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

by William Clark Russell

The light brightening—that is the fog growing more luminous, without appearing to thin—the boat's outline lay visible, together with her furniture, such as the sail and the oars. I tenderly laid Imogene's cold hand down, and turning the sail over, found—as I had expected—the mast lying under it; and partly peering and partly groping, I made out an iron clamp fitted to the foremost thwart or seat, with an hollow under it in the bottom of the boat for receiving the heel of the mast.

I lifted the spar and very easily stepped it, discovering that the halliards for hoisting the sail were ready rove through a small block seized to the head of the mast. I hauled upon this rope to clear the sail, and perceived it to be shaped like a lug, fitted to a yard, only the yard was arched, causing the head of the sail to appear like a bow when the arrow is drawn upon it. Before setting the sail I went aft, and by dint of feeling and staring discovered a rope grummet or hempen hook fastened to the larboard horn, but close in, so that it lay out of sight against the boat's stern. 'Twas very clear that this was meant to receive an oar for steering; but whether or not it would serve my turn for that purpose; so without more ado I rove an oar through the grummet, then hoisted the sail, making the tack fast to the larboard horn on the bow, and came aft with the sheet.

The boat instantly felt the pressure, and the wind being abaft the beam, she slipped along like a sledge, as you will suppose, when I say that her bottom was shaped like the side of a pea-shell, and that her whole frame might have been imitated from one of those black pods of sea-weed which are furnished by nature with wire-like projections, and which may be found in plenty upon our sea-coast. The oar controlled her capitally.

The double motive I had for getting away from this place—first, to run out of the fog and so get light to enable me to minister to Imogene, and next to remove myself so far from the Death Ship as to render pursuit hopeless even should the thickness in the bay clear up and enable Vanderdecken to recover his boat which I had cut adrift; this double motive, I say, lifted my anxiety and eagerness to the height of madness. My dearest lay with her head towards me, and in the glistening white obscurity I could discern her pale face upon the pillow of my coat, but could not tell whether her eyes were open or shut. She did not moan; she lay as still as the dead. I asked her if she was in pain. She said "No," but in a voice so feeble that I had to bend my ear to catch the syllable.

I could not think of her but as slowly dying to the streaming away of her precious blood. What to do I knew not; and in addition to this dreadful state of despair was the obligation upon me to watch the boat and shrewdly and seriously attend to my course by the warning surf-thunder floating back against the wind from the echoing strand. From time to time I would address Imogene, always with a terror in me of winning no reply, of touching her and finding her dead. Once she answered that she believed the bleeding in her shoulder had stopped; the icy-coldness was gone, and there was a small smarting there as if she had been burnt, but nothing that she could not easily endure. But I knew by the tone of her voice that she spoke only to give me comfort; either that she was suffering above the power of her love for me to conceal in her faltering whispers or that her strength was unequal to the labour of utterance.

Yet, as I have said, what could I do? I was no chirurgeon; and I wonder that my heart did not break to the bending of my scorching eyes upon my love lying wounded and bleeding at my feet.

An hour passed; the fog still compassed us, but the white splendour of the moon was upon it. Methought that I heard Imogene whisper; I dropped on my knee, and she asked for water. I let go the steering oar, that jammed in the grummet and that could not therefore go adrift, and with great trouble found the little cup that I had hidden in one of the bags, and poured some water out of the pitcher into it. She moaned in pain when I put my arm under her head to raise it; but she drank greedily, nevertheless, and thanked me in a whisper when I tenderly let sink her head on to the jacket.

I resumed my place at the oar, and through the blackness drove the boat, the sail pulling briskly, the water shining very brightly in our wake, and, as my ear seemed to fancy, the noise of the surf dwindling somewhat, whence I conjectured we were hauling off the coast and standing more directly seawards. I do not know that I should have been without hope for my beloved if it had not been for the haunting and blasting thought that nothing but misery could attend association with Vanderdecken and his doomed ship. It seemed to me now—though on board I had been too eager to escape with her, too wrapped up in my love for such consideration to occupy my mind—that nothing less than the death of one of us could expiate our involuntary and unhappy connexion with the banned and fated craft. Ships that spoke her perished, often with all hands; misfortunes pursued those who merely sighted her. What sort of death could the Curse involve for one who had lived for years or for weeks in the monstrous fabric, who had conversed familiarly with her abhorred occupants, who had been admitted into close inspection of her secret life, beheld the enactment by Vanderdecken in his sleep of the impious and horrible drama of his Christ-defying wrath, eat of his bread, drank of his cup, yea, and hearkened with sympathy to his talk of home, to his yearning speech concerning those he loved there?

The sense of the doom that was upon her as upon me—upon her in her young and beautiful life, upon me in my love for her, upon both in the crushing separation of the grave, whether 'twas for her to die or for me; oh! I say, the sense of this thing weighed as iron and as ice upon my heart, crushing out all hope and leaving me as blind in my soul as my eyes were in the fog to steer the boat through the silence of that vaporous night, hearing nothing but the rippling of the water, and the blunted edge of the surf's wild beat, and beholding nothing but the outline of my dearest—of my dearest—stricken and dying at my feet!

Suddenly the fog broke up. It was then about two o'clock. The vapour floated into league-long streaks, lunar-tinted here and there into an ærial mockery of the rainbow, and over the edge of one great steam-like body the moon with an ice-like, diamond-splendour of radiance looked down upon us out of a pool of black sky. The lustre had something of the sharpness of daylight, only that the flooded pearl of it wore the complexion of death, all things showing out wan; and in that illumination the delicate gold of Imogene's hair melted into the extreme pallor of the forehead on which it stirred to the wind, and her lips were of the colour of her cheeks, and her half-closed lids like wax.