Book Two—Chapter Eight.
At Sea—Mermaids and Mermen.
So long as the wind blew free, even though it did not always blow fair, there was joy, and jollity, too, in every heart that beat on board the saucy Sea Flower, fore as well as aft.
She looked a bonnie barque now, in every sense of the word.
Tandy and Halcott had spared neither expense nor pains in rigging her well out. Had not her timbers been stanch and sound they certainly would not have done so.
She had new sails, a new jibboom, and several new spars; and before she got clear and away out of the English Channel the crew of many a homeward-bound ship manned their riggings and gave her a hearty cheer.
Halcott had left the whole rig-out of the Sea Flower to Mr Tandy, and had not come near her for six long weeks.
He was better employed, perhaps, and more happy on shore. But pleased enough he was on his return.
“Why, Tandy, my dear fellow, this isn’t a ship any more; it’s a yacht?”
“A pot of paint and a bucket of tar go a long way,” Tandy replied smiling.
“Ah! there’s a good deal more than tar here; but how you’ve managed to get her decks and spars so white and beautiful, bother me if I can tell. And her ebony is ebony no longer, it is polished jet, while her brass work is gold.”
Down below the two had now gone together.
Tandy could not have made the cabin a bit bigger if he had tried, but he had removed every morsel of her lumbering old lockers and tables, and refurnished it with all he could think of that was graceful and beautiful.
Mirrors, too, were everywhere along the bulk-heads, and these made the saloon look larger. The only wonder is that, in a lit of absent-mindedness, some one did not walk right through a mirror.
Hanging tables, beautiful crystal, brackets, and artificial flowers gave a look that was both lightsome and gay.
On the port side, when you touched a knob, a mirrored door opened into the captain’s cabin—small but pretty, and lighted by an airy port that could be carried open in good weather, and all along in the trades.
The other state-room was larger. This Halcott had insisted upon Tandy taking; and it contained not only his own bunk, but a lower one for Nelda, and was better decorated and furnished than even the captain’s.
“Oh, gaily goes the ship when the wind blows free.”
And right gaily she had gone too, as yet.
Halcott was a splendid sailor and navigator. It might have been thought, however, that Tandy, from his long residence on shore, had turned a little rusty in his seamanship.
If he had, the rust had not taken long to rub off; and as he trod the ivory-white quarterdeck in his duck trousers, neat cap, and jacket of navy blue, he really looked ten years younger than in the days when he sailed the Merry Maiden up and down the canal.
The crew were well-dressed, and looked happy and jolly enough for anything.
I need hardly say that Nelda was the pet of the Sea Flower, fore and aft. There was no keeping the child to any one part of the ship. In fine weather—and, with the exception of a “howther” in the Bay, it had up till now been mostly fine—she was here, there, and everywhere: in the men’s quarters; down below in the forecastle; at the forecastle-head itself, when the men leaned over the bows there, smoking, yarning, and laughing; and in the cook’s galley, helping to make the soup. But she ventured even further than this, and more than once her father started to find her in the foretop, and standing beside her that tall, imperturbable Admiral.
The bird was pet number two; but Bob made an equal second.
At first the ’Ral was inclined to mope. Perhaps he was sea-sick. It is a well-known fact that if a Cape pigeon, as a certain gull is called, is taken on board, it can fly no more, but walks slowly and stupidly round the deck.
Sea-sickness had not troubled Bob in the slightest. When he saw the ’Ral standing in the lee-scuppers, with his neck hitched right round till the head lay right on the top of his tail, Bob looked at him comically with his head cocked funnily to one side.
Then he seemed to laugh right away down both sides, so to speak. Bob was a droll dog.
“My eyes, Admiral,” he said, “what a ridiculous figure you do cut, to be sure! Why, at first I couldn’t tell which was the one end of you and which was the other.”
“I don’t care what becomes of me,” the Admiral replied, talking over his tail. “It is a very ordinary world. I’ll never dance again.”
But, nevertheless, in three days’ time the Hal did dance, and so droll and comical were his capers on the heaving deck that the crew lay aft in a body and laughed till they nearly burst their belts. The Admiral took kindly to his meal-worms after that, and didn’t despise potted salmon and morsels of mutton.
Now it must not be supposed that the Sea Flower was going out in ballast, on the mere chance of filling up with gold. They might never see the Isle of Misfortune, and all their dreams of gold might yet turn out as dreams so often do.
