"Are these works pretty new?" said I.
She answered, "Of various years; the newest, I think, is dated 1647."
"Ay," said Vanderdecken, "that will be my friend Bloys Van Treslong's book upon the tulip-madness."
Finding him willing to converse, I was extremely fretted to discover that, owing to my ignorance of the literature and art of his time, I could not "bring him out" as the phrase runs, for looking into the Batavian story since, I find scores of matters he could have told me about, such as the building of ships at Hoorn, the customs of the people, the tulip-madness he had mentioned, the great men such as Jan Six, Rembrandt, Jan Steen, Van Campen who designed the Stadhuis and others, some of whom—as happened in the case of the great Willem Schouten—he may have known and haply smoked pipes of tobacco with.
But be this as it may, we had got back again to the gale when Prins brought in the dinner, and in a few minutes arrived the mate, Van Vogelaar, whereupon we fell to the meal, Imogene saying very little and often regarding me with a thoughtful face and earnest eyes as though, after the maiden's way in such matters, she was searching me; I taciturn, the mate sullen in expression and silent, as his death-like face would advertise the beholder to suppose him ever to be, and Vanderdecken breaking at intervals from the deep musing fit he fell into to invite me to eat or drink with an air of incomparable dignity, hardened as it was by his eternal sternness and fierceness.
At this meal I found the food to be much the same as that with which we had broken our fast. But in addition there was a roasted fowl and a large ham; and into each silver goblet Prins poured a draught of sherry—a very soft and mellow wine—which I supposed Vanderdecken had come by through the same means which enabled him to obtain coats for his own and his men's backs, and ropes for his masts and sails, and brandy and gin for his stone jars—that is, by overhauling wrecks and pillaging derelicts, for certainly strong waters were not to be got by lying off the coast and going a-hunting.
Yet though the wine put a pleasant warmth into my veins, insomuch that I could have talked freely but for the depressing influence of the captain and his mate, them it no more cheered and heartened, it gave them no more life and spirit than had they been urns filled with dust into which the generous liquor had been poured. Several times, indeed, whilst I was on board that ship, have I seen Vanderdecken, Vogelaar, and Arents swallow such draughts of punch out of bowls, as would have laid me senseless in five minutes, yet these capacious jorums gave rise in them to not the least signs of jollity; as, indeed, how should it have been otherwise, for their brains were dead to all but the supernatural influence that kept them moving—dead as the works of a going watch—and what is there in the fumes of wine to disorder embodied ghosts?