The Illimitable Senses

by James B. Connolly

The Illimitable Senses

BY JAMES B. CONNOLLY

IT was one of those nights that sometimes come to Georges: air without motion, sea serenely still.

One by one the men coiled in their lines, left their berths by the vessel's rail, salted down the fish, went below, turned into their bunks, and soon were sleeping soundly. All but three or four, who, with the passenger, were not yet wearied; and these presently began to wonder, and, after a while, to venture guesses, as to when the skipper would come below. They could hear him walking the quarter, evidently striving to tread softly, but clearly failing; for one who had a mind to sleep, turning again in his bunk, cried querulously, "I wish the old man 'd get out of those red-jacks."

"Hush, boy," interposed old Bob, who knew the skipper longest; "something's vexed him. He'll work it off, and then he'll come and tell us what it was about."

And he came below at last, but not yet in his usual good temper. Plainly it was as old Bob had said—something had vexed him; and as nobody, as a rule, has much to say on a fishing-vessel while the skipper is put out about anything, so now respectful silence held the cabin—held until, after the various uneasy movements and rumbling sighs which in him betokened disappointment as well as vexation, he at length settled into his chair and began the preparations for the long-delayed night smoke; whereat gentle leading questions were inserted into the silence, first by old Bob, then by the less venturesome, all with a view to draw the master, who took no immediate heed, but exactly cut the tobacco and filled the bowl, carefully tamped the brown weed with his forefinger, and smartly drew the match across his thigh.

Pu-u-f-f! pu-u-f-f! pu-uff! puff! Gradually he established a good draught; slowly the marks of annoyance faded from his brow—which, incidentally, was a fine brow, with noticeable development above the deep-set, glowing eyes, and of a white that lay like a broad band between the bronze of cheek and chin below and the iron gray of the thick hair above. At length, as he would have said himself, he eased his sheets and let her run.

"Did you ever, when you were walking along the street, hear a child utter some foul word that he probably no more knew the meaning of than if 'twas a bit of some foreign language? Yes, of course. We all have; and never heard but what we felt—not angry, altogether, but grieved and shocked to think of what an upbringing that child was getting. Well, that was something like the way I felt to-night when up on deck young Russell, because some little thing went wrong, had to curse and swear and blaspheme as he did. He said things, and at his age no more notion of the awful things he was saying than the little child that utters oaths on the street—oaths that he's heard his elders using. I stopped Russell, of course, after a while; but my mind's been on it since. I tell you I don't like it. I'd known young Russell's father—shipmates we'd been for many a year before he was lost; and thinking of him up there while I was walking the deck alone a while ago, I got to thinking of our own young days, and the Didymus, and that night which none of us who were there will ever forget—the night Eb Stone was struck down at the rail. Bob there was one of that crew, and he too has been a changed man since. You never heard of that?"

The passenger had heard of it from a dozen sources, but never a first-hand version of it; and so, "Never from one of the crew," he answered now.

"Well, you'll hear it now from one who was there, and then you won't wonder, maybe, why I was so disturbed a while ago. This time I speak of the Didymus was hand-lining on Georges here, and those few of the crew now alive are a good many years older than they were then. Young fellows all we were, few of us more than twenty-five, and proud of our notoriety as the most blasphemous crew that ever sailed out of Gloucester. To explain how that crew came to be that, would be a long sermon on one thing or another—hypocrisy mostly. They came from people who were more concerned that they should be well thought of than that they should themselves do well. These young fellows weren't old enough then to have got to where they could separate the true from the false; and so, seeing their elders preaching one thing and practising another, they come to the way of thinking that what their elders preached, as well as their elders themselves, must be in the wrong. From fearing God too much they come to fear Him too little. And so with them 'twas a daily riot of scoffing, blaspheming, mocking what men should hold holy. Maybe some of them pretended to be worse than they were, after the manner of young men; but there they were, that hard crew of the Didymus.