Halcott and Tandy were good sailors, and but little likely to trust overmuch to blind chance. They took out with them, therefore, a good-paying cargo of knick-knacks and notions to barter with the natives along the coast of Africa. Having made a good voyage—and they knew they should—and having filled up with copal, nutmegs, arrowroot, spices, ivory, and perhaps even gold-dust and ostrich feathers from the far interior, they would stretch away out and over the broad Atlantic, and rounding the Horn, make search for the Isle of Misfortune, which they hoped to find an island of gold.
If unsuccessful, they should then bear up for the northern Pacific Islands, taking their chance of doing something with pearls or mother-of-pearl, and so on and away to San Francisco, where they were sure of a market, even if they wished to sell the Sea Flower herself.
But the best of sailors get disheartened far sooner in calms than even in tempests.
In the latter, one has all the excitement of a battle with the elements; in the former, one can but wait and think and long for the winds to blow.
“The fair breeze blew, the white foam flew,
The furrow followed free.”
Yes; but although in the region of calms some ships seem to have luck, the Sea Flower had none.
“Down dropt the breeze, the sails dropt down,
’Twas sad as sad could be;
And they did speak only to break
The silence of the sea.”
A week, a fortnight, nearly three weary weeks went past like this.
There was no singing now forward among the men. Even little Fitz the nigger, who generally was trolling a song, at times high over the roar of the wind, was silent now. So, too, was Ransey Tansey. He and Nelda had been before the life of the good ship. It seemed as if they should never be so again. Bob took to lying beside the man at the wheel. As far as the latter was concerned, there might just as well have been no man there at all. The sea all round was a sea of heaving oil. The waves were houses high—not long rollers, but a series of hills and valleys, in which the Sea Flower wallowed and tumbled; while the fierce heat of the sun caused the pitch to melt and bubble where the decks were not protected by an awning.
The motion of the good ship was far indeed from agreeable. Any seaman can walk easily even when half a gale of wind is roaring through the rigging. There is a method in the motion of a ship in such a sea-way. There is no method in the motion of a vessel in the doldrums; and when one puts one’s foot down on the quarterdeck, or, rather, where it seemed to be a second before, it finds but empty space. The body lurches forward, and the deck swings up to receive it. A grasp at a stay or sheet alone can avert a fall.
In such a sea-way there is no longer any leeward or windward. The sails go flapping to and fro, however: they are making wind for themselves as the vessel rolls and tumbles; and if this wind carries her forward a few yards one minute, it hurls her back again the next.
No wonder Nelda often asked her father if the wind would never, never blow again, or whether it would be always, always like this.
No birds either, save now and then a migrant gull that floated lazily on a wave to rest, or perched on the fin of a basking shark.
So day after day passed wearily on, and you could not have told one day from the other. But when, at six o’clock, the sun hurriedly capped the great heaving waves with crimson, leaving the hollows in deepest purple shade, and soon after sank, then, in the gloaming that for a brief spell hung over the ocean, the stars came out; and very brightly did they shine, so that night was even more pleasant than day.
Banks of clouds sometimes lay along the horizon. By day they appeared like far-off, snow-capped, serrated mountains; at night they were dark, but lit up every few moments by flashes of lightning, which spread out behind them and revealed their form and shape.
No thunder ever followed this lightning; it brought no wind; nor did the clouds ever rise or bring a drop of rain.
Phantom lightning; phantom clouds!
There were times on nights like these when Ransey took his sister on deck to look at the sky, and wonder at the lightning and that strange mountain-range of clouds.
She was not afraid when Ransey was with her. But she would not have gone “upstairs,” as she called it, with even the stewardess herself.
Ransey, I may mention, lived in the saloon with his father and the captain, the second and third mates having comfortable quarters in the midship decks.
A stewardess only was carried on the Sea Flower, and she acted in another capacity—that of maid to Nelda. A black girl she was, but clean, smart, and tidy and trim, full of merriment and good-nature. Her assistant was Fitz, and with him alone she deemed it her duty to be a little harsh now and then. Because Fitz wouldn’t keep his place, so she said.
Poor Janeira, she always forgot she was a nigger herself, seeing so many white faces all around her. But when she looked into the little mirror that hung in her pantry, she used to go into fits of laughter at her face therein displayed. She was a funny girl.
Ransey used to take Nelda up on these nights, and hoist her on to the grating abaft the quarterdeck, and she would cling to his arm, while he held on to the bulwark.
Thus they would stand, silent and awed, for long minutes at a time.
Was there nothing to break the dread stillness? There was occasionally the flap of a sail, or a footstep forward; but no song from the men, no loud talking—they hardly cared to speak above a whisper. But more than once a plash was heard, and a great dark head would appear from the side of a billow, seen distinctly enough in the gleam of the starlight, then sink and disappear.
