might not strike the deck, and threw it over the quarter, coughing distinctly as I did so. I felt her pull it; I paid it out cautiously, narrowly watching Vanderdecken till the whole length was gone, then sauntered forward to where the shadow of the mizzen-rigging blackened the air.

I had not stood there a minute when Vanderdecken cried out, "Van Vogelaar!" The mate answered from the forecastle.

"Let a hand remain on the main-topsail yard to receive a tackle for hoisting out both boats."

I turned my back, putting both my hands to my face in an ecstatic burst of gratitude to the great God of Heaven for this signal mercy. 'Twas what I had been hoping and waiting for, with a heart sickened by doubt and fear. The order was given, and had I been suddenly transported with Imogene into a ship bound for England my soul could not have swelled up with keener exultation!