"Well, this trip they were doing the usual things in the usual way, invoking the devil, defying the Almighty, profaning sacred things. A common thing with them when they went to their berths by the rail, before they hove over their line to fish, was to throw over a copper or a nickel—generally a copper, they coming mostly of thrifty ancestry—and, as it dropped into the sea, to call by name the particular power they had it in mind to ridicule. 'Come up out of the sea, you fork-tailed Beelzebub,' they'd call, casting in the coin, 'and show us your horned head till I clout it with an oar'; or, 'Come up, whoever You are that knows all and sees all, and scare me blue, as they say You can.' But that's as much as I dare repeat now, though one time they slipped off the end of my tongue as the swash off the rail of a rolling deck.

"And so it came to the night that Eb Stone came on deck, saying he couldn't sleep, and guessed he'd fish for a while. There was nobody else awake at the time but me. I was on watch, and tending to my line too, as a man on watch quite often does, when he's not overtired and the night is fine. Having to stay awake anyway, a man might as well be fishing and adding to his store as be doing nothing. This night, when Eb came up, I thought it would be a good chance to go below and get a mug of coffee. Eb could have an eye out, and there was no danger anyway, for it was a wonderfully fine night—'twas the look of to-night made me think of it, even as much as Russell's words a while back—clear as could be, except for the little spats of clouds drifting across the moon and throwing small, little shadows onto the sea. A quiet sea it was, too, the same as it is to-night, smooth as the oilcloth on this cabin floor. A wonderful night altogether, I couldn't help remarking to Eb as I was about to drop below.

"'Yes,' said Eb—to the rail he was then and ready to bait up,—'mighty fine night to get a hook into a few people from the other world. I wonder, now, would I pull up a devil if I was to throw a penny over?' and picked up his line to overhaul it. 'And bring my knife from my bunk when you come up, will you, Ned? But no hurry—there's a couple of baits here still fresh enough to use.'

"The last thing I saw as I sank down the companionway was Eb ready to cast over his line as he stood by the rail. Well, I drew a mug of coffee from the pot on the stove. It was wonderfully quiet below as well as on deck. Not a sound from out of the bunks, where a dozen men were sleeping. You know how, among ten or twelve healthy men, there will always be two or three, at least, to turn and toss, especially if they've eaten a hearty supper; but that night they were all breathing like infants. Unnaturally quiet, altogether, I was thinking—so quiet that before lifting the mug of coffee to my lips I couldn't help looking toward the bunks again to make sure there really were men in 'em. Yes, they were occupied—of course 'twas foolish ever to doubt it. And yet, after that, I had to look up the hatchway to assure myself again by the sight of the peeking moon and the little patches of drifting clouds that I wasn't in a dream. But there they were, all the tranquil heavens.

THERE WE FOUND HIM STRETCHED FULL LENGTH

"Well, I began to grow lonesome then—almost called to Eb once, just for the companionship of a human voice; but I thought again how foolish that would be, and turned to my coffee. The coffee was good and warm, and with two or three mouthfuls of that inside me I began to feel better. And yet I looked up the companionway to the sky again—and I simply couldn't get over it, such a supernaturally quiet night it was!

"And all at once, while I was looking up—I never knew why, certainly I didn't intend to,—I set down my cup of coffee, and I found myself trying to catch my breath; which couldn't have been for any lack of air—there was plenty of air, the companion slides drawn far back—but my lungs seemed not to want it. It didn't smell right to me, that air—it really didn't. 'Twas like something decaying. And, trying to pick up the mug of coffee again, my fingers felt numb. I grew scared—I did. What in God's name is the matter?' I heard myself saying, but not like myself, either—much as though it was somebody else talking. 'But I will pick it up,' I said, like somebody was daring me to do it, and grabbed the mug of coffee suddenly, as though I was afraid somebody would really stop me. And I got it, too, but my fingers barely on the handle, when such a shriek! Just one shriek. There wasn't any notion to compare it to anything then, but I've often thought since that if 'twas a lost soul being dragged over the brink of hell I'd expect he'd shriek like that.

