The Forty Fathom Bank and Other Stories Read online

  “Travel comes from travail, to suffer, and travail derives from trepalium, an instrument of torture. When one willfully seeks suffering for its own sake, it is usually a last desperate grasp for reality.”

  Now what could he mean by all that, travel, travail, trepalium? Mueller himself was a trepalium, an insidious instrument of torture! What worse pain could one inflict upon a man than to pin him down and pour this black gibberish into his ears?

  Well, there was one thing this audacious passenger of his had not reckoned with, the authority of a ship’s master. He would have him thrown off the Caspar immediately. He’d do it himself, by God! And to hell with the agent or the general manager or the whole damn company, for that matter. He’d put in too many years of faithful service, of miserable, body breaking labor, to be forced to listen to Mueller’s mad ramblings. Goaded by angry indignation, he started to rise from his chair. He would stand up to his full height, which he judged to be about equal to Mueller’s, point to the gangway and order this lunatic off his ship.

  He could not move. All coordination had left him. His muscles refused, absolutely, to respond to his will. Even his hands, accustomed for half a century to handling heavy gear, were powerless to grip the wooden armrest of the deck chair. Desperation and then panic seized him.

  What had happened to him? Exhaustion? Too much direct sunlight? The dry, hyperborean wind and a high barometer? Or was Mueller’s whisper, which seemed to rise like an invocation from the depths of the Captain’s unconscious, exercising some mysterious control over his mental processes?

  Just then, a series of distinctly disagreeable questions intruded into his mind. Could this paralysis of his, he wondered, weaken his hard-won resistance to the metaphysical terrors of his childhood just as deep sleep had weakened his defenses against the dream depredations of the grease-blackened workman from below? And would his incapacity soften him up for the frontal attack he sensed Mueller had been preparing for him since the moment he came aboard?

  One way or another, he could still speak, think and defend himself with his reason. Besides, this whole ridiculous situation would soon pass, he felt certain. It would have to pass. There was work to be done.

  None of the turmoil that wracked the Captain’s mind and body seemed to affect Mueller in the least. Or, if it did, he showed no sign by any change in his voice, or in the steady flow of words that followed with the persistence of the shadow that he, himself, appeared to be.

  “It was the ticking of a clock that sent me on this journey that has no end,” he said. “Think of that, an old wall-hung clock, its oak frame darkened by time to a dull black and its heavy pendulum swinging impassively in obedience to a law, Galileo’s, to be exact, but in reality, immune to all laws, a mere mechanical device designed to calibrate the flow of time. As though time were a river with a source and a destination! Think of it, wheels geared to pointers that attempt to divide nothingness into finite and palpable parts. Lying in bed at six or seven or eight years old, I could hear, from the dark outer hall, the light tick, as the pendulum swept with infinite leisure through its arc, tripped the escapement wheel, and then the dull tock of the blocked cog on the return journey. Nightlong footsteps going nowhere. Don’t you agree that it is madness, the hope only of desperate men, to attempt to harness and measure nothingness?”

  “Agree?” the Captain asked. His voice was weak but his fear had ebbed somewhat as he resigned himself to Mueller’s unrelenting discourse. “At the moment, I do not know what to think, but it would seem to me that only some sort of insanity would cause a man to take such a peculiar view of something as ordinary as a grandfather clock hanging on the wall outside his bedroom.”

  “Have you never listened to a clock then,” Mueller asked, “and counted each tick, yet knowing, as you lay in the dark, that there would always be more ticks, in numbers without end, that you could count until the clock stopped, until all the clocks stopped, and still go on counting, and that the whole thing was meaningless?”

  “I had better things to think about,” the Captain replied, feeling increasingly more at ease as he became aware that the mystery of Mueller’s behavior lay in some deep well of internal disturbance and that he meant no harm. Obsessed by some problem or other, the news of an illness perhaps, a death, the rupture of some old psychic wound, or by any one of the “ten thousand troubles” which, according to the ancient Chinese, made up a man’s life, Mueller had probably rushed out into the night, and after wandering through the streets till daybreak, had stumbled upon the company’s dock office, and as he had said, impulsively booked passage on the first ship out. However, now that he had found a listener, albeit an unwilling one, he would no doubt pour out the tale of his misery, elaborating each detail and dwelling with brutal self-interest upon the scope and the magnitude of his suffering.

