The Man Who Laughs Page 11

  England disappeared. The fugitives had now nothing round them but the sea.

  All at once night grew awful.

  There was no longer extent or space; the sky became blackness, and closed in round the vessel. The snow began to fall slowly; a few flakes appeared. They might have been ghosts. Nothing else was visible in the course of the wind. They felt as if yielded up. A snare lurked in every possibility.

  It is in this cavernous darkness that in our climate the Polar waterspout makes its appearance.

  A great muddy cloud, like to the belly of a hydra, hung over the ocean, and in places its lividity adhered to the waves. Some of these adherences resembled pouches with holes, pumping the sea, disgorging vapour, and refilling themselves with water. Here and there these suctions drew up cones of foam on the sea.

  The boreal storm hurled itself on the hooker. The hooker rushed to meet it. The squall and the vessel met as though to insult each other.

  In the first mad shock not a sail was clewed up, not a jib lowered, not a reef taken in, so much is flight a delirium. The mast creaked and bent back as if in fear.

  Cyclones, in our northern hemisphere, circle from left to right, in the same direction as the hands of a watch with a velocity which is sometimes as much as sixty miles an hour. Although she was entirely at the mercy of that whirling power, the hooker behaved as if she were out in moderate weather, without any further precaution than keeping her head on to the rollers, with the wind broad on the bow so as to avoid being pooped or caught broadside on. This semi-prudence would have availed her nothing in case of the wind's shifting and taking her aback.

  A deep rumbling was brewing up in the distance. The roar of the abyss, nothing can be compared to it. It is the great brutish howl of the universe. What we call matter, that unsearchable organism, that amalgamation of incommensurable energies, in which can occasionally be detected an almost imperceptible degree of intention which makes us shudder, that blind, benighted cosmos, that enigmatical Pan, has a cry, a strange cry, prolonged, obstinate, and continuous, which is less than speech and more than thunder. That cry is the hurricane. Other voices, songs, melodies, clamours, tones, proceed from nests, from broods, from pairings, from nuptials, from homes. This one, a trumpet, comes out of the Naught, which is All. Other voices express the soul of the universe, this one expresses the monster. It is the howl of the formless. It is the inarticulate finding utterance in the indefinite. A thing it is full of pathos and terror. Those clamours converse above and beyond man. They rise, fall, undulate, determine waves of sound, form all sorts of wild surprises for the mind, now burst close to the ear with the importunity of a peal of trumpets, now assail us with the rumbling hoarseness of distance. Giddy uproar, which resembles a language, and which, in fact, is a language. It is the effort which the world makes to speak. It is the lisping of the wonderful. In this wail is manifested vaguely all that the vast dark palpitation endures, suffers, accepts, rejects. For the most part it talks nonsense; it is like an access of chronic sickness, and rather an epilepsy diffused than a force employed; we fancy that we are witnessing the descent of supreme evil into the infinite. At moments we seem to discern a reclamation of the elements, scone vain effort of chaos to reassert itself over creation. At times it is a complaint. The void bewails and justifies itself. It is as the pleading of the world's cause. We can fancy that the universe is engaged in a lawsuit; we listen, we try to grasp the reasons given, the redoubtable for and against. Such a moaning of the shadows has the tenacity of a syllogism. Here is a vast trouble for thought. Here is the raison d'être of mythologies and polytheisms. To the terror of those great murmurs are added superhuman outlines melting away as they appear--Eumenides which are almost distinct, throats of furies shaped in the clouds, Plutonian chimeras almost defined. No horrors equal those sobs, those laughs, those tricks of tumult, those inscrutable questions and answers, those appeals to unknown aid. Man knows not what to become in the presence of that awful incantation. He bows under the enigma of those Draconian intonations. What latent meaning have they? What do they signify? What do they threaten? What do they implore? It would seem as though all bonds were loosened. Vociferations from precipice to precipice, from air to water, from the wind to the wave, from the rain to the rock, from the zenith to the nadir, from the stars to the foam--the abyss unmuzzled--such is that tumult, complicated by some mysterious strife with the evil consciences.