"One breath before, and I thought nothing short of a call to judgment could have waked that crew for'ard; but with that cry from above, every man of them leaped from his bunk. None of 'em needed more than boots and trousers to be dressed, but some, not even waiting for that, rushed on deck to see what it was. Eb's berth was on the starb'd side, just for'ard of the fore-rigging; and there we found him, stretched full length beside the rail, his feet to the cleat under the pin-rail and his head almost against the drumhead of the windlass. And that wasn't all. His line was cut clean off at the rail; not broke off, nor bit off, but cut clean off as with a knife. Said somebody, 'He must have cut it himself,' and we looked for his knife, and couldn't find it. And then I remembered Eb couldn't have had a knife on deck—he'd asked me to get his from his bunk when I dropped below for a mug-up. And, sure enough, under the mattress in Eb's bunk we found it, where he always kept it when he wasn't fishing; and nobody else's knife was missing from its place.

"We looked out to sea then, and there wasn't a thing there—no craft, no light, no sail, no floating thing of any kind; and 'twas the kind of a night, too, to see far, but nothing there; only the awful quiet and the drifting bits of clouds across the sky, and the little shadows they threw on the sea, which was itself so smooth that not even the play of the everlasting tides was rippling the surface of it.

"We carried him below, stiff and motionless, and laid him on the cabin floor. We called to him; and before his eyes, wide open and staring up to the roof of the cabin, we waved things—even the tin-type of his girl we took from the shelf in his bunk. But not the smallest twist of his lips, nor quiver of his eyelids, to show that he heard or saw.

"There was nothing to it but put for home. So we up-anchor; and I mind how mournful sounded the clinking of the chain through the hawse-hole; and winching in, there were men on that vessel who dreaded standing on the side of the windlass where Eb's body had lain. Arrived in Gloucester harbor, we carried Eb to the house of his only brother, and there we laid him on the lounge in the parlor. And an awful duty that—bearing a dead man in from sea."

"But was he dead, then, skipper? I always heard—"

"Well, as to that, he was dead, and yet he wasn't dead. He lay there stiff and stark, with never a word or moan, and the doctor came; and another doctor came and another doctor came; but none of 'em could say what was the matter with poor Eb. And seven nights from the night he was struck down the last flutterings of his heart stopped entirely."

Tick, tick, tick, went the cabin clock. Tick, tick, insistently, until it gained the skipper's attention. "Aye, I 'most forgot her," said the skipper, and stood u]) to have a look. "She'll be a few seconds fast, I'm thinking," and compared it with the superb little chronometer that sat in a polished cedar case in his room. "But only a few seconds—gains maybe four seconds a day. Pretty good that, when you allow for the pitching of the vessel and where it has to hang. But it was always a great little clock that," and this last he almost whispered. "'Most nine o'clock already." Carefully he replaced the chronometer, and presently closed the stateroom door behind him.

The passenger turned from the blank door to old Bob. "Surely he's not turning in?"

"'Sh—!" warned old Bob.

And silence held the cabin again, till the door was slid back, and the skipper, resuming his chair and leaning forward, fastened his gaze on the hot coals in the stove.

"But, Captain"—the passenger was consumed with curiosity,—"during that seven days and nights, didn't Eb Stone ever come to sufficiently to offer a word of explanation, any word or sign to throw a little light on the matter?"

At sound of the passenger's voice the skipper came out of his reverie. Tightly he closed his eyes, as if to shut out the pictures in the fire, and over them pressed his tense finger-tips. "Eb? Never a word. He died without speaking."

"But didn't the doctors have anything to say?"

"What could they? They wanted to cut poor Eb open, but Eb's brother wouldn't stand for it. 'No,' he said, 'it's something more than doctors can explain,' and had him buried without an autopsy."

"And what did you think yourself, Captain?"