  The Captain sighed deeply. How many tales of a similar nature had he heard in the past? And yet not once, as far as he could remember, had he himself sought help from another. He sighed again and tried to lift his hand to wipe a trickle of sweat from his forehead. His hand felt far away as though it belonged to another body. A temporary loss of circulation, he thought, and felt no special concern. On the adjoining armrest he could see the pale hand of the passenger. The bony fingers lying limply on the sun-bleached wood looked remarkably like his own. Yes, he reflected, he’d had a fairly trouble-free time of it, moments of danger to be sure, and pain not to be forgotten, but nothing covering him like the miserable wretch beside him.

  “So we arrive by night at a strange crossing,” Mueller was saying, “. . . which road we take is not a matter of choice, for there is no choice between two unfamiliar identicals. At such a moment we are at the mercy of fate. You, with no pre-knowledge whatever, turn right and shortly find a refuge from the hostile night, while I, in equal ignorance, but seeking the same end, go to the left and disappear into nothingness.”

  “Which road indeed!” the Captain mumbled irritably. Just then, and for no reason at all, a scene flashed before his mind—a cross upon which hung a dark Christ on a backdrop of intense blackness. But the expression on the exhausted face was not the familiar one of universal sorrow. The distorted features, mouth twisted, eyes rolled upward under netted lines of violent stress, transmitted so vividly the terror of total abandonment to an abyss of nothingness, and with such a complete communication of terror, it seemed to the Captain that, for an instant, he was a witness to his own crucifixion and his precipitation into the nothingness on the dark side of infinity.

  The scene vanished quickly, and oddly enough, though the experience had no precedent, he felt no surprise. Could all he had known about that, he wondered, long discarded but emotionally sustained, have been a huge dissimulation, or at the least, an unintended misinterpretation?

  But what had all this to do with Mueller’s crossroads? And what about his clock? Was there some direction, after all, to his incomprehensible digressions? If so, where was he heading, this shadowy being with his whispery voice and his random soliloquies that could stir up the dregs in the time-deep bottoms of feeling?

  “Between the before and the after there is a crucial pause, a moment of silent hesitation as the pendulum begins its swing either to the right or to the left. I can remember the before like a bright summer day that extended back beyond memory, which is to say, in effect, it had no beginning. No time flowed by the before. It was a tranquil island in a tideless sea. Then somewhere, somehow, an awareness crept in like a shadow without a source. What followed after was a long and progressively deepening darkness. And once you have fully experienced darkness there can never be light again.”

  As usual, a pause followed this singular disclosure during which the Captain could hear the sound of a match being struck, followed by the familiar and acrid smell of Hoskins’ cigar smoke.

  “We should have talked long ago,” Mueller went on. His voice, though still in a whisper, had grown more confidential as though some barrier between them had been parted. “W
e should have come to know one another. Our problem may not have been resolved, but with the two of us together, it might have been more tolerable.” He did not stop. “The first six years was an island cut off entirely from every kind of fear except that induced by childish fancy to stimulate and further incite the imagination, and anticipation, of dream creation, of simple, sensual satisfactions. It was a long, slow, indrawing of a breath before the plunge.

  “And then one winter afternoon, coming home from school, I was stopped by a neighbor lady with teary eyes and little suffocated sobs, and again by my father with two deadly quiet words, ‘Mother’s dead.’

  “Well now, that meant nothing to me. I felt nothing one way or another. I was frightened only by the fear and the sorrow of those who had told me. If the neighbor lady had said, ‘William, you lucky boy, your mother is dead,’ and laughed with joy, I might have laughed too. And if my father had flipped me a nickel and said, ‘Go buy yourself a bag of candy, your mother’s dead,’ I would, no doubt, have run off to the grocery store, happy and unconcerned.

