The Death Ship: A Strange Story, Vol. 3 (of 3)

by William Clark Russell

Happily nothing more came of the tempest that lay muzzled in the captain's breast. Whether my standing up for myself, my heated manner towards his mate, gave a new turn to his mood, he did not speak again of the change of weather, and as speedily as ceremony would permit, I got up, made my bow, and went on deck.

The appearance in the west was sullen enough, though merely with a faintness there that was unrelieved by any edging or shouldering outline of cloud. A few patches of vapour lay streaked along the sky, otherwise the heavens hovered in an unstained hollow, but of a faded, watery blue, unwholesome and with a sort of blindness of fog in it; and up in the north-east hung the sun, shorn of his rays, a squeezed yet uncompacted mass of dazzle, like as I have seen him show when setting in a belt of vapour that has not entirely hid him, and casting a wake as dim as burning oil. The swell had grown in weight even while we had been breaking our fast. There being not the faintest draught of air to steady the vessel—no, not so much as to put the most delicate curl of shadow upon the heads of the muddy-blue, grease-smooth, liquid roundings which came with a sulky brimming to the channels. She rolled with stupid heaviness, her sails rattling like a discharge from great ordnance, and a sort of song-like cries twanging out from the sharp fierce strains put upon the shrouds and backstays, and many noises in her hold. You would have thought that her huge round-tops and heavy furniture of spar and rigging would have given some regularity to her pendulous swaying: but the contrary was the case, her action being so jerky, abrupt, and unforegatherable by the legs, that walking was impossible.

I passed the morning partly on deck, partly in the cabin, nearly all the while in Imogene's society, Vanderdecken's passionate mood being too vehement to suffer him to notice either me or my dearest. Indeed, I sought the cabin chiefly to remove myself from his sight, for as the weather darkened round his wrath mounted with it—visible in his tempestuous stridings, and above all, in the flaming and cursing eyes he would again and again level at the heavens; and I sometimes felt that nothing less than my life might be the forfeit of my even provoking his regard and constraining his attention to me in his present satanic posture of mind.

When the dinner hour came, he fiercely ordered Prins to bring him some drink on deck: he could not eat. All the morning he had been directing his gaze into the south and north and east for any blurr of the polished folds that should exhibit movement in the air in those quarters; and from the undulating sea-line, which he searched in vain, his eyes seemed to reel with the very sickness of wrath into the west where, as I knew, the Curse was busy.

Imogene and I were as mute as images at table. We had agreed not to utter a syllable whilst the mate was present, and some time before he had finished his meal, we left the cabin for the quarter-deck, where we sat hidden from Vanderdecken, who marched about the poop near the tiller, with a tread whose echo rang through the solid deck, and with a mien that made me ready to witness him at any minute repeat, waking and sensible, the horrid blasphemous part he had performed in his sleep.

The faintness in the west deepened into thickness. The atmosphere grew hot, and the fanning of the canvas that had before filled the decks with chilling draughts became a refreshment. By two o'clock in the afternoon the heads and shoulders of ponderous storm-clouds had shaped themselves above the dingy blueish obscurity in the west; they jutted up with a ghastly sheen of sickly bronze upon their peaks and brows and made a very frightful appearance. You would have thought there was a great motionless fold of heat suspended, viewless, in the middle of the heavens, and that it was magnetically drawing up volumes of black fumes from some pestilential land lying hidden behind the sea. The strange light, rusty with the ominous storm-tinge, made the sea appear round and hard, cheating the eye with the illusive complexion, till the eastern sea-line looked thirty leagues distant, and not closer westwards either, spite of its fading out in a jumble of ugly shadow that way. The sky still had a dirty sort of blue where the sun went out behind it, and I tell you 'twas scaring to find him sunk out of sight in a kind of ether whose hue, deceptive as it was, caused it to look clear enough for him to float in. It was in its way a sheer drowning of the luminary, like the foundering of a flaming fabric in the sea.

The gloom stole gradually into darkness as though some giant hand was warily drawing a sable curtain over our mastheads. Never did I watch the growth of a storm with such awe as now filled me. To my alarmed sight, the gathering seemed like an embodiment of the Curse in dreadful, swelling, livid vapours, whose dull hectic, whose sallow bronze glaring out of the murkiness, showed like the overflowing of the blue and scarlet and sunlight fires pent up in those teeming surcharged bosoms. My plain sense assured me that the tempest could not hold for this Death Ship the menace that would render its aspect terrifying to the mariner on board an earthly craft; yet it was impossible for my instincts as a seaman to accommodate themselves to the supernatural conditions which begirt me, and I found myself trembling for the safety of the ship when I discovered that the tempest was suffered to grow without an order being given to the men to shorten sail and prepare for it.

I left Imogene and stepped furtively along the quarter-deck to command the poop, and saw Vanderdecken standing aft, surveying the storm with his arms folded, his chin depressed, and his face staring out ashenly against the gloom. I watched him for some minutes, but never once did he stir. Arents and Van Vogelaar were on the other side of the deck, leaning over the rail, gazing at God knows what, but never speaking as I could be sure in the silence that rested upon the ship. The men hung about in groups forward; mere cunningly devised shapes of human beings without the faintest stir of restlessness among them. Many of them smoked, and the pale wreaths went from their paler lips into the air straight as staffs.

"Imogene, look at that sky!" I whispered, "did mortal ever behold the like of it?"

'Twas two o'clock; a tempest-coloured twilight, in which the sails to the flattened swell swayed like visionary wings grown languid with long flight, and feebly hovering and almost noiselessly beating over the ship; out of the gloom over the side came now and again the yearning moan of water, foamlessly laving the bends and run of the vessel; in each death-like pause you heard the silence tingling in the air with the low phantasmal muttering of a weltering sea, a sound as of an imagination of unreal breakers upon a faery shore.