"Think? Well, 'twould take a long time to say, but I know what I did, and what effect it had on me. From the day of his burial I made up my mind never again to cast ridicule on things that other people venerated, simply because I didn't wholly believe in them. I began to see that there might be things in tho universe that my brain was unequal to grasping. And—"

The passenger was about to offer a theory, but the skipper raised a protesting hand. "Wait a bit with your scientists. And adhering to that, I came to be a better man. And from being a better man I came to have the courage to marry a girl that I'd almost begun to think was never to be for me; and, marrying her, life began to take on new aspects. It was no longer hard and gray, though 'twas terrible enough at times—mostly through fear for her. For one thing, she had, not exactly a dread of the sea, but a dread of what it might do to me—in winter-time especially. You see, she was the kind that knew—whether I was near her or away from her didn't matter—she knew when danger threatened me. She'd wake out of her sleep at night—many's the time she's told me, and the children have heard her, too—and cry out my name and pray to God to save me. And when next I'd get home, after I was quiet and calm under the home influence, and no distress to hear it, she'd tell me, and, coming to look into it, sure enough I'd find that on the night or day, at the time she said, myself or the vessel was in more or less danger. Sometimes I had to strain my memory to find grounds for her alarm, but there'd nearly always be something, maybe some little thing that any man would forget two minutes after it happened, but yet a terrible matter 'twould be to a timid and loving woman ashore."

"Nearly always," you said, Captain?"

"Nearly always, that's right. There were times when I couldn't discover the least ground for her fright; occasionally, on coming home from the calmest trips imaginable, she'd have her fears to tell. And when I'd laugh at her then, she'd only say 'twas there just the same. 'You don't know what might have been threatening you in the dark and you not able to see it,' she'd say.

Well, in the course of time I got to be a different man. No man could've been married to my wife long and not be; and I got to appreciate her, and coming home from sea and meeting her again got to be what I lived for. I came, too, to believe in the mysterious power she had of knowing how things had gone with me. Even when there'd been no particular danger, she'd know whether I'd had a hard trip or a pleasant one; but saying nothing of it at the moment, she'd meet me at the door with just the word to suit my feelings, though, again, as I said, never any long speeches till I'd been made comfortable generally.

"At last it came to what I want to tell you about. I'd got a fine little chronometer for taking some people off a wreck, and by and by I took some more off another dismasted vessel—at great peril, as the resolutions went with 'em said, though 'twas just an ordinary sea running at the time. But, anyway, I got another chronometer, both the same winter. And my wife says I must give her one and keep one on the vessel. Which I did. There in my room, now, is mine—you saw me go to it a while ago. By it I take care to set the cabin clock every few days, and after every trip I take it ashore and compare it with my wife's at home; and if they don't agree have them corrected. But they need but small correction. They are both good chronometers—sometimes those rescue ones are that way—and these two 'll run almost tick for tick for months together. Which is just what my wife wants; for every night, exactly at nine o'clock, she has the older children kneeling by their bedsides and saying a prayer for me. She prays with them. And I've got to where I say a prayer myself aboard the vessel at the same hour, if the weather'll allow. And there's where the chronometer comes into the story. You all know of the last gale out here on Georges. Of course. Fourteen vessels and one hundred and sixty-five men lost that night. Every third man and vessel of the hand-lining fleet went down inside twenty-four hours. We were in that gale, this same vessel, and no particular praise to me or the crew—and a fine crew, too—that ourselves and vessel came out of it safe. And how was that? I'll tell you.

"A wicked night it was, and we trying to buck our way off the Bank. Wind? Lord knows, maybe ninety or a hundred miles an hour 'twas blowing. Frightful—yes. Under a two-reefed fores'l we were, and that was plenty. Black as hell, and seas to your masthead. All around us we could hear the calls of men in peril, with their voices, when sometimes they'd rise above the wind, like the cries of ghosts in the night. Suddenly comes a bolt of thunder and a flash of lightning, so bright and sudden as to blind us almost, and in the glare of it we saw the other two vessels. It was like seeing when you're being photographed in a flash-light group at night—the sudden report and glare, and the other people being seen suddenly—and then darkness again, with a ringing in your ears, and you trying to keep your eyes from blinking after it. 'Twas that flash of light saved us. There were three vessels of us about to come together, and you know what happens to vessels that come together on Georges in a gale. We saw them, just time to shift the wheel and to scrape by, the Smuggler to one side and the Barmecides the other. Man, but 'twas close!

