The Collected Fiction of William Hope Hodgson: The Dream Of X & Other Fantastic Visions (46 page)

“You three go aft to the steward, lads, an’ get him to fix you up. Tell him I said you was to have a tot each.”

I leant forward over the break and saw three men come aft through the dusk. And pretty woeful looking objects they seemed, so far as I could judge in the gathering darkness. Evidently Captain Dang had “done himself proud,” as a coster might have expressed it.

A few seconds later, I heard the Captain shout the cheeriest of good nights to the men in the fo’cas’le, the same being answered with the utmost heartiness and respect. Then his footsteps came lightly and trippingly aft, the while that he broke out joyously into his favorite: “The Lord is Mindful of His Own,” repeating and repeating the words with immense gusto. Singing thus, he reached the poop again and resumed his coat without a word of reference to what had transpired forrard. Yet, even in the gloom I noticed that his new kid gloves were all burst and split to pieces.

The Mate pinched me slyly:

“Ain’t he a corker, Mister!” he said in a low tone. And therewith I went below to turn in, agreeing profoundly.

From then onwards, Captain Dang put in his morning’s half hour at the punch-ball, which I found to be his invariable rule on all trips, once the ship was well away in the open; and each morning, when it was my watch on deck, I would follow-on at the ball, with the result that it helped me to keep splendidly fit.

From that time onward, we made fair wind of it, right down across the Line, where we picked up the Trades again finely, and ran bang away south for the Horn. Our luck in fair holding until we hammered into a “Southerly Buster” that went round to the West’ard and held us up off the Horn for six bitter weeks of snow and ice, until we looked more like a ghost ship of snow, heading into the enormous, grey, desolate seas round the Cape.

No one who has not faced continuous head gales off Cape Horn for a matter of several weeks on end can have any idea of what the sea presently becomes. In the gales themselves, the splendid wrathful wildness of the smoking mountains of water is a thing never to be forgotten, with the sails booming the damp wind out of their leeches, and everything dripping and glistening with the incessant flog of the countless tons of water that are hove aboard, hour after hour, through the long, bitter, wind-tanged watches. And then come the periods of calm between the constant succession of the head gales that are the trial of all vessels rounding the Horn the “wrong way.”

I think, in some ways, the hours of calm—that is freedom from wind but not from the sea—is the thing that always leaves the deeper impression upon me—the memory of a shifting world of eternal grey desolation of waters; the sky a perfect grey canopy of gloom, shedding yet a stern, cold light down upon the wandering mountains of grey brine, shifting, shifting eternally. The strange silence of the hours of no-wind that is yet no silence, but only apparently so, because then one may hear the incessant noise of the gear, slatting, the creak of the spars, the dulled, wet rustle of the heavy canvas; and outside of the ship, the enormous slop, slop of the windless sea, striking the steel side of the ship, and the occasional iron clang of some tumbling, clumsy, vast mound of water striking the steel side of the ship and slamming the iron water-doors in the bulwarks that supplement the scuppers in bad weather.

“Eh, laddie,” said Captain Dang to me during one of these strange times of windlessness, “could ye not think to near see the grey Babes o’ Death in the sma’ hollows that go sa canny in the tops o’ the seas, like as they was cradles o’ water.” I stared at him, for the idea was so unexpectedly quaint, and to me so unmeaning. Then I looked out at the slow moving seas and saw what he meant.

He was silent for a little, his glance going away over the miles, and mine likewise, noting many a thing that until then I had not “wakened” to see. Here and there an odd, strange mounding of foam would be thrown up, like a dome of white out of the greyness:

“The domes av th’ sea-palaces, laddie,” he said suddenly. “They’re all about here, laddie. . . . A strange place to be drowned . . . a strange place to be drowned!” he muttered to himself, the while that I just listened as a young man will, stumbling on the borders of thoughts and fancies that had never come to me before. There followed a little space of silence, and Captain Dang spoke again:

“I do like mushrooms, Mister,” he said suddenly. “Don’t you?”

