I advanced more slowly, and still the thing wavered
and flitted with strange eerie lurches. And
then, right before my eyes, it vanished. I saw
it vanish. Neither to the right nor left did
it go, nor backward. Right there, while I gazed
upon it, it faded away, ceased to be. I didn’t
die, but I swear, from what I experienced in those
few succeeding moments, that I know full well that
men can die of fright. I stood there, knife
in hand, swaying automatically to the roll of the ship,
paralysed with fear. Had the Bricklayer suddenly
seized my throat with corporeal fingers and proceeded
to throttle me, it would have been no more than I
expected. Dead men did rise up, and that would
be the most likely thing the malignant Bricklayer
would do.
But he didn’t seize my throat. Nothing
happened. And, since nature abhors a status,
I could not remain there in the one place forever
paralysed. I turned and started aft. I
did not run. What was the use? What chance
had I against the malevolent world of ghosts?
Flight, with me, was the swiftness of my legs.
The pursuit, with a ghost, was the swiftness of thought.
And there were ghosts. I had seen one.
And so, stumbling slowly aft, I discovered the explanation
of the seeming. I saw the mizzen topmast lurching
across a faint radiance of cloud behind which was
the moon. The idea leaped in my brain.
I extended the line between the cloudy radiance and
the mizzen-topmast and found that it must strike somewhere
near the fore-rigging on the port side. Even
as I did this, the radiance vanished. The driving
clouds of the breaking gale were alternately thickening
and thinning before the face of the moon, but never
exposing the face of the moon. And when the
clouds were at their thinnest, it was a very dim radiance
that the moon was able to make. I watched and
waited. The next time the clouds thinned I looked
for’ard, and there was the shadow of the topmast,
long and attenuated, wavering and lurching on the
deck and against the rigging.
This was my first ghost. Once again have I seen
a ghost. It proved to be a Newfoundland dog,
and I don’t know which of us was the more frightened,
for I hit that Newfoundland a full right-arm swing
to the jaw. Regarding the Bricklayer’s
ghost, I will say that I never mentioned it to a soul
on board. Also, I will say that in all my life
I never went through more torment and mental suffering
than on that lonely night-watch on the Sophie Sutherland.
(TO THE EDITOR.—This is not a fiction.
It is a true page out of my life.)
A CLASSIC OF THE SEA
Introduction to “Two Years before the Mast.”
Once in a hundred years is a book written that lives
not alone for its own century but which becomes a
document for the future centuries. Such a book
is Dana’s. When Marryat’s and Cooper’s
sea novels are gone to dust, stimulating and joyful
as they have been to generations of men, still will
remain “Two Years Before the Mast.”