  “I went to my room upstairs at the end of the hall as I was told, washed my hands and face in the old marble-topped basin in the alcove beside my bed, combed my hair with a nice straight part down the middle, changed into my Sunday clothes, and buttoned up my good patent leather shoes. Then I sat on my bed and fiddled with the brass caps on the white iron bedstead until my father should call me down to the parlor where I had a feeling my mother would be. As I twisted the caps and ran my fingers across the iron rungs, I felt nothing but irritation for having been made to dress up in my best clothes when I could have been playing outside on the sidewalk with my coaster until dark.

  “Except for the noise I made with the bedstead, the only sound in my room came from the ticking of the big clock in the hall which, because it had hung there ticking away since before I was born, I was no longer conscious of. After awhile my father entered, took me by the hand, and led me down to the parlor where my mother, looking quite nice with her dark brown hair done up and her hands folded over her breast, lay with her eyes closed in a white casket which stood on a pedestal, with a velvet drape hanging to the floor.

  “I wanted to go outside. It was getting dark, but I wanted to go outside anyway and play on the sidewalk. Of course I didn’t ask my father if I could go. He looked so strange, like someone I didn’t know standing by the head of the casket with his face like night. Yet his eyes were shining in the light of the tall flames from the candelabra that was only lit on Christmas Eve. So I just stood there, a little way back and stared at them both, my dark, quiet father and my mother’s white face that had not moved once.

  “I knew she was dead. I had been told that twice, and I could see from the white box in which she lay and the long time that she didn’t move, that she really was dead. And I knew I should be crying, that it was expected of me. But I didn’t feel like crying. Besides, I was getting hungry and wanted to get out of the dark parlor with its candlelight and shadows and into the bright gaslight in the kitchen and get at the dinner I knew my mother would have cooking on the big, black coal-burning stove, where it would be warm and cozy and we could laugh while we ate and maybe sing a song or two before I went up to do my homework.

  “But we went out to eat, or rather, we went out so I could eat, because my father wanted nothing. We went to the neighbor lady’s house where I was served corned beef and cabbage and boiled potatoes. I ate everything except the mustard, which was the hot kind, and the horse radish. And all the while I was eating, the old neighbor lady patted my head, and in between sobs and snuffles, kept asking my father how in the world he would ever manage a six-year-old boy by himself.

  “When I finished the apple cobbler I got sleepy, and my father, with never a word, took me by the hand and we walked up the steep sidewalk, past the two gas lamps and across the cobblestone street until we came to our house, with its narrow bay windows, looking very still except for the guttering of low-burning candles in the parlor.

  “I got into my nightgown, said a quick prayer on my knees by the bed, asking God to bless Mother and Father, then I curled up under the soft patchwork quilt my mother had sewn on since before I could remember. After being kissed on both cheeks very gently by my father, I went to sleep.

  “It was the clock that woke me, the same old clock that had ticked away in the hallway outside my bedroom all the days of my life, but which I never really heard.

  “I woke up thinking, as though my thoughts were a busy road that wound up out of the depths of my mind. I thought about the hearse rocking over the cobblestones through the early fog. I could even see the pale sprouts of winter grass being crushed under the hard rubber tires and the horses stumbling and slipping on the steep hill. I sat up in my bed and looked out the window. The sky was black and the city too, except for the street lights, very small and quiet, following diverging paths over the wide slopes and valleys and away to some unpleasantly unfamiliar rim of deeper darkness. And as I looked through the window, it seemed those still little points were long lines of pale dead stars tracking the surface of immense waves of blackness.

  “The ticking of the clock was loud and so clear I could hear the click of the escapement wheel and even, I thought, the rotation of the gears. It was like I was seeing it all under a huge magnifying glass. The sound of it filled the room with harsh throbbing which echoed down the empty hallway.

  “And still my thoughts went on, following one after another like a night train of silent coaches. I saw every detail of the long, slow journey to the graveyard, the sealed casket with its wreathes of heavy-smelling flowers and narrow, black, velvet-covered seats on either side in the rear with my father on one side, his black hat in his lap, and Aunt Hilda and Cousin Ilsa opposite, staring straight in front of them. It seemed as though I had experienced it all before. There was even an incident. When the driver whipped up the horses to make the last steep pull up the hill through the open gates of the graveyard, the hearse lurched to one side and the casket slipped back down the aisle. My father leaped forward, his face gray and tight, and, clinging to one of the ebony handholds as if to stop the heavy casket from going through the door, let out a high, thin cry.

