“Oh, yes,” said he, “I shall want you to do that. My dream was so vivid that I shall ask you to take notice of the fittings of that cabin for the sake of corroboration, and let me be first with you——”
He shut his eyes as one seeking strongly to realize his own imaginations, and said: “It is a square cabin with a square table directly under an oblong skylight. There is a chair at the head of the table. In that chair sat the skeleton, not answering to Milton’s magnificent fancy:
“What seemed his head
The likeness of a kingly crown had on.
No, the thing was uncrowned. It was a skeleton, but it lived, and made as though it would deal the cards it held. Opposite is another chair; on either hand are lockers. There are sleeping berths at the foot of the companion ladder, and that’s all that I can remember,” said he, opening his eyes.
Jimmy announced breakfast. Yan Bol came aft to take charge while I went below. The burly Dutchman looked at me meaningly, and then I recollected my talk with him; but I resolved to say nothing to the captain this side my excursion to the schooner.
Before we sat down Jimmy received one of his lessons. There was a ham upon the table, and he called it a leg of mutton. I had long ago discovered that the boy was honestly wanting in the power to distinguish between articles of food. Sometimes I supposed he blundered on purpose to divert his master, who appeared to enjoy the concert that was part of the lesson, but I was now convinced that though he had the names of many varieties of meats, and even dishes, at his tongue’s end, he was utterly unable to correctly apply them. His confidence in his own indications was the extraordinary part of his misapplications. He spoke, for instance, of the ham as a leg of mutton as though quite sure; then to the first syllable of correction that fell from Greaves, and to a faint, uneasy groan which the dog always gave when Greaves spoke on these occasions—as though the noble beast knew that the boy had blundered and that the duet was inevitable—Jimmy stiffened himself into a soldier-like posture, nose in the air, hands up and down like a pump handle, and the dog looking at him ready to howl. The lesson ended, we sat down and fell to.
“Your teaching does not seem to make the lad see the difference between meats,” said I.
“I have hopes of him,” he answered, “and Galloon’s face is good on these occasions.”
He then talked of the schooner, of his dream, and his discourse ran in such a strain that I discovered that secretly he was not only of a serious and religious cast of mind, but superstitious beyond any man I had ever sailed with. Thought has the speed of the lightning stroke, and I remember as I sat listening to him, saying very little myself—for I had but the shallowest understanding of the subject he had got upon; I say that I remember thinking: Suppose this voyage should be the consequence of a dream? Suppose this Pacific quest for hard Spanish milled dollars should be an effect of superstitious fancy? Suppose the whole scheme should be as unsubstantial in fact as the actors in the revels in the ‘Tempest’? But the image of Mynheer Tulp swept as an inspiration of support into my mind. I had entertained myself by figuring that man. In thinking over this voyage I had depicted its promoter, and my fancy gave me the likeness of a little withered Dutchman in a velvet cap, with a nose of Hebraic proportions, a keen black eye, a wary, sarcastic smile, and a mind whose horizon was the circumference of a guilder. I seemed to see the little creature looking over Greaves’ shoulder at me as I mused upon my companion’s somewhat foggy talk, and I said unto myself, “Tulp believing, all’s well.”
When we went on deck the schooner was within musket shot. She had seemingly been in collision with another vessel, though her hull looked perfectly sound; nor did she sit upon the sea, nor rise with the slope of the swell, as if she had more water in her than was good for buoyancy. Nothing alive was visible aboard.