by Mike Ashley
“The voyage began delightfully. I was the only American on board. The rest were merchants going over to take up relations with us again, and a brand-new consul or two.
“Near evening on the second day something queer happened. It was foggy, and I was on deck, talking, in a desultory way, with the first mate, but really wondering if I’d get to sleep to the obligato of the fog-horn all night, when suddenly out of the dark came the nose of a great ship. Our engines were reversed, but not in time, and she struck us amidships. I cowered down. Yes, I did. There was no time for life-preservers and lowering boats. I simply cowered, and put my hand over my eyes. But there was no crash, no shock, no grinding of splintered wood and steel. I opened my eyes. The first mate was still there, a foot or two further from me, as if the apparition had started him toward his duty in case of collision. But he was looking off into the fog, and now he turned and looked at me. I have seen men frightened, but never one in such case as this.
“ ‘Did you see it?’ he asked. It was as if he implored me to say I did, because otherwise he’d have to doubt his own reason.
“ ‘Did she sheer off ?’ I asked. My voice sounded queer to me.
“ ‘Sheer off ? She struck us amidships and went through us.’
“I began to stare ’round me. I must have looked a fool. It was as if I were trying to find a break in a piece of china. There was the deck unoccupied, except for us two, exactly as it had been when we were struck. There were the smoke-stacks and boats and altogether the familiar outline of the ship.
“ ‘Well!’ said I. My voice was a sort of croak now. ‘You and I are nutty, that’s all. There never was any ship.’
“But he turned and ran up to the lookout, and afterward I heard the wireless zip-zipping away, and later—for I stayed on deck; I couldn’t go below—I saw him and the captain standing amidships and talking. They looked pretty serious and really a little sick, just as I felt. And I didn’t speak to either of them. Didn’t dare. You know when there’s a fire in the hold, or any such pleasantry on board ship, you’d better let the great high josses alone. Well, that’s what I did. The next day I found the first mate wouldn’t notice me. He spoke English perfectly, but all I could get out of him was a Nein or a Was? and as stupid a grin as I ever saw on a man’s face. So I understood the incident was closed. And it began to look a little thin even to me, who’d seen it. But the next night, with no fog at all, the thing happened again. A big British liner came down on us, and we did all in the power of navigation to escape her; but she raked us and passed through us from stem to stern, and I swear I put out a hand and touched her as she cut the length of the deck. For an instant I believed what I know every officer and man on the ship believed at the time—believed madly, for you couldn’t reason in the face of that monstrous happening. They believed England had broken the peace, only they cursed ‘perfidious Albion’, and I knew she’d got wind of some devil’s deed we hadn’t heard of, and was at her old beneficence of police work on the sea. But it was only an instant we could think that, for there, untouched, unharmed, at her maximum speed went the English liner. And we, too, were untouched. We weren’t making our course because we’d manoeuvred so as to avoid her, and now we lay there an instant, trembling, before we swung about again. Yes, it’s a fact; the ship did tremble, and though there was her plain mechanical reason for it, it seemed to be out of panic, just as everybody aboard of her was trembling. And that night the ship’s doctor, a fat, red-haired man whom I’d remembered as waltzing indefatigably and exquisitely on a trip to the West Indies, but who had been turned into a jelly of melancholy by the war, did talk to me. I think he had to. He thought he was dotty and the entire lot were dotty. He had to find out whether a plain American was onto it.
“ ‘A pleasant night, last night,’ he said.
“I knew what he was coming at, and I thought there was no need of wasting our time by preambles. ‘Yes,’ said I, ‘till the British liner ran us down.’
“He looked at me—well, I can’t tell you how grateful he looked. All melted up, you know, the way those fatties are sometimes. I stepped away a little. I thought he was going to kiss me.
“ ‘You saw it, too. God be thanked!’ said he.
“ ‘Saw it!’ said I. ‘I not only saw her, but I touched her on the elbow as she split the deck. Splendid old lady, wasn’t she? But eccentric. Makes nothing of cutting a ship in two, just for fun, I suppose, and not losing speed. Her little joke. That’s how I take it, don’t you?’
