The Collected Fiction of William Hope Hodgson: The Dream Of X & Other Fantastic Visions (43 page)

A night or two later, however, we had a long talk, and he took me into his confidence in the following way. I had been down on the main-deck, slacking off the braces, a little after five bells. When I finally returned to the poop, I found the Old Man pacing fore and aft, to windard, bumming away as usual at his classical selections.

For my part, as it seemed to me that he wished to be alone, I walked thwart ship, to and fro across the poop break, arranging my journeys so as not to meet the Captain, as he came forrard. Suddenly, however, he left his regular beat and came across to me, where I had paused a moment, staring away to leeward.

“Laddie,” he said, speaking in a quieter voice than usual, “I want you to take the wheel from yon Turrill, and send him forrard to me. I want a word with him without the crowd knowing. Away with you now, smart, laddie. I’ve a yarn for you later, maybe.”

“Aye, aye, Sir,” I said and went away aft to relieve the A.B., telling him the Skipper wanted a word with him, which news the man received without comment, and walked forrard to the break.

For some time they stood and talked, a little foreside of the jigger-mast; then Captain Dang took the man below into his cabin, and for quite half an hour the low murmur of their voices came up to me, mingled with the odd, faint sounds of papers rustled, by which I surmised that the Captain was handling an unmounted track-chart, and tracing out something that had to do with their talk.

Now, what I have recorded is not exactly orthodox. It is not usual for the Master of a vessel to indicate to his officer that any particular A.B. shall be placed in any particular watch; it is still less usual for a ship-master to follow up such an action by inviting the A.B. down into his cabin, to some conference connected, presumably, with chart-work of any form or description. All this was, obviously, intruding itself upon me. I could neither fathom it, nor yet push it out of my thoughts. I found myself conjuring up a wild romance of mystery, for which I called myself a fool immediately. Yet, as it chanced, nothing that had flashed through my puzzling brain, was half so extraordinary as the actual strangeness towards which we were heading; as I think you will acknowledge, eventually.

Seven bells struck forrard, and I answered them with the bell on the wheel-box; for I had told the ’prentice who was time-keeping that he could go down for a smoke. The ring of the bell had hardly died away, before Captain Dang emerged from the companionway, followed by Turrill, who came immediately to relieve me at the wheel. As soon as I had given him the course, the Old Man told me to light up and come for a turn along the poop, as he wanted to have a talk.

“Laddie,” he said, after we had done the distance fore and aft a couple of times, “yon Turrill’s the devil of a lad.”

He stopped and fumbled for his matches, and I found myself nibbling mentally at the fact that he spoke with something of a Scotch tang. Yet there had been no suggestion of any kind of tang in the speech of the well-dressed man I had applied to for a billet only a few days before. However, I had almost ceased to wonder at any new side to his character that my Captain chose to turn up.

He lit his pipe methodically and walked slowly to leeward to dump the burnt-out match into the sea. There he stood for some minutes, as if he had entirely forgotten me and the thing he had meant to talk about. Abruptly, he turned and beckoned to me through the gloom to join him, which I did.

“Hark to it, laddie,” he said and bent now over the lee rail, staring down into the sea. “Hark to it.”

I bent also, in doubt as to what he meant; but all that I could hear was the strange, keening hiss of the foam to leeward, as the ship drove easily along with the light breeze upon our beam.

“Yon’s the sea an’ the ship talkin’, laddie,” he said at last, showing me again that half-poet side that he had uncovered in that former remark, days before, when I was looking up at the canvas.

I made no reply, being young; and indeed there was nothing I could say. Once Captain Dang spoke: “And the wind, laddie! And the wind, laddie! Hark to it talkin’!” he said.

I heard it then, though I had not noticed it before—the low musical booming of the wind emptying itself out of the lee of the cross-jack. And, listening, you know, I began dimly to appreciate. But I was, as I have said, something young as yet.

Captain Dang returned to wind’ard, and we resumed our traipse fore and aft.