“Oh, the awful beast, ’Ansey! Can it climb up and swallow us?”
“No, dear silly, no.”
But older people than Nelda have been frightened by such dread spectres appearing close to a ship at night while in the doldrums, and wiser heads than hers have been puzzled to account for them.
Are they sharks? No, no. Five times as large are they as any shark ever seen. Whales? No, again. A whale lives not under the water but on it.
In the ocean wild and wide, reader, we sailors find many a strange mystery, see many a fearsome sight at night we can neither describe nor explain. And if we talk of these when we come on shore, you landsmen look incredulous.
But after a time the child became accustomed to scenes like these. Indeed the sea by night appeared to have a kind of fascination for her.
In beholding it, she appeared to be looking through it into some strange land, the abode of the fairies and elves and mermaids with which her imagination had peopled it.
“Deep, deep down among the rocks,” she would say to Ransey, “who lives there? Tell us, tell us.”
Ransey had therefore to become the story-teller whether he would or not.
He spoke to her then of mermaid-land deep down below the dark, heaving ocean.
“Deep, deep, deep down, ’Ansey?”
“Very, very deep. You see only a glimmer of light below you as you sink and sink; and this light is greenish and clear, and the farther down you get the brighter and more beautiful does it become.”
“And you’re not drowned?”
“No! oh, no! not if you’re good. Well, then you come to—oh, ever so beautiful a country! The trees are all of sea-weed, and underneath them is the yellow, yellow sand; but here and there are beautiful rockeries, and beds of such bright and lovely flowers that they would dazzle your eyes to look upon. And the strange thing about these flowers is this, Babs, they are all alive.”
“All alive? My! and can they talk to you?”
“Yes, and sing too. A sailor man who had been there told me. And he said their voices were so low and sweet that you had to put your ear quite close down before you could hear and understand; for at a little distance, he said, it was just like the tinkling of tiny silver bells. The danger is in stopping too long, and being enchanted or slain.”
“Enchanted? Whatever is that, ’Ansey?”
“Oh, you stay so long listening that you feel like in a dream, and before you know what has happened you are a flower yourself; and then, though you can see and hear everything that goes on around you, you cannot move away from the rock you are growing on, and you never get back again out of the water.”
“Never, never, ’Ansey?”
“Never, never, Babs.”
“But in the deep, dark, beautiful woods that you come to and enter there is many a terrible monster living—horned, shelly, warty monsters. And they are all waiting to catch you.”
“Terrible, ’Ansey!”
“Are you afraid, dear?”
“Oh, no, ’Ansey! Be terrible some more.”
“Well, there is danger all around you now, for some of these monsters are quite hidden among the sand, with only one eye protruding, and this looks like a flower because it grows on a stalk. But when you go to look at it, suddenly the sandy ground gives way under you. You are caught and killed, and know no more.
“Some of these monsters, Nelda, live in caves, and if you go too near the entrance a great, long, skinny arm is thrust out, and you are dragged into the dark and devoured.”
“But I would turn quickly away out of that terrible wood, ’Ansey,” said Nelda.
“Yes, that is just what the sailor did.”
“And then he was saved?”
“Not yet. He came to a lovely wide patch of clear, hard sand, and he was looking down to admire it. He had taken up some to examine, and was pouring it from one hand into the other—for the sand was pure gold mixed with pearls and rubies—when all at once it began to get dark, and looking up he saw a creature that was nearly all one horrible, cruel, grinning head, with eight long arms round it. It stopped high up, just hovering, Nelda, like a hawk over a field. The sailor man was spell-bound. He could only stare up at it with starting eyes and utter a long, low, frightened moan. But from the creature above a tent was lowered, just like a huge bell, and he knew it would soon fall over him and he would be sucked up to the sea-demon’s body and slowly eaten alive.
“But at that very moment, sissie, the creature uttered a terribly wild and mournful cry, and darted off through the water, which was all just like ink now.”
“And the sailor was dead?”
“No; a voice that sounded like the sweetest music ever he had heard in his life was heard, and a hand grasped his.
“‘Quick, quick,’ she cried, for it was a mermaid, ‘I will lead you into safety. Stay but another moment here and you are doomed.’
“‘I’ll follow you to the end of the world, miss,’ said the gallant sailor.
“It did seem queer to call a mermaid miss, but Jack Reid couldn’t help it.
“‘You won’t have to follow so far,’ she said, with a sweet smile that put Jack’s heart all in a flutter.
