The Ship of Coral

by H. De Vere Stacpoole

Then he was coming on board at the docks of Marseilles, joining the ship with the treasure in his pocket, the beautiful spirit of unreasonableness who presides over the affairs of Dreamland did not hint to him of the absurdity of the situation, his obfuscated reasoning faculty was engaged in trying to solve the problem before him—the problem of how to hide a million’s worth of gems and act as stoker on a transatlantic steamer at the same time. To increase the difficulty he had placed the snake of gold under the muffler he wore round his neck—but it refused to be hidden; and then, all at once, he was back again in the docks in a tavern, fighting in a corner with his back to the wall, whilst Malays from the P. & O. boats, Dagoes armed with sheath knives and a Chinaman—a hatchet man such as he had heard tell of amidst the stokers—attacked him for his treasure. He awoke gasping and still fighting his viewless enemies. After a while he fell asleep again, only to continue his experiences in Dreamland, awaking finally, just as the sun’s rim was rising above the sea.

The wind was blowing now from E.S.E., and the sea had lost its waves and had fallen back into quietude and long lapses of swell—the gulls were back.

Not the cormorants and frigate birds of the northern beach, but the fishing gulls, the familiar spirits of the island, whose voices had once terrified Gaspard. They had returned during the night, but they did not terrify him now. Nothing could terrify him now except, perhaps, the idea of a robber.

It was extraordinary, the effect of this fortune on this imaginative mind, stiffening and strengthening it against all imaginary fears save the fear of material enemies. The man who dreads burglars has no time to dream of ghosts.

Immediately on waking he turned and placed his hand upon the treasure, then he sat up facing the brave, bright morning; it was all true, then, despite his dreams and his visionary enemies he was still in possession of this incredible and fantastic wealth; his mind, clear now and strengthened by sleep, could grasp the matter in its true proportions; the stuff was his by all right, he was lineal heir by the right of labour and suffering, to the fortune that Sagesse had taken from the hand of Chance.

He could go to M. Seguin with a clear conscience and ask him to help in the disposal of these things.

He rose up and walked along the beach, every moment casting back an eye at the place where the treasure was. The storm had brought treasure of its own to the beach, other than gems, and the falling tide was leaving behind it strips of emerald and clear-brown seaweed, starfish, seaweed whose roots were clinging still to fragments of red branch coral, great bunches of flying-fish eggs like bunches of white currants, shells shewing all the tints of opal and pearl.

The great hand of the storm had stripped the sea coves, the tidal rocks, the gardens of the lagoons, and had cast the coloured harvest on the sand; the sea itself had a brighter look, a fresher smell; great depths seemed to have been stirred and the freshness and youth that lie at the heart of ocean to have been diffused through its being.

O, the vision of the morning sea! The blue distance, the green, curling waves, the blowing wind; it is the only thing that never grows old; unspoiled by time or change, it is to-day as it was when Jason sailed it, when Helen knew it, when the blue-painted triremes clashed beaks at Salamis in the morning of the world.

When we first saw Gaspard, a stoker fresh from the Rhone, sitting under a palm tree smoking and waiting for Yves, he was a man who would have been moved not at all by the youth and spirit of this morning sea; the crushed aesthetic sense, the imagination that had been subdued to bar rooms and girls of the type of Anisette, would have responded scarcely at all to this hilarity of blue waves and morning light—but it was different now. He had changed and the world had changed; the change was perhaps more subtle than profound, altering rather the point of view than the viewer, yet he had changed. He had learned to expand his nostrils to the breeze, to feel pleasure in the morning light, and satisfaction in the sense of being.