  The loquacity of night is not less lugubrious than its silence. One feels in it the anger of the unknown.

  Night is a presence. Presence of what?

  For that matter we must distinguish between night and the shadows. In the night there is the absolute; in the darkness the multiple. Grammar, logic as it is, admits of no singular for the shadows. The night is one, the shadows are many. [1]

  This mist of nocturnal mystery is the scattered, the fugitive, the crumbling, the fatal; one feels earth no longer, one feels the other reality.

  In the shadow, infinite and indefinite, lives something or some one; but that which lives there forms part of our death. After our earthly passage, when that shadow shall be light for us, the life which is beyond our life shall seize us. Meanwhile it appears to touch and try us. Obscurity is a pressure. Night is, as it were, a hand placed on our soul. At certain hideous and solemn hours we feel that which is beyond the wall of the tomb encroaching on us.

  Never does this proximity of the unknown seem more imminent than in storms at sea. The horrible combines with the fantastic. The possible interrupter of human actions, the old cloud-compeller, has it in his power to mold, in whatsoever shape he chooses, the inconsistent element, the limitless incoherence, the force diffused and undecided of aim. That mystery, the tempest, every instant accepts and executes some unknown changes of will, apparent or real.

  Poets have, in all ages, called this the caprice of the waves. But there is no such thing as caprice. The disconcerting enigmas which in nature we call caprice, and in human life chance, are splinters of a law revealed to us in glimpses.

  [1] The above is a very inefficient and rather absurd translation of the French. It turns upon the fact that in the French language the word for darkness is plural--Ténèbres.--TRANSLATOR.

  * * *

  VIII

  NIX ET NOX

  THE CHARACTERISTIC of the snowstorm is its blackness. Nature's habitual aspect during a storm, the earth or sea black and the sky pale, is reversed; the sky is black, the ocean white, foam below, darkness above; a horizon walled in with smoke; a zenith roofed with crape. The tempest resembles a cathedral hung with mourning, but no light in that cathedral: no phantom lights on the crests of the waves, no spark, no phosphorescence, naught but a huge shadow. The Polar cyclone differs from the Tropical cyclone, inasmuch as the one sets fire to every light, and the other extinguishes them all. The world is suddenly converted into the arched vault of a cave. Out of the night falls a dust of pale spots, which hesitate between sky and sea. These spots, which are flakes of snow, slip, wander, and float. It is like the tears of a winding sheet putting themselves into lifelike motion. A mad wind mingles with this dissemination. Blackness crumbling into whiteness, the furious into the obscure, all the tumult of which the sepulchre is capable, a whirlwind under a catafalque--such is the snowstorm.

  Underneath trembles the ocean, forming and re-forming over portentous unknown depths.

  In the Polar wind, which is electrical, the flakes turn suddenly into hailstones, and the air becomes filled with projectiles; the water crackles, shot with grape.

  No thunderstrokes: the lightning of boreal storms is silent. What is sometimes said of the cat, "it swears," may be applied to this lightning. It is a menace proceeding from a mouth half-open, and strangely inexorable. The snowstorm is a storm blind and dumb; when it has passed, the ships also are often blind and the sailors dumb.

  To escape from such an abyss is difficult.

  It would be wrong, however, to believe shipwreck to be absolutely inevitable. The Danish
fishermen of Disco and the Balesin; the seekers of black whales; Hearn steering toward Bering Strait to discover the mouth of Coppermine River; Hudson, Mackenzie, Vancouver, Ross, Dumont D'Urville all underwent at the Pole itself the wildest hurricanes, and escaped out of them.

  It was into this description of tempest that the hooker had entered, triumphant and in full sail. Frenzy against frenzy. Ashen Montgomery, escaping from Rouen, threw his galley, with all the force of its oars, against the chain barring the Seine at La Bouille, he showed similar effrontery. The Matutina sailed on fast; she bent so much under her sails, that at moments she made a fearful angle with the sea of fifteen degrees; but her good bellied keel adhered to the water as if glued to it. The keel resisted the grasp of the hurricane. The lantern at the prow cast its light ahead.