"'TWAS THAT FLASH OF LIGHT SAVED US"

"But more wonderful than the flash of lightning or our being saved and the two other vessels being lost—which they were—we could hear them grinding together and their calls in the dark—and, worst of it all, we couldn't help, and they went, God rest 'em! But the wonderful thing—just at the time of the flash, which we easily fixed by the cabin clock—old Bob there was to be relieved at the wheel on the hour, and the new man on watch had just looked at the clock—that same clock, which I then as well as now kept to exact time with the chronometers,—he'd just taken a peep and said, 'Less than a minute now,' and had drawn on his mitts and had one foot on the companionway steps there to go on deck, when the flash came. Well, ashore, as it happened, which it doesn't always, it was bad weather that same night too, and my wife was feeling worried, but not worrying enough to make any fuss over, for she knew that it might be bad weather in Gloucester and good weather on Georges. The children were sitting around reading or playing—she was nursing the baby—when all at once she set the baby down and got the children together—she didn't know why, and all in a moment. 'Children,' she said,—'Anna, Jack, Tom, Irene—on your knees, quick! and pray for your father—"

"'Why, mamma, it's only eight o'clock, an hour to bedtime yet,' says Irene.

"'H'sh! your father's in danger—pray with me now!'

"And they repeated the prayers after her; and the chronometer tinkling eight bells as they prayed, little Irene turned her head to tell it to hush. It didn't seem right to her that even the striking of a clock should be allowed to disturb prayers."

The skipper drew the sensitive finger-tips slowly down over forehead, eyelids, cheeks, and jaw. "Eye-ah!" he sighed, and slipped feet out of slipshods, and, after another pause, slipped suspenders from shoulder to waist and went to the companionway, and there for a while stood, head above the house, for a whiff of the air, and presently returned and faced the passenger.

"And what do your scientists make of that?"

"Oh, they've long been working on the question of psychic force."

"H-m! and consider it, most of 'em, a disease of the nerves, hallucination and so on. Well, my wife's not one of those that take in mysterious seances in darkened, smelly rooms. She's a healthy, lovable woman, with eight healthy, handsome children. Now what?"

"Well, telepathy's admitted by some."

"By some, yes, but half doubting. And others?"

"Well, superstition."

"Superstition, that's it. What they don't understand, whatever's beyond their dull imaginations and souls—for the average scientist is weak in what we agree to call a soul—whatever's beyond them they say bah! old superstitions! And why? Lord knows, unless it's because they can't explain it. Now there will always be the so-called scientists, and useful people they'll be, too, and yet more useful if they weren't so fond of overrating their mission, which is to deal mostly with facts, so called, of the physical world—things you can measure with a bushel-basket or a tape, or weigh on a pair of platform scales. If only now and then they wouldn't consider all but their own cold-blooded kind deficient in intellect and would try to explain, instead of destroy, the faith in so many things that make for the betterment of mankind. These men who dabble in laboratories should really follow behind. There is where they might become useful. A hundred things we might quote, but take the one thing that all the world is interested in now. Take wireless telegraphy. Now, before the days of wireless telegraphy, you had your scientists, didn't you?"

"Surely. They were very active, too."

