Widdershins Part 13

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 pa.s.seth under ground--"_

II

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, hoa.r.s.e, 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 st.i.tched 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; to-morrow 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 lodemanage," 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 pa.s.sed 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 d.a.m.ned 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 h.e.l.l 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 br.i.m.m.i.n.g sea made, as it were, a chain with the carved bal.u.s.trade of the quarter-deck--one link a still gleaming edge, then a dark bal.u.s.ter, 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 eyeb.a.l.l.s.

"_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, pa.s.sed 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 pa.s.sionate 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 G.o.d, 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 bal.u.s.trade had now become continuous, and the bal.u.s.ters 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 G.o.d made man to go. With his leathery hand he smote upon the bell. He waited for the s.p.a.ce of a minute, and then cried:

"Ahoy!... Ship ahoy!... What ship's that?"

III

We are not conscious in a dream that we are playing a game the beginning and end of which are in ourselves. In this dream of Abel Keeling's a voice replied:

"_Hallo, it's found its tongue.... Ahoy there! What are you?_"