It is wonderful what we mortals can see and hear when we keep our inward ears and eyes wide open. Of course, such sights were as nothing to me; I had long since realized that the great truths of this world exist outside the realms that men persist in erroneously dubbing “Reality.”
It was an engrossing spectacle to watch those old-time sailors dance on deck by moonlight. The very winds in the sails seemed to sing an eerie accompaniment, as the weird old shellbacks jigged and tossed their arms to the moon. I’d play the fiddle, as the strain of “Oh, oh for Rio Grande!” came ghost-like from the dancers’ bearded lips. It looked as though they were the ragged phantom crew of a ghostly ship, as they shuffled on deck, their sea-boots going “Tip-er-te-tap-tum-per-te-thump-thump!” their eyes bright with merriment, as they opened their big, tuneless mouths and joined in the chorus. Then a cloud would suddenly pass across the moon’s face, and lo, puff! they had all vanished, gone, blown overboard!
I’d stare aghast, and see lumps of ragged clothes and misty stuff, like remnants of old beards, swept off on the night winds, as their parchment-like hands clutched in vain at the clouds in space!
Some unimaginative folk might have sworn that it was nothing more than hovering albatrosses asleep on the wing, floating on the wind. But still, it’s a weird place is the South Sea.
However, in the morning, there they were, all in their bunks, fast asleep, or half awake, dipping their swollen heads in buckets of cool sea-water—as real as real could be!
With all that voyage’s discomforts I found it in no way monotonous. For that forecastle was a wonderful breathing library of stirring adventure. The characters of the books walked about, talked, and took mighty oaths if one dared to doubt their veracity.
I often marvelled how any shipping-office officials came to engage such ancient-looking sailormen. They looked infirm and useless. I sometimes half fancy that I dreamed them, or that I am quite a thousand years old, as they come to me in some memory of the night, and dance till I distinctly hear their sea-boots tapping on my bedroom floor in this old inn. Olaf was clean-shaven, and was so wrinkled and tanned that he looked like some neptuonic mummy clad in modern duck-pants and a belt. Steffan wore a peculiar-shaped bristly beard round his neck only, which looked like an old, frayed, grey woolly scarf, a fixture round his throat. Hans, the boatswain, who always said “Thou canst,” and “thee,” and “shiver-me-timbers,” would look straight into the mate’s eyes and say, “Avast there, you lubber!” He had one enormous tooth that protruded from his compressed lips, which seemed ever grinning, were he awake or asleep. At other times he would remind me of a wonderfully carved heathen idol, a kind of South Sea Laocoön that I had once seen in a tambu-house in New Guinea. For he would stand on deck bathing in a large tub that hardly reached to his knees, his muscles and veins swollen, vividly standing out as though through some mental and physical agony, while he stared on the skyline, then once again scanned his tanned arms and chest, whereon were tattooed the strange names of women he had known! Olwyn Saga, who wore a beard that brushed against his hips and where through the winds whistled eerie melodies when storms blew, had cornflower-blue eyes that had ogled the women of Shanghai and Callao before any modern sailor was born.
Even the skipper would tug his huge beard in a kind of meditative way whenever he met Olwyn on deck. As for the mate, a Scot, he almost apologized before shouting out his orders to those grand old fathers of the sea. Even their songs sounded like echoes from another age, as the old fo’c’sle dog, Moses, sat upright before them, tears coursing down his cheeks as the strains seemingly awakened memories of other days. And when Olwyn jigged in the forecastle by night, the hands would sit huddled on their sea-chests, their chins leaning on their horny hands as they dreamily watched. And I would fiddle a weird obligato, shivery-like, as I stood beneath the fo’c’sle’s oil-lamp, playing, not to Olwyn’s dancing figure, but to his shadow that mimicked him as it bobbed up and down in the gloom of the bunks and wooden bulwark side, first to port and then to starboard, as, folding his arms under his beard, he slewed round and round! Only the shuffling sounds of the big sea-boots, “Tump-er-te-tump-er-thump-er-te-thump,” told of the reality, as I, avoiding Olwyn and staring at his silently moving shadow in the gloom, was enabled to feed my imagination and extemporize an eerie accompaniment to a melody that had been sung on the Spanish Main a century before.
It was in the hush of the hot, calm, tropic night, when the “Zangwahee” wallowed in the swell and plomped till the hanging canvas seemed to be drumming to the destiny of the marching stars, that I blessed those aged sailormen. For, as they yarned and yarned, telling of their far-off experiences, my admiration for them became unbounded. They were either the most glorious old liars that ever existed, or had lived in Olympian times when nothing was impossible and only the marvellous occurred. Treasure-troves, typhoons, scented merchandise from the Indies, faithless lovers, dusky beauties on mysterious uncharted isles, and God knows what else, haunted my dreams, as I, at last, fell asleep, with their voices still mumbling in my ears. Old Hans, who smoked a filthy terra-cotta clay pipe and gassed me into insensibility on nights of sad rememberings, took a fancy to me. I became quite interested in the lonesome dog-watches. I’d sit by his bunk, and he’d point to the faded pictures of the foreign women he’d known and shake his head. “When did she die, Hans?” I’d say, as I pointed to one of the faded outlines of his bunk’s photographs.
“She?—why, shipmate, she died ages ago!” Then I’d hear all about the reality of that shadowy outline on the wooden wall. So did I become familiar with the inner dramas of those old sailors’ lives. Sometimes I’d hear things that made a shiver go down my spine, or, rather, down where the remnants of my spinal column remained, for the mate had surely broken it in three places (I had experienced so much in my travels that it did not seem strange that I should go off to sea in search of romance and lose my spine).