“Yon Turrill was in a whalin’ packet, laddie,” he said abruptly. “She foundered, so he says, in a little bit of the Pacific Ocean that I happen to be uncommon well acquainted with. Ran on to a spike of rock and went down in two minutes, more or less. That’s the beginning of it, laddie; an’ there’s no such rock marked in any chart of those seas, as well I know; though, mind you, it’s an uncommon lonesome patch he’d got into. There’s a few hundred miles that way, laddie, North an’ South, East an’ West, that’s precious little known, even to the whale-ships; an’ they go mostly everywhere, an’ to the devil in the end, like the rest of us.

“That’s, as I was saying, laddie, only the beginnings. Yon Turrill got away in one of the boats with the Mate and three of the hands. They were, I should say, uncommon lucky; for it was all so sudden that there was only two other boats got afloat, and a rare throat-cuttin’ to get into ’em, with the result they was both capsized, and the contents went to D.J., which is short for Davy Jones.”

He stopped and chuckled at me through the darkness; and in the pause that followed, I found myself puzzling, almost half irritably why he did these things—why he talked like that; why—oh, a hundred things! It was the irritation and puzzlement of Youth that cannot put one of its limited supply of labels on some newly found object; and is therefore troubled.

“As I was sayin’, laddie, for the third time isn’t it? all this was only the first lap, as you might say. Presently, after a little spell of something like fourteen days in the boat—five of ’em without grub or drink—they drifted in sight of a great big lagoon; mind you that, laddie—a thunderin’ big one; no five-shilling-piece reef; but a good fifteen miles long, so the man says, an’ always has said, even in the papers, way back. You may remember reading something about it?”

“No, Sir,” I said. “I never read the papers.”

“Well you should, laddie,” he replied. “If I didn’t read ’em, I should never have come across this. It was that way I found out Turrill and signed him on. We’re out for something this trip, I’m hoping; an’ maybe we shall be a bit overdue—from the freighters’ point o’ view; dam ’em; the Lord help ’em!

“Well, as I was saying, they discovered this big lagoon, away down on the horizon; and that put some spunk into them; an’ they out oars and pulled for it until they came to one of the openings and put the boat in through, with a great deal of misdirected energy in the shape of Thanksgiving; so I gathered from Turrill.”

He paused again to chuckle; and I smiled to myself, to notice how the wording of the last part of his yarn had betrayed the man of culture, with its accompanying touch of cynicism, peeping out unwittingly through the rind of rough, pilot-clad sailorman.

“Now, laddie,” he continued, after an almost imperceptible little pause of silence following his laugh, and with something in his voice and words that stirred me to a sense of coming adventure and mystery: “there’s no such lagoon marked on any chart of that part of the great big Pacific Ocean. Moreover, and what is more, I’ve never run against it; and, as I’ve hinted already, I happen to know that patch pretty well; for I’ve done some hanky-panky down there that would prove interestin’ telling, laddie. Yet, mind you, it’s an almighty big patch, as I do admit; an’ a ship or two, or an island, for that matter, might be lost there for an odd century or so without much trouble.

“Now they found three islands in the lagoon, laddie, and an old-time wooden, ’Merican sailing-ship. Think of it! An’ these five blessed shipwrecked mariners, of course, away for the ship an’ hailed her; but never no answer.” He chuckled inaudibly. “So they up an’ hailed her again; but still no answer; then the Mate an’ Turrill shinned up the cable (chain it was, so the miracle wasn’t complete, laddie!) and got aboard. There was no one in that vessel, fore or aft; and Turrill says she had a queer, desolate sort of feel to her. Yet she wasn’t rotted, an’ her paint-work was good, as I made him remember. What do ye think o’ that, laddie? But there was no water in her—leastways, the two of ’em couldn’t find the water bar’l.” Again Captain Dang chuckled silently to himself as he discovered himself overdoing his language. At least that is what I supposed; though I don’t know whether he had discovered the infusion of Americanism that was now in evidence. He paused for quite a minute; so that I prompted him; for I was impatient to hear more:

“Yes, Sir,” I said.

“So they went down again into the boat, My Son,” said Captain Dang in his queer, whimsical fashion. “And they went ashore then on the middle island, which was the nearest, and in a biggish hurry, I fancy, having something of a thirst on ’em; though weakish, you know. Bound to have been—hey?”