I stared at him, bewildered a little, whereat he grinned enormously.

“Yes, Sir,” I said, “but I can’t say I’ve had much of that kind of thing at sea.”

“We’re having ’em for tea tonight, laddie,” he said, chuckling. “I’ve been experimenting with a bed of them down in the lazarette.”

And thus the unexpected conclusion of his strangely poetical and imaginative previous remarks!

As I have said, we were six bitter weeks of storm and desolate windless spells before we came round upon the Eastern side of the old Cape of Lonesomeness; and then, to reward us, we got a splendid fair breeze that hove us Northward at the rate of X knots. Yet, even with this we could not make the best of it, as Captain Dang wanted to sweep a big surface of the little known portion of the Pacific. And so, in a few days’ time we were literally beating to leeward, if one can make use of so paradoxical a term. That is to say that we had a fair wind, but the Captain hauled us up and made a beam wind of it, letting us to leeward about fifty miles each tack of three hundred miles; and this way quartering the ocean like a giant dog, searching for the mysterious lagoon with the three islands and the strange olden ship that the A. B. Turrill had told about in his most improbable yarn.

Each night, Captain Dang hove the ship to as soon as night was fully come, commencing the search again with the first glimmer of dawn. I got a better notion those days of the fund of vast, almost grim, determination that lay beneath his frequent bellows of laughter and his quaint moods of meditation or audible ponderings.

“You mean to find that lagoon, Sir,” I said to him one night, when he had come up to join me in the middle watch. It was a thing that he had begun to do quite frequently of late.

“I do that, laddie,” was his reply, spoken quite normally and without any suggestion that the man thought he was saying anything to display forcefulness. “While there’s bread in the biscuit tanks we’ll look for her, laddie, if she’s above water—meanin’ in this case, my son, the Waters o’ Reality.”

I knew him well enough now to be aware that he truly meant that nothing short of proof that the unknown lagoon either existed or did not exist would now put him off the search, short of actually running short of provisions.

“And the freighters, Sir?” I asked.

“Damn the freighters, laddie,” he said genially.

“And the Company?” I ventured.

But this received no reply, and I knew that I had presumed a little beyond the line with which this seemingly free-and-easy man defined our relationship.

“Do you think there is really any such lagoon, Sir?” I asked after a moment, covering up my unanswered question.

“The Lord, He knows, laddie,” was all that Captain Dang said, and he turned and put his hands on the rail, staring dreamily away through the dark miles to wind’ard. Presently he began bumming away softly at his favorite tune, and I, thinking that maybe he wanted to be alone, began to walk the poop by myself. But he called me to him softly as I passed.

“Laddie,” he said, “the sea-life’s just hell! But oh, the Sea’s no less itself than the gateway o’ Eternity, laddie. ’Tis just that, laddie, an’ no less . . . a place where a man may find his God with nought of shame or insufficient words, laddie. Do ye look now away out on the beam, into the almighty mystery. Look! Can ye no’ see the mystery on mystery—eh, laddie? Or are ye blind like the rest—are ye?” He was silent a moment, staring and muttering gently. And suddenly I caught the words that he was saying over and over to himself: “I was born in the froth of thy mountains.”

He seemed to be almost tasting and flavoring the words with his tongue, as if he had been an epicure with some much-appreciated dainty. It was a new experience to me . . . it opened yet another door of the unopened Doors of Youth that shut me out from the knowledge-of-life. I got a glimpse, fleeting, of a form of enjoyment and actual happiness that had hitherto been outside of my awareness. I wonder whether I make myself clear.

“And if there’s beauty, there’s deviltry out there, laddie,” he said suddenly. “Eh, but I could tell you things, I could tell you things. . . . Look you, laddie,” he added, turning suddenly on me; “there’s places out there so strange”—and waved his arm around at the surrounding grey gloom of the sea—“that I should be laughed at ashore, if I was to say one word of the truth. It’s just because I’ve seen things myself that I know yon Turrill man may ha’ told the truth, the whole truth an’ nothin’ but the truth, my son.”