“But I shouldn’t have chaffed him. It shut him up. I think he gathered I was in it somehow. But the fact is, I was scared. Well, if you’ll believe me (and of course you will, for I’ve written the thing out in my Notes on the War, and it’s been quoted over and over till even school children know the text of it), so, as you must believe me and the hundreds that corroborated me, in other cases, the next collision, or ramming—what shall I call it?—happened in broad daylight, ten o’clock in the morning. It was a perfectly clear day and a smooth sea. We were in the track of the freighter Marlborough and by George! she didn’t make way for us. She ran through us as neat as wax and cut us in two. But we didn’t stay cut. We didn’t show a crack. And there she went churning off, as gay as you please, and we steamed on our way. Only we weren’t gay, mind you. We were scared. And the doctor, ghastly again, came stumping across the deck to me, and I thought he was going to fall into my arms’.
“ ‘Lieber Gott!’ said he. ‘What does it mean? We see them, but they don’t see us.’
“That was it. We’d been slow in taking the hint, but we’d got it at last. We were invisible on the seas. We were practically non-existent. And we’d tried wireless. We’d sent out call after call, and finally, desperately, S.O.S., because we knew, if there was a conspiracy against us, no ship but would listen to that. No answer. We were marooned—if you can be marooned on the high seas. Civilization had put us on an island of silence and invisibility. Civilization wasn’t going to play with us any more. Though it wasn’t civilization at all. It wasn’t any punitive device of man. It was something outside.
“For the next two days the doctor hardly left me. I suppose he was forbidden to talk and he had to keep near somebody or die. He wasn’t the man he was when he tripped the light fantastic in the West Indies. He’d been through the war, and now he was going through something worse. And he said to me the morning of the day before we were due in New York: ‘Now we shall be picking up the pilot. And I sha’n’t go back. I’ve got a married daughter in New York. I shall spend the rest of my life with her.’
“And, as we went on, we sighted ship after ship. It was a great day for ships. You don’t know how many there are till they won’t notice you. And not one of them would turn out for us or answer our call. And everybody was desperate now on board, though we had learned we were safe enough, even if they did run us down. So we put on all speed and forged ahead and rammed whatever got in our way—and never sunk them. Never seemed to touch them. But with every one we hit and never hurt our panic grew. Desperate panic it was, from the captain down to me.
“Then we came on the pilot-boats, quite a distance out, for of course everybody knew we were coming and there was a little rivalry about it all. Just as I’d wanted to say I’d crossed on the first liner from Germany, every pilot wanted to be the one to take us in. Well, the first one was making for us and we hailed him. But, by God! he didn’t slacken speed, but dashed through us. That little bobbing boat ran through our High Mightiness and went careering on in search of us. And we went on in search of another pilot. And we sighted him shortly, several of him; and, though they didn’t ram us in that ghostly way they had, they went sliding by us, bowing and ducking to the breeze, and always—that was the awful part of it—looking for us. There we were, and they didn’t see us. And we hailed them and they didn’t hear. By that time we were all pretty nearly off our nuts, and it took us different ways. The captain was purple with rage and that sense of injured importance the Deutscher didn�
��t lose by having to toe the mark after his big war bubble burst. He swore, and I heard him, that he could take his own ship into New York Harbor as well as any condemned pilot that ever sailed, and he wouldn’t even hail another, not even if all the dead in the sea rose up and faced him. I was rather worried over that about the dead in the sea. I couldn’t help thinking that if all the dead recently in the sea rose up and combined against any German ship, it would have short shrift. But we were all, I fancy, rather glad of his stand. We had full confidence in him. He was a clever, daring fellow, heavier by the iron cross—for in the last years he’d sent scores of men unwarned to the bottom, and he had been precious to Kultur. We much preferred to go in unpiloted to making even one more grisly try at proving; we were living flesh and blood.
“My own particular obsession was to wonder what would happen if, when a ship clove our decks and left them solid, as they’d done so often in the past six days, I put myself in the way of its nose. Would it run through me like a wedge and I close up unhurt? Would it smash me, carry me with it off the deck, to Kingdom Come? I wondered. It didn’t smash life-boats or deck-chairs. It—I found I was beginning to call the ramming boats ‘it’, as if there were but one of them, though really there were all kinds of craft—it would go through a rug on the deck and leave it in its folds. But I hadn’t the sand to put myself in its way and find out beyond a peradventure whether it tore me, nerve from nerve. The drama was too absorbing. I wanted to see it through.
