One morning, going on three o'clock, while all were dreaming quietly under their winding-sheet of fog, they heard something like a clamour of voices—voices whose tones seemed strange and unfamiliar. Those on deck looked at each other questioningly.
“Who's that talking?”
Nobody. Nobody had said anything. For that matter, the sounds had seemed to come from the outer void. Then the man who had charge of the fog-horn, but had been neglecting his duty since overnight, rushed for it, and inflating his lungs to their utmost, sounded with all his might the long bellow of alarm. It was enough to make a man of iron start, in such a silence.
As if a spectre had been evoked by that thrilling, though deep-toned roar, a huge unforeseen gray form suddenly arose very loftily and towered threateningly right beside them; masts, spars, rigging, all like a ship that had taken sudden shape in the air instantly, just as a single beam of electric light evokes phantasmagoria on the screen of a magic lantern.
Men appeared, almost close enough to touch them, leaning over the bulwarks, staring at them with eyes distended in the awakening of surprise and dread.
The Marie's men rushed for oars, spars, boat-hooks, anything they could lay their hands on for fenders, and held them out to shove off that grisly thing and its impending visitors. Lo! these others, terrified also, put out large beams to repel them likewise.
But there came only a very faint creaking in the topmasts, as both standing gears momentarily entangled became disentangled without the least damage; the shock, very gentle in such a calm had been almost wholly deadened; indeed, it was so feeble that it really seemed as if the other ship had no substance, that it was a mere pulp, almost without weight.
When the fright was over, the men began to laugh; they had recognised each other.
“La Marie, ahoy! how are ye, lads?”
“Halloa! Gaos, Laumec, Guermeur!”
The spectre ship was the Reine-Berthe, also of Paimpol, and so the sailors were from neighbouring villages; that thick, tall fellow with the huge, black beard, showing his teeth when he laughed, was Kerjegou, one of the Ploudaniel boys, the others were from Plounes or Plounerin.
“Why didn't you blow your fog-horn, and be blowed to you, you herd of savages?” challenged Larvoer of the Reine-Berthe.
“If it comes to that, why didn't you blow yours, you crew of pirates—you rank mess of toad-fish?”
“Oh, no! with us, d'ye see, the sea-law differs. We're forbidden to make any noise!”
He made this reply with the air of giving a dark hint, and a queer smile, which afterward came back to the memory of the men of the Marie, and caused them a great deal of thinking. Then, as if he thought he had said too much, he concluded with a joke:
“Our fog-horn, d'ye see, was burst by this rogue here a-blowing too hard into it.” He pointed to a sailor with a face like a Triton, a man all bull-neck and chest, extravagantly broad-shouldered, low-set upon his legs, with something unspeakably grotesque and unpleasant in the deformity of strength.
While they were looking at each other, waiting for breeze or undercurrent to move one vessel faster than the other and separate them, a general palaver began. Leaning over the side, but holding each other off at a respectable distance with their long wooden props, like besieged pikemen repelling an assault, they began to chat about home, the last letters received, and sweethearts and wives.
“I say! my old woman,” said Kerjegou, “tells me she's had the little boy we were looking for; that makes half-score-two now!”
Another had found himself the father of twins; and a third announced the marriage of pretty Jenny Caroff, a girl well known to all the Icelanders, with some rich and infirm old resident of the Commune of Plourivo. As they were eyeing each other as if through white gauze, this also appeared to alter the sound of the voices, which came as if muffled and from far away.
Meanwhile Yann could not take his eyes off one of those brother fishermen, a little grizzled fellow, whom he was quite sure he never had seen before, but who had, nevertheless, straightway said to him, “How d'o, long Yann?” with all the familiarity of bosom acquaintance. He wore the provoking ugliness of a monkey, with an apish twinkling of mischief too in his piercing eyes.
“As for me,” said Larvoer, of the Reine-Berthe, “I've been told of the death of the grandson of old Yvonne Moan, of Ploubazlanec—who was serving his time in the navy, you know, in the Chinese squadron—a very great pity.”
On hearing this, all the men of La Marie turned towards Yann to learn if he already knew anything of the sad news.
“Ay,” he answered in a low voice, but with an indifferent and haughty air, “it was told me in the last letter my father sent me.” They still kept on looking at him, curious at finding out the secret of his grief, and it made him angry.
These questions and answers were rapidly exchanged through the pallid mists, so the moments of this peculiar colloquy skipped swiftly by.
“My wife wrote me at the same time,” continued Larvoer, “that Monsieur Mevel's daughter has left the town to live at Ploubazlanec and take care of her old grand-aunt—Granny Moan. She goes out to needlework by the day now—to earn her living. Anyhow, I always thought, I did, that she was a good, brave girl, in spite of her fine-lady airs and her furbelows.”
Then again they all stared at Yann, which made him still more angry; a red flush mounted to his cheeks, under their tawny tan.
With Larvoer's expression of opinion about Gaud ended this parley with the crew of the Reine-Berthe, none of whom were ever again to be seen by human eyes. For a moment their faces became more dim, their vessel being already farther away; and then, all at once, the men of the Marie found they had nothing to push against, nothing at the end of their poles—all spars, oars, odds and ends of deck-lumber, were groping and quivering in emptiness, till they fell heavily, one after the other, down into the sea, like their own arms, lopped off and inert.
They pulled all the useless defences on board. The Reine-Berthe, melting away into the thick fog, had disappeared as suddenly as a painted ship in a dissolving view. They tried to hail her, but the only response was a sort of mocking clamour—as of many voices—ending in a moan, that made them all stare at each other in surprise.
This Reine-Berthe did not come back with the other Icelandic fishers; and as the men of the Samuel-Azenide afterward picked up in some fjord an unmistakable waif (part of her taffrail with a bit of her keel), all ceased to hope; in the month of October the names of all her crew were inscribed upon black slabs in the church.
From the very time of that apparition—the date of which was well remembered by the men of the Marie—until the time of their return, there had been no really dangerous weather on the Icelandic seas, but a great storm from the west had, three weeks before, swept several sailors overboard, and swallowed up two vessels. The men remembered Larvoer's peculiar smile, and putting things together many strange conjectures were made. In the dead of night, Yann, more than once, dreamed that he again saw the sailor who blinked like an ape, and some of the men of the Marie wondered if, on that remembered morning, they had not been talking with ghosts.
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