  The cloud, full of winds, dragging its tumour over the deep, cramped and eat more and more into the sea round the hooker. Not a gull, not a seamew, nothing but snow. The expanse of the field of waves was becoming contracted and terrible; only three or four gigantic ones were visible.

  Now and then.a tremendous flash of lightning of a red copper colour broke out behind the obscure superposition of the horizon and the zenith; that sudden release of vermilion flame revealed the horror of the clouds; that abrupt conflagration of the depths, to which for an instant the first tiers of clouds and the distant boundaries of the celestial chaos seemed to adhere, placed the abyss in perspective. On this ground of fire the snowflakes showed black; they might have been compared to dark butterflies flying about in a red-hot furnace--then all was extinguished.

  The first explosion over, the squall, still pursuing the hooker, began to roar in thorough bass. This phase of grumbling is a perilous diminution of uproar. Nothing is so terrifying as this monologue of the storm. This gloomy recitative appears to serve as a moment of rest to the mysterious combating forces, and indicates a species of patrol kept in the unknown.

  The hooker held wildly on her course. Her two mainsails especially were doing fearful work. The sky and sea were as of ink with jets of foam running higher than the mast. Every instant masses of water swept the deck like a deluge, and at each roll of the vessel the hawse-holes, now to starboard, now to larboard, became as so many open mouths vomiting back the foam into the sea. The women had taken refuge in the cabin, but the men remained on deck; the blinding snow eddied round, the spitting surge mingled with it. All was fury.

  At that moment the chief of the band, standing abaft on the stern-frames, holding on with one hand to the shrouds, and with the other taking off the kerchief he wore round his head and waving it in the light of the lantern, gay and arrogant, with pride in his face, and his hair in wild disorder, intoxicated by all the darkness, cried out:

  "We are free!"

  "Free, free, free," echoed the fugitives; and the band, seizing hold of the rigging, rose up on deck.

  "Hurrah!" shouted the chief.

  And the band shouted in the storm:

  "Hurrah!"

  Just as this clamour was dying away in the tempest, a loud solemn voice rose from the other end of the vessel, saying:

  "Silence!"

  All turned their heads. The darkness was thick, and the doctor was leaning against the mast so that he seemed part of it, and they could not see him.

  The voice spoke again:

  "Listen!"

  All were silent.

  Then did they distinctly hear through the darkness the toll of a bell.

  * * *

  IX

  THE CHARGE CONFIDED TO A RAGING SEA

  THE SKIPPER, at the helm, burst out laughing:

  "A bell, that's good. We are on the larboard tack. What does the bell prove? Why, that we have land to starboard."

  The firm and measured voice of the doctor replied:

  "You have not land to starboard."

  "But we have," shouted the skipper.

  "No!"

  "But that bell tolls from the land."

  "That bell," said the doctor, "tolls from the sea."

  A shudder passed over these daring men, the haggard faces of the two women appeared above the companion like two hobgoblins conjured up: the doctor took a step forward, separating his tall form from the mast. From the depth of the night's darkness came the toll of the bell.

  The doctor resumed:

  "There is in the midst of the sea, half-way between Portland and the Channel Islands, a buoy, placed there as a caution; that buoy is moored by chains to the shoal, and floats on the top of the water. On the buoy is fixed an iron trestle, and across the trestle a bell is hung. In bad weather heavy seas toss the buoy, and the bell rings. That is the bell you hear."

  The doctor paused to allow an extra-violent gust of wind to pass over, waited until the sound of the bell reasserted itself, and then went on:

  "To hear that bell in a storm, when the nor'wester is blowing, is to be lost. Wherefore? For this reason: if you hear the bell, it is because the wind brings it to you. But the wind is nor'westerly, and the breakers of Aurigny lie east. You hear the bell only because you are between the buoy and the breakers. It 1S on those breakers the wind is driving you. You are on the wrong side of the buoy. If you were on the right side, you would be out at sea on a safe course, and you would not hear the bell. The wind would not convey the sound to you. You would pass close to the buoy without knowing it. We are out of our course. That bell is shipwreck sounding the tocsin. Now, look out!"