“And in five minutes’ time they were out of danger, and there was Jack with his hat in his hand, which he had taken off for politeness’ sake, being led along by the most charming young lady he had ever clapped eyes on.
“‘Her beauty,’ he said to me, ‘was radiant, and her long yellow hair floated behind her in the water till I was ravished; on’y the wust of it was, that all below the waist wasn’t lady at all, but ling or some other kind of fish.’
“But Jack wouldn’t look at the ling part at all, only just at the mermaid’s face and hair and hands.
“However dark it might have been, you could have seen to read by the light of the diamonds around her brow and neck.
“They soon came to a rock of quartz and porphyry, and next minute Jack found himself in a hall of such dazzling delight that he had to rub his eyes and pinch himself hard to make sure he was not in a dream. This was the mermaids’ and sea-fairies’ great ballroom.
“Tier upon tier of galleries rose up towards the beautiful, star-studded ceiling, and every gallery was filled with beautiful ladies. Jack knew that they all ended in ling, but the tails could not be seen.
“There was light and loveliness everywhere, and flowers everywhere—”
“Go on, ’Ansey. Your story is better than the Revelations, better even than ‘Jack the Giant Killer.’”
“I must stop, siss, because even I don’t know much more, only that the music was so ravishing that Jack himself danced till he couldn’t dance a bit more.”
“And did he sit down?”
“No; he thought he would like a smoke, so he floated away down to the entrance to a cave at the far, far end.
“‘That must be the smoking-room,’ he thought to himself, so he pushed aside the curtain and floated boldly in.
“But lo and behold, this inner cave was filled with little shrivelled-up old men, uglier far in the face than toads.
“These, sissie, were the mermen, and they were all sitting on rough blocks of coral, which must have hurt them dreadful, nursing their tails. These mermen sat there swaying their yellow, wrinkled bodies back and fore, to and fro, but taking not the slightest notice of Jack. The sailor stood staring at them; and well he might, for whatever motion one made the others all made the same. If one lifted a skeleton hand to rub its bald head, every hand was raised, every bald head was rubbed; whichever way one swayed all the rest swayed; sometimes every blear eye was directed to the ceiling, or lowered towards their tails, as the case might be; and when one gaped and yawned they all gaped and yawned, and Jack told me that he had never seen such a set of ugly, toothless mouths in his life before.
“But as they wouldn’t speak, Jack Reid himself—and he was a very brave sailor, sissie—did speak.
“‘Ahoy, maties!’ he cried, ‘ye don’t seem an over-lively lot here, I must say, but has e’er a one o’ ye got sich a thing as a bit o’ baccy?’
“Jack told me, Babs, that when he made this speech he got a fearful fright. Every merman stood up straight on its stool, its skinny arms and claw-like hands held straight above its head, and a yell rang through the hall that Jack says is ringing in his ears till this day.
“‘Oh!’ he cried, ‘if that’s your little game, here’s for off.’
“Jack must have been glad enough to get back to the ballroom, but this was now deserted. No one was there at all except the lovely mermaid who had saved him from being devoured by the terrible devil-fish.
“She smiled upon him as sweetly as ever.
“‘I’m going to guide you,’ she said, ‘to the nursery grotto; it is time that all sailor boys went to by-by.’
“‘Go on, missie,’ Jack said, ‘go on, yer woice is sweeter far than the song of—of a Mother Carey’s chicken. Wot a lovely lady ye’d be, miss, if ye didn’t end in ling!’
“She smiled, and combed her hair with her long white fairy fingers as she glided on.
“‘Going to by-by am I? Well, the mum did used to call it that like, miss, but we grown-up sailor lads calls it a bunk or an ’ammock. Ain’t got ne’er a bit o’ baccy about ye, has ye, miss?’
“But the fairy mermaid only smiled.
“So soft and downy was the bed that Jack fell asleep singing low to himself—
“‘All in the downs the fleet was moored.’
“And that is the end of the story, siss.”
“Oh, no! What did he see when he woke up again?”
“Well, when he awoke in the morning, much to his amazement, he found himself in his own bed in his mother’s little cottage at home.
“He rubbed his eyes twice before he spoke.
“‘What! mother?’ he cried.
“‘Yes, it is your own old mother, dearie, and I’ve been sittin’ up with you, and sich nonsense you has been a-talkin’, surely.’
“‘I’m not a merman, or anything, am I, mother? I don’t end in ling, do I, mother?’
“‘No, Jack Reid, you end in two good strong legs; but strong as they are, my boy, they weren’t strong enough to keep you from tumbling down last night. O Jack, Jack!’”