Tales of Wonder

  The Secret of the Sea

  In an ill-lit ancient tavern that I know, are many tales of the sea;but not without the wine of Gorgondy, that I had of a private bargainfrom the gnomes, was the tale laid bare for which I had waited of anevening for the greater part of a year.

  I knew my man and listened to his stories, sitting amid the bluster ofhis oaths; I plied him with rum and whiskey and mixed drinks, butthere never came the tale for which I sought, and as a last resort Iwent to the Huthneth Mountains and bargained there all night with thechiefs of the gnomes.

  When I came to the ancient tavern and entered the low-roofed room,bringing the hoard of the gnomes in a bottle of hammered iron, my manhad not yet arrived. The sailors laughed at my old iron bottle, but Isat down and waited; had I opened it then they would have wept andsung. I was well content to wait, for I knew my man had the story, andit was such a one as had profoundly stirred the incredulity of thefaithless.

  He entered and greeted me, and sat down and called for brandy. He wasa hard man to turn from his purpose, and, uncorking my iron bottle, Isought to dissuade him from brandy for fear that when the brandy, bithis throat he should refuse to leave it for any other wine. He liftedhis head and said deep and dreadful things of any man that should dareto speak against brandy.

  I swore that I said nothing against brandy but added that it was oftengiven to children, while Gorgondy was only drunk by men of suchdepravity that they had abandoned sin because all the usual vices hadcome to seem genteel. When he asked if Gorgondy was a bad wine todrink I said that it was so bad that if a man sipped it that was theone touch that made damnation certain. Then he asked me what I had inthe iron bottle, and I said it was Gorgondy; and then he shouted forthe largest tumbler in that ill-lit ancient tavern, and stood up andshook his fist at me when it came, and swore, and told me to fill itwith the wine that I got on that bitter night from the treasure houseof the gnomes.

  As he drank it he told me that he had met men who had spoken againstwine, and that they had mentioned Heaven; and therefore he would notgo there--no, not he; and that once he had sent one of them to Hell,but when he got there he would turn him out, and he had no use formilksops.

  Over the second tumbler he was thoughtful, but still he said no wordof the tale he knew, until I feared that it would never be heard. Butwhen the third glass of that terrific wine had burned its way down hisgullet, and vindicated the wickedness of the gnomes, his reticencewithered like a leaf in the fire, and he bellowed out the secret.

  I had long known that there is in ships a will or way of their own,and had even suspected that when sailors die or abandon their ships atsea, a derelict, being left to her own devices, may seek her own ends;but I had never dreamed by night, or fancied during the day, that theships had a god that they worshipped, or that they secretly slippedaway to a temple in the sea.

  Over the fourth glass of the wine that the gnomes so sinfully brew buthave kept so wisely from man, until the bargain that I had with theirelders all through that autumn night, the sailor told me the story. Ido not tell it as he told it to me because of the oaths that were init; nor is it from delicacy that I refrain from writing these oathsverbatim, but merely because the horror they caused in me at the timetroubles me still whenever I put them on paper, and I continue toshudder until I have blotted them out. Therefore, I tell the story inmy own words, which, if they possess a certain decency that was not inthe mouth of that sailor, unfortunately do not smack, as his did, ofrum and blood and the sea.

  You would take a ship to be a dead thing like a table, as dead as bitsof iron and canvas and wood. That is because you always live on shore,and have never seen the sea, and drink milk. Milk is a more accurseddrink than water.

  What with the captain and what with the man at the wheel, and whatwith the crew, a ship has no fair chance of showing a will of her own.

  There is only one moment in the history of ships, that carry crews onboard, when they act by their own free will. This moment comes whenall the crew are drunk. As the last man falls drunk on to the deck,the ship is free of man, and immediately slips away. She slips away atonce on a new course and is never one yard out in a hundred miles.

  It was like this one night with the Sea-Fancy. Bill Smiles was therehimself, and can vouch for it. Bill Smiles has never told this talebefore for fear that anyone should call him a liar. Nobody dislikesbeing hung as much as Bill Smiles would, but he won't be called aliar. I tell the tale as I heard it, relevancies and irrelevancies,though in my more decent words; and as I made no doubts of the truthof it then, I hardly like to now; others can please themselves.

  It is not often that the whole of a crew is drunk. The crew ofthe Sea-Fancy was no drunkener than others. It happened like this.

  The captain was always drunk. One day a fancy he had that some spiderswere plotting against him, or a sudden bleeding he had from both hisears, made him think that drinking might be bad for his health. Nextday he signed the pledge. He was sober all that morning and all theafternoon, but at evening he saw a sailor drinking a a glass of beer,and a fit of madness seized him, and he said things that seemed bad toBill Smiles. And next morning he made all of them take the pledge.

  For two days nobody had a drop to drink, unless you count water, andon the third morning the captain was quite drunk. It stood to reasonthey all had a glass or two then, except the man at the wheel; andtowards evening the man at the wheel could bear it no longer, andseems to have had his glass like all the rest, for the ship's coursewobbled a bit and made a circle or two. Then all of a sudden she wentoff south by east under full canvas till midnight, and never alteredher course. And at midnight she came to the wide wet courts of theTemple in the Sea.

  People who think that Mr. Smiles is drunk often make a great mistake. Andpeople are not the only ones that have made that mistake. Once aship made it, and a lot of ships. It's a mistake to think that old BillSmiles is drunk just because he can't move.

  Midnight and moonlight and the Temple in the Sea Bill Smiles clearlyremembers, and all the derelicts in the world were there, the oldabandoned ships. The figureheads were nodding to themselves andblinking at the image. The image was a woman of white marble on apedestal in the outer court of the Temple of the Sea: she was clearlythe love of all the man-deserted ships, or the goddess to whom theyprayed their heathen prayers. And as Bill Smiles was watching them,the lips of the figureheads moved; they all began to pray. But all atonce their lips were closed with a snap when they saw that there weremen on the Sea-Fancy. They all came crowding up and nodded and noddedand nodded to see if all were drunk, and that's when they made theirmistake about old Bill Smiles, although he couldn't move. They wouldhave given up the treasuries of the gulfs sooner than let men hear theprayers they said or guess their love for the goddess. It is theintimate secret of the sea.

  The sailor paused. And, in my eagerness to hear what lyrical orblasphemous thing those figureheads prayed by moonlight at midnight inthe sea to the woman of marble who was a goddess to ships, I pressedon the sailor more of my Gorgondy wine that the gnomes so wickedlybrew.

  I should never have done it; but there he was sitting silent while thesecret was almost mine. He took it moodily and drank a glass; and withthe other glasses that he had had he fell a prey to the villainy ofthe gnomes who brew this unbridled wine to no good end. His bodyleaned forward slowly, then fell on to the table, his face beingsideways and full of a wicked smile, and, saying very clearly the oneword, "Hell," he became silent for ever with the secret he had fromthe sea.