“I did once, in my most daring minute, stand at the rail, watching a freighter as it came, head on. And I yelled to the lookout, when we were near enough to pass the time of day, yelled desperately. I can see him now, a small man with a lined face and blue eyes screwed up into a point of light, as if the whole of him concentrated on feeding that one sense, just seeing. And there was a queer-shaped scar on his face, a kind of cornerwise scar, and I wondered how he got it. The freighter was making her maximum, and so were we; but in that fraction of time I waited for her it seemed to be hours, eternities, that I had my eyes on the little man with the scar. It seemed as if he and I alone had the destinies of the world to settle. If I called and he answered me, it would prove our ship was not lost in a loneness of invisibility more terrible than any obvious danger on the unfriending seas. Suppose you were in hell, and you met face to face somebody that had your pardon or your reprieve mysteriously about him, and the pardon and reprieve of all the other millions there—think how you’d fix him with your eyes and signal, call to him for fear he’d pass you by. Well, that was how I signaled and called the little man with the scar. But he stared through me out of those clear lenses of his eyes, and when I yelled the loudest he made up his lips and began whistling a tune. It was a whispering sort of whistle, but I heard it, we were so near. And the tune—well, the tune broke my heart, for it was an old English tune that made me think of the beautiful English country as I had seen it not many weeks before, with the people soberly beginning to till it with unhindered hands. And here were we on a German ship that the world wouldn’t even see. The sun himself wouldn’t lend his rays for humanity to look at us. And then, as I began to cry—yes, I cried; I’m not ashamed to own it—the freighter passed through us, and I felt the unsteadiness of her wake. The lookout and I had met in hell, and I had hailed and he had not answered me.
“Was I glad to see the Goddess of Liberty and the gay old harbor of New York? I believe you! We went on like a house afire, and once, when I caught a glimpse of the captain’s face, I decided he could steer his ship into any harbor against unknown reefs and currents, because there was a fury of revolt in him, a colossal force of will. And as I thought that I exulted with him, for, though nobody knows better than I do the way the Furies ought to be out after Kultur—oh yes, they’d have to or lose their job—there was a kind of fighting grit that came up in me, and for that voyage I was conscious that the Treue Königin had got to fight, fight, for existence, the mere decency of being visible to other men.
“Did we sail into New York Harbor, invisible or not? You know as well as I. The story’s as real as George Washington and Valley Forge, and it’ll stay in print, like them, as long as print exists. We stopped short, an instant only, it was, and then against the impetus of the ship and the steering-gear and against the will of her captain and her crew, she turned about and steamed away again. And, by the Lord! it was as graceful a sweep as I ever saw a liner make. I remember thinking afterward that if there were heavenly steersmen on board—the Furies, maybe, taking the wheel by turn—they knew little tricks of the trade we pygmies didn’t. At first, of course, this right-about didn’t worry us. It didn’t worry me, at least. I thought the captain had found it a more difficult matter than he thought, and was going down harbor again, for some mysterious nautical reason, to turn about and make another try. But pretty soon I saw my fat doctor making for me. He was ash-colored by now, and he kept licking his dry lips.
“ ‘We’re going back,’ he said.
“ ‘Ah?’ said I. ‘They don’t find it so easy?’
“ ‘Why, good God, man!’ said he, ‘look at the sun. Don’t you see your course? We’re going back, I tell you!’
“ ‘Back where?’ I asked. But I didn’t care. So long as we made New York Harbor within twenty-four hours or more I wasn’t going to complain.
“ ‘Where?’ said he. He looked at me now as if he’d got to teach me what he knew, and I thought I’d never seen eyes so full of fear, absolute fear. Nothing in mortal peril calls that look into a man’s eyes. It has to be the unknown, the unaccounted for. ‘How do I know where? I only know the ship’s out of our hands somehow. She won’t answer.’
“ ‘Well,’ said I, ‘something’s the matter with the machinery.’ You see, the bright American air, the gay harbor, the Statue of Liberty—everything had heartened me. For an instant I didn’t believe we really were invisible.
“ ‘The machinery’s working like a very devil, but it’s working its own way. You can’t turn a nut on this ship unless it wants to be turned. You can’t change your course unless this devil of a ship wants it changed.’
“I laughed out. ‘You’ve been under too much of a strain,’ said I. ‘You seem to think the ship’s bewitched. Well, if we’re not to dock in New York, after this little excursion down the harbor, where is it your impression we’re going? Back to Germany?’