“Yes,” I said, rather ineffectually.

“All the same,” he added, “yon man’s told a damned funny yarn; an’ whether it’s Gospel, or whether it’s fever-fancies that he got in the boat, I don’t know. Maybe we’ll know in a day or two. Maybe we’ve somethin’ queer ahead. By the Lord, Mister, I hope so!” The last words came out with an intensity of expression that almost startled me, and they showed the volcano of a man that he was when the mood for adventure was upon him.

He turned from me abruptly and began to pace the poop alone, muttering from time to time some half-spoken words that I judged to be the line I had heard: “I was born in the froth of thy mountains.” And so he went, pacing and dreaming from time to time, sniffing at the night wind, or pausing to lean his elbows on the weather rail and stare away to wind’ard. . . . “I was born in the froth of thy mountains!”

I never met any other man to whom it might so well apply.

For seventeen days we tacked steadily across the great strip of ocean that we were searching, heaving-to at nights. The light, fair breeze held with wonderful steadiness, but never a sign of anything did we see. Once I asked Captain Dang whether he did not think this proof that the A.B. Turrill must truly have mistaken his delirium for reality.

“Wait, laddie, wait,” was his reply. “There’s nought done in this world, my son, by impatience. Wait till I’ve beat up this part of the blessed Pacific for another three months. No one knows better’n me how a tidy big thing can get lost surprisin’ easy in these parts.”

And so we continued for a space of eleven days further, narrowing the distance between out beats from fifty to thirty miles, with two men at the mastheads the whole long day. Yet, curiously enough, they were not the first to see it.

It came about in the dawn of the twelfth day. I was walking the poop in the middle watch, with the vessel hove to, and a light, steady breeze blowing. Away Eastward there was just the first faint loom of the dawn, which slowly strengthened into a pale, uncertain light that showed the sea vaguely.

Suddenly I heard Captain Dang’s voice to my back.

“Where are your eyes, Mister! Where are your eyes!” he was saying, and turning, I saw that he was pointing away to leeward. . . .

[UNFINISHED]

/* */

Captain Dan Danblasten

T
his story concerns the treasure of a certain Captain Dan Danblasten,
known in his youth as merely Dan Danblasten, in the village of Geddley, on
the south coast.

With the youth of Captain Dan Danblasten, which occurred, if I may so phrase it, prior to 1737, I have little to tell, except that being “wild like” and
certainly lacking in worldly “plenishings,” he was no credit to the
respectability of that quiet seaport village.

In consequence of this double stigma of commission and omission, he went away to sea taking his wildness and his poverty along with him; on
which it is conceivable that the respectable matrons and maidens of Geddley sighed; though, possibly with different feelings.

There you have the whole tale of Dan Danblasten’s youth in a few
words; that is, so far as Geddley is concerned.

Twenty years later he returned, with an ancient and ugly scar from right eyebrow to chin, and two enormous iron-bound chests, whose weight was
vouched for by the men he hired to carry to the old Tunbelly Hostel, that
same Tunbelly Inn being fronted on the old High Street Alley, which has
been done away with this twenty years, and more.

Now, if young Dan Danblasten had lacked of friends and kindliness in his wild and youthful days of poverty, the returned Captain Danblasten had no cause for complaint on such score. For, no sooner had he declared his name and ancient kinship to the village, than there were a dozen to remember him and shake him by the hand, in token of those older days, when—as they seemed strangely to forget—there had been no such general desire to
grip hands and invite him to sundries of that which both cheers and
inebriates.

Yet, at the first of it, there seemed to be every reason to suppose that
Captain Danblasten had forgotten the slights and disrespect that had been
put upon the onetime Dan; for he accepted both the hands and the liquors that were offered to him; and these, I need scarcely say, were not stinted,
when word of those weighty iron-bound chests had gone through the little
port; for there was scarcely a man who could refrain from calling in the
Tunbelly to welcome “old Dan, coom back agen. Cap’n Dan, sir, beggin’
your pardin
’
.”