  As the doctor spoke the bell, soothed by a lull of the storm, rang slowly stroke by stroke; and its intermitting toll seemed to testify to the truth of the old man's words. It was as the knell of the abyss.

  All listened breathless. Now to the voice. Now to the bell.

  * * *

  X

  THE COLOSSAL SAVAGE, THE STORM

  IN THE MEANTIME the skipper had caught up his speaking-trumpet.

  "Strike every sail, my lads; let go the sheets, man the down-hauls, lower ties and brails. Let us steer to the west, let us regain the high sea; head for the buoy, steer for the bell, there's an oiling down there. We've yet a chance.

  "Try," said the doctor.

  Let us remark here, by the way, that this ringing buoy, a kind of bell-tower on the deep, was removed in 1802. There are yet alive very old mariners who remember hearing it. It forewarned, but rather too late.

  The orders of the skipper were obeyed. The Languedocian made a third sailor. All bore a hand. Not satisfied with brailing up, they furled the sails; lashed the earrings, secured the clew-lines, bunt-lines, and leech-lines; and clapped preventer-shrouds on the block straps, which thus might serve as backstays. They fished the mast. They battened down the ports and bull's eyes, which is a method of walling up a ship. These evolutions, though executed in a lubberly fashion, were, nevertheless, thoroughly effective. The hooker was stripped to bare poles. But, in proportion as the vessel, stowing every stitch of canvas, became more helpless, the havoc of both winds and waves increased. The seas ran mountains high.

  The hurricane, like an executioner hastening to his victim, began to dismember the craft. There came, in the twinkling of an eye, a dreadful crash: the topsails were blown from the bolt-ropes, the chess-trees were hewn asunder, the deck was swept clear, the shrouds were carried away, the mast went by the board, all the lumber of the wreck was flying in shivers. The main shrouds gave out, although they were turned in, and stoppered to four fathoms.

  The magnetic currents common to snowstorms hastened the destruction of the rigging. It broke as much from the effect of effluvium as the violence of the wind. Most of the chain gear, fouled in the blocks, ceased to work. Forward the bows, aft the quarters, quivered under the terrific shocks. One wave washed overboard the compass and its binnacle. A second carried away the boat, which, like a box slung under a carriage, had been, in accordance with the quaint Asturian custom, lashed to the bowsprit. A third bleaker wrenched off the spritsail yard. A fourth swept away the figurehead and signal light.

  The rudder only was lef
t.

  To replace the ship's bow lantern they set fire to, and suspended at the stem, a large block of wood covered with oakum and tar.

  The mast, broken in two, all bristling with quivering splinters, ropes, blocks, and yards, cumbered the deck. In falling it had stove in a plank of the starboard gunwale. The skipper, still firm at the helm, shouted:

  "While we can steer we have yet a chance. The lower planks hold good. Axes, axes! Overboard with the mast! Clear the decks!"

  Both crew and passengers worked with the excitement of despair. A few strokes of the hatchets and it was done. They pushed the mast over the side. The deck was cleared.

  "Now," continued the skipper, "take a rope's-end and lash me to the helm." To the tiller they bound him.

  While they were fastening him he laughed, and shouted:

  "Blow, old hurdy-gurdy, bellow. I've seen your equal off Cape Machichaco."

  And when secured he clutched the helm with that strange hilarity which danger awakens.

  "All goes well, my lads. Long live our Lady of Buglose; let us steer west."

  An enormous wave came down abeam, and fell on the vessel's quarter. There is always in storms a tiger-like wave, a billow fierce and decisive, which, attaining a certain height, creeps horizontally over the surface of the waters for a time, then rises, roars, rages, and, falling on the distressed vessel, tears it limb from limb.

  A cloud of foam covered the entire poop of the Matutina.

  There was heard above the confusion of darkness and waters a crash.

  When the spray cleared off, when the stern again rose in view, the skipper and the helm had disappeared. Both had been swept away.

  The helm and the man they had but just secured to it had passed with the wave into the hissing turmoil of the hurricane.