  “And all the while these pictures passed before my mind, the clock kept up its steady beat, filling the room, as I said, and echoing in the hallway with its brash, metallic ticking. I didn’t visualize the lowering of the casket into the grave. I fell asleep again. When I woke up it was late afternoon. I could tell that by the winter shadows on the floor. I was lying on my left side and I could feel my heart beating. It was exactly in phase with the ticking of the clock in the hall. The old neighbor lady, dressed all in black, was standing beside my bed. She was rubbing my hands and arms and making little whimpering noises. Nearby on a small stand was some broth in a white bowl that did not belong to our house. Just then I realized the clock had stopped.”

  5

  High in the crosstrees, the wind continued its low whimpering cry, changing from time to time to a series of short little gasps. The hot sun burned down steadily from its still slightly westward inclination. At any time now, the Captain thought, Hoskins would be making his appearance. Perhaps he should not be lying there wasting time in a futile attempt to grasp the significance of Mueller’s arcane ramblings.

  Residual guilt, stirred by the knowledge of work to be done, or fear of doing nothing, forced a sigh of concern. Work and action, the aegis of his life. A protective screen? Protection from what? A question indeed. No doubt Mueller would come up with some murky answer. Was this his mission then, to seek out a kindred soul in that city of over half a million disparate personalities for the single purpose of revealing a mystery that in all probability did not exist? Kindred soul! What kinship had he with Mueller? He shared nothing at all with this fear-haunted, shadow-of-a-man, the distorted lens of his mind’s eye infusing the simple reality of things with weird significance and strange dimensions while his own consistently practical mind, even since
an early age, had been happy with conditions as he had found them. So there was an attempt to escape into the temporary sanctuary of forgetfulness. But a kind old lady had brought him back. No, it was the clock that had brought him back. But the clock had stopped. Yes, of course.

  “Have you never listened to a clock then?” Mueller’s question came back to him.

  I had better things to do, the Captain thought. Yet since Mueller had brought it up, he did remember a clock in the old house where he was born, a fine Seth Thomas with a porcelain face and bronze Roman numerals. The clock belonged to his father, Captain Lars Larson, retired master of sail and steam, and then, as befitted an aging mariner, a San Francisco bar pilot. The clock was his father’s pleasure and his responsibility. He unlocked it every Sunday morning before church and wound it slowly, methodically, with a brass key of a quaint antique design. Yet it was a clock. Nothing more. And certainly not Mueller’s dread symbol of time without end.

  Vividly, happily—not at all like the somber passage of anomalous visions on the shifting screens of Mueller’s memory—he could see his room at the end of the hall with its high-coved ceiling above an embossed plaster moulding. At the center of the ceiling and directly above his bed a gas chandelier was suspended from three chains that met in a medallion of gold vine leaves—the repository of his hedonistic dreams. All manner of adventures took place deep in that golden foliage. Often there appeared a young girl of surpassing beauty.

  But what would Mueller know of all this, picnics in the park, ferry boat rides, the view from his bedroom window that faced west to where the late afternoon fog in a vast silver wave engulfed the hills and licked at the city with curling tongues of mist? And the toys that grew in size from bathtub steamboats and miniature warships to a full-fledged sailing dory with clear, white cedar planking, a dagger board and a mahogany tiller with a Turk’s head knot? And what would Mueller do with such a luxury? Explore the waterfront? Sail right under the high sterns of ocean going square-riggers and gaze up at their huge rudders and iron bark rudderposts? Would he wonder at the mighty transoms carved with exotic names and home ports like Haakon I, Bergen; Arminius, Hamburg; Reina Isabella, Barcellona; Orion, Liverpool? Would he dare sail out to Goat Island, beach his craft in a sandy cove and climb through thick brush to the crest of the mountain and gaze, like a pirate, at the city through his polished brass long glass?