I began to perceive that Captain Dang was quite prepared to find Turrill’s story all moonshine. His manner told me so much; yet he was plainly not entirely of this mind.

“They found some bananas ashore,” continued Captain Dang, knocking out his pipe. “That should tell you something about the climate, sonny. Also, there was plenty of water. They filled the boat’s breaker, took some big bunches of the fruit, and went back to the old ship. What did they do that for when they had a chance to have a run ashore!

“They slept aboard that night, the whole five of them in the big poop-cabin. And this is where the yarn comes a bit thicker than ever. Turrill says he woke up sometime in the night with a feeling that something was wrong. There was a good moon shining, and he lay still and took a careful look round the big cabin; but the men were snoring away in their bunks, and everything just quiet and ordinary. Yet, all the same, yon man says he felt there was something queer about. He’s daft lookin’ enough, anyway! He lay still as a mouse, just harking for all he was worth. Then he thought he heard a faint, wee sound on deck, and the next moment there came something up against the window that looked over his bunk. He swears it was the most lovely lookin’ face ever he’d seen, but it gave him the horrors, worse than if it had been a tiger lookin’ at him.

“An’ then, so it seems, the thing went away from the port, or window, as I should say, and the next instant it came back, laddie, an’ looked at him again. But now it was a huge, great face, like a monstrous great hag’s. An’ the thing just looked at him, so he has it, and looked at him until he woke up and found that it was morning, and the sun shining in through the window on his face, and he pretty sure then that it must have been a dream—only it seems he was to know different in a bit.

“They went ashore in the morning onto the middle island for some more fruit, and to see whether they couldn’t put their hands on something better to get their teeth into. An’ well I know the feelin’, laddie! One of the men stayed aboard an’ said he’d have another root round in the ship to see whether there weren’t nothin’ fit to eat somewheres.

“Turrill says they’d meant to split up when they got ashore, go different ways, and all meet again at the boat with anything they might have found. They did this, too, at least at first. But in awhile the three men all drifted together, an’ they kept together after that, except the Mate was away off somewhere by himself, laddie.”

He paused again here to fill his pipe, and I gave way to a silly temptation to say something:

“You’ve altered again, Sir,” I said, meaning that what I considered was his assumed ‘rough speech’ was not homogenous but hybrid. I grinned slyly to myself.

“What’s that, laddie?” he asked, in a simple seeming sort of way. But somehow there was something at the back of his tone that warned me I’d made a mistake to venture what I had said. So I made as if I had not heard him, which was the wisest thing I could have done; for he went on in a minute, as if neither of us had spoken.

“They’d gone maybe half round the island, laddie, keeping together like this for company’s sake, when they heard a most horrible scream away up in the woods to their left; for it seems that all three of the islands were middlin’ well wooded, some places right down to the water. Now when they heard this scream, they were all struck in a heap; you see, they’d been feelin’ lonesome like; for there was a queer, quiet way about the island that gave ’em all the hump, so yon Turrill says, laddie; an’ that’s why they’d all come together again so soon as the Mate had left ’em. And now, when they heard this scream away up among the trees, they were fit to run.

“And then the scream came again, laddie, and a nasty, hoarse sort of dying away note to it. ‘That’s the Mate, lads!’ shouts Turrill, and away up into the wood he went, with a whale-lance that he’d brought out of the boat. He run on a bit, an’ then stops to shout. But there was no answer, only all the wood seemed extra still like. And yon Turrill, so he says, lookin’ everyway at once over his shoulder, for what might come out at him.

“He sung out then to the two others to come along up after him, and they shouted back that they were coming; and at that he calls again to the Mate, an’ thought he heard something away among the trees to his left. He went that way, with his whale-lance handy, an’ lookin’ all about him. He saw something move behind a tree trunk, a bit off from him; but whether it was aught or a shadder, he couldn’t say, laddie; but away to it, holding the whale-lance to the ready, as it were. An’ then, when it got close, it being a bit dark there, he stops and shouts the Mate’s name again. An’, on that, something poked out from behind the tree, and yon Turrill swears it was that same wonderful lovely-lookin’ face he’d seen in the night, staring in at him through the cabin window.