"Aye, and so are ants, though mostly by way of example, and they mustn't mistake their little sand-heaps for Himalayas. Well, suppose we say one hundred years ago, or fifty or sixty years ago, before the cable was laid, a man came to them and said, 'The other day I sent a message across the sea—from a point in Newfoundland I asked a question of a man in Ireland, and got his answer.' What would they have said to that man? We all know what they'd have said. Well, suppose, again, that to-day a fine old lady, who has lived a full life, loved and married and borne her brood of children, and her children after her borne children, too, and some have lived and some have died—she has christened her quick and waked her dead, her own and her children's children—she's had great joys in her life, but mostly she's had great sorrows, and from out of her life has come much thought. And all her life she has been trying to get nearer her Creator. Well, she hears in the night the cry of a beloved—at the other side of the earth he may be. He is in danger, and she hears his cry, his prayer for rescue, his wail of despair. He is dying, and she hears his whispered hope for pardon, and she speaks of it with tears, actually choking with the thought of it. And what is said of it? 'She is an old woman,' they say—your friends the scientists, I mean now—'she is an old woman—can't read or write, possibly. Dreams,' they'll say; 'don't mind her.' And soothe her as if she were a child. And so she is hushed, but something within her is still unsatisfied. And there it is: Marconi in Newfoundland tunes up his instrument to so many vibrations a second, and a man in Ireland, with his instrument—whatever 'tis called—tuned up to the same number of vibrations, gets his message. In their symbols they communicate, and thereby prove the truth of what in an earlier day your friends would label superstition. Yet Marconi is only proving in the physical world what that saintly old woman is doing continually in the spiritual world. All her life she has lived in God. Why can't she, towards the end of it, have the eyes that see, the ears that hear, the divinations that us ordinary fleshly people never have. We know people that would as soon smell a cabbage as a rose, who see no purple in a summer sunset in the hills, who know no difference between the booming of a negro boy on a bass drum and the touch of a heaven-born musician on the violin. You talk to them, and you have to limit your speech. Live with them long enough, and you may come yourself to have the same limited senses, to see nothing delightful in flowers, sunsets, music, poetry, or in any of the beautiful things in life, for we certainly can lose the finer senses by gross living.

"And again, for your people who believe nothing until it is proved to them, and proved according to their own rule; for by proof they mean something they can understand, something that's within their grasp, never for a moment alive to the fact that their grasp on the great things may be pitiably weak. I've had that kind out on a trip with me, and I've seen them grow—actually grow to a bigger conception of things. All their lives they've been looking out of little windows on narrow streets, and suddenly they are brought out here and set face to face with one of the great works of the universe. On a black night I've seen them stand on the deck of this little vessel—no great big seven-hundred-foot ship, with her promenade rail sixty feet from the water; but on this little fisherman, where they have only to lean over the rail and trail their fingers in the ocean. And something comes to them. They don't know what it is. They are then inarticulate, like the child. Something, whatever it is, too big for them to understand. But they feel it, although they never stay long enough to grasp it quite, or to let it take full hold. If they only would stay longer! But no, in a week, a fortnight, they're once more ashore, back to their little four-walled room they go again. Back to their books, compiled by men but half of whom are grown, half developed, deficient in insight, in emotions, in experience of humanity. And, mind you, I'm not deriding science—I'm only saying, why do they not come out in the open and enlarge their vision? A man of the hills and the prairies, they tell me, rarely doubts. And the man of the sea, this I know myself, is never a sceptic; and so to him nothing is impossible."

The last straggler sank to sleep below, and the passenger sought the deck, where only old Bob was; and he, a sculptured figure against the fore-rigging, might have been asleep too. So still he stood that the passenger was in doubt until he reached his side and saw that the steady eyes were really open.

"A grand night, Bob!"

"Aye, lad, grand—and solemn."

"That's it—solemn. Something like the night that Eb Stone was struck down, the skipper was saying a while ago."

"Something like that, but"—his slow eyes roamed sky and sea—"but stiller that night."

"Stiller? Than this? Then the elements themselves must have been asleep, Bob?"

"And why not? Why not to sleep, lad?"

"Sleep?"

"Aye, sleep."

"And dream, too, Bob?"

"Aye, lad, why not? To sleep and dream o' God?"

Why not? The passenger looked above and about. A notable night, not alone for the overpowering beauty—beautiful nights are not rare at sea—but for the amazing quiet of sea and sky. The passenger's thoughts came back to that other night of the Didymus.

Wasn't it possible that a knife was lying around deck, after all? And with it couldn't Eb have cut the line and let it slip overboard then? If not that, what sort of a creature—what manner of a countenance did it bear that the strong man was stricken dead at sight of it?

What was it? Was it— A hundred hypotheses took shape in the passenger's brain. But no, for thirty years the fleet had passed up that question, and in the fleet were those who dwelt ever on the brink of the Great Crossing, and who dwelt there had thoughts beyond the measure of the roof-bound peoples.

The tide was turning; from the chain in the hawse-hole came the almost imperceptible note of chafing; the ceaseless tide against the side of the vessel emitted a gurgle that was like an infant's sob. Bound rolled the stars. The passenger went below.