“ ‘God knows!’ said he, solemnly. ‘Maybe back to Germany. I wish to God we were there now. Or maybe we shall sail the seas—eternally.’
“I laughed again. But he put up his hand and I stopped, his panic was actually so terrible. I was sorry for the beggar.
“ ‘Wait!’ said he. ‘I thought that would happen. I wonder it hasn’t happened before.’
“A man came running—the quartermaster, I found out afterward—and I had one glimpse of his face as he passed. He covered the deck as if he were sprinting and was near the goal, and suddenly the run seemed only to give him momentum or get his courage up, and he slipped over the rail, with a flying confusion of arms and legs, into the sea. I yelled and grabbed a life-belt and ran to the rail, where I knew there’d be sailors, in an instant, letting down a boat. I threw my life-belt, and kept on yelling. But no one came, no one but the doctor. In an instant I realized he was by my side, his hands in his pockets, his eyes fixed in a dull gaze on the sea. And we hadn’t slackened speed, and we hadn’t put about, and I saw two other sailors idly at the rail, looking as the doctor looked, into the vacancy of immediate space.
“ ‘For God’s sake!’ said I, ‘aren’t they going to do something?’
“ ‘There’s nothing to do,’ said my doctor. ‘He won’t come up. They know that.’
“ ‘Won’t come up? Why won’t he?’
“ ‘Because he doesn’t want to.’
“ ‘Didn’t you ever hear of the instinct of self-preservation,’ I spluttered, ‘that steps in and defeats a man, even when he thinks he’s done with life? How do you know but that poor devil is back there
choking and praying and swallowing salt water, and sane again—sane enough to see he was dotty when he swapped the deck for the sea?’
“ ‘He won’t come up,’ said the doctor. He turned away and, with his head bent, began to plod along the deck. I couldn’t help thinking of the way he used to fly over the planks in the West Indies. But he did turn back again for one word more. ‘Did you,’ said he—and he looked a little—what shall I say? a little ironic, as if he’d got something now to floor me with—‘did you ever happen to hear of the Flying Dutchman?’
“Then I understood. They’d understood days and days ago. The words had been whispered round the decks, in the galley even, Der Fliegende Holländer. Knowing better than I what Kultur had done on the high seas, they had hit sooner on the devilish logic of it. They were more or less prepared. But it struck me right in the center. After they’d once said it I didn’t any more doubt it than if I’d been sitting in an orchestra stall, with the score of the old ‘Flying Dutchman’ and the orchestra’s smash-bang, and the fervid conductor with his bald head to divert me for a couple of hours or so. And I went down into my cabin and stretched out in my berth and shut my eyes. And all I remember thinking was that if we were going to sail the seas invisible till doomsday, I’d stay put, and not get dotty seeing the noses of ships cleaving the deck or trying to hail little whistling men with scars on their faces and finding that, so far as they knew, I wasn’t in the universe at all. I think I dozed for a matter of two days. The steward brought me grub of a primitive sort—our cuisine wasn’t what it had been coming over—and news, whenever I would take it from him. There had been more of the ghastly collisions. We had picked up S.O.S. from an English ship and gone to her rescue, to find we could neither hail her nor, though we launched boats, approach her within twenty feet. Why? The same reason that prevented our going into New York Harbor, if you can tell me what that was. And in the midst of these futile efforts a Brazilian freighter came along and did the salving neatly, and neither ship was any more aware of us than if we had been a ship of air. But my chief news, the only news that mattered, I got from the steward’s face. It was yellow-white, and the eyes were full of that same apprehension I had learned to know now—the fear of the unknown. He brought sparse items he dropped in a whisper, as if he had been forbidden to speak and yet must speak or die— about the supply of water, the supply of coal. It was his theory that, when the coal actually gave out and the engines stopped, we should stay everlastingly tossing in the welter of the sea, watching the happy wings of commerce go sailing by and hailed of none. But it proved not to be so, and when he told me that it scared him doubly. For we economized coal to the last point, and it seemed the engines went excellently without it, so long, at least, as we kept our course for Germany. Evidently, so far as we could guess at the designs of those grim powers that had blocked our way, a German ship was to be aided, even by miracle, to sail back to Germany, but not to enter any foreign port.
