Kraken in a Coffee Cup: 3
Kraken in a Coffee Cup: 3
Chapter 3
If you’re new to the story, I suggest beginning with the table of contents so you’ll understand the origins of the text and why I say it was co-authored by Herman Melville.
And now,
Kraken in a Coffee Cup.
Chapter Three
I have seen many varied crafts in my day; square-toed luggers; mountainous Japanese junks; and butter-box galliots; but never such a rare vessel as this. She resembles a ship of the old school, rather small if anything; with an old-fashioned claw-footed look about her. Her venerable bows look bearded. Her ancient decks are worn and wrinkled, like the pilgrim-worshiped flag-stone in Canterbury Cathedral where Becket bled.
An elderly man helms the turnstile wheel at her reverend helm; he is brown and brawny, like most old seamen, and heavily rolled up in blue pilot-cloth, cut in the Quaker style; only there is a fine and almost microscopic net-work of the minutest wrinkles interlacing round his eyes. Such eye-wrinkles are very effectual in a scowl.
“Is this the captain of the stove boat?” says I.
“Come a stove boat for a stove body,” he answers. “Stave a soul Jove himself cannot, otherwise.”
A mist of seawater plays upon my face. “The widow sent me.”
“Why is every robust healthy boy with a robust healthy soul, crazy to go to sea?” he asks. “Why upon your first voyage as a passenger, did you yourself feel such a mystical vibration, when first told that you and your ship were now out of sight of land? This cannot be without meaning, lad. What men seek in the water is their own reflection.”
“Narcissus,” says I.
A thin line of humor cuts open his mouth. “Aye, Narcissus, who because he could not grasp the tormenting, mild image he saw in the fountain, plunged in to his own swift drowning. But that same image, we ourselves see in all rivers and oceans. It is the image of the ungraspable phantom of life; and this is the key to it all.”
“They key to what?” I ask.
“The key to all,” he says. “You know nothing of what becomes of the dead at sea, I dare say—eh?”
“Is that our business, sir? Retrieving the dead?”
“Retrieval would suggest the dead come back. Your scriptures say at His coming the sea give up its dead. Do you assume that’s what day this is?”
“Your wife seemed to be of the mind you’d return, perhaps even supposing my going out might hasten it.”
“My wife?” He laughs dryly amidst the ocean. “Is that what you know of the dead, that you are the vessel by which drowned men come home to their widowed wives? What else do you suppose to know?”
“Nothing, sir; but I have no doubt I shall soon learn. I’ve been several voyages in both whaling and the merchant service, and I believe—”
“Merchant service be damned. Your merchant sailor is crunched, chewed up, and devoured, all on the promise of another man’s profit.”
I am a little alarmed by his energy, perhaps also a little touched at the hearty grief in his concluding exclamation, but say as calmly as I can, “What you say is no doubt true enough, sir. Every man sails at another man’s profit. Every man drowns at another man’s loss.”
“The rich lose only their money, and money, unlike the man, returns with the next successful voyage.”
I stare up at this helmsman, before whom indolence and idleness perish. His own person is the exact embodiment of his utilitarian character. On his long, gaunt body, he carries no spare flesh, no superfluous beard, his chin having a soft, economical nap to it, like the worn nap of his broad-brimmed hat.
“I’ve to ship with you, sir, if you’ll have me,” I say, “and I see no way of going back.” In truth, I have a hope that if he rejects me he might spit me back on shore, but this I will not say.
He nods in agreement that such is so, although I am not sure what his agreement means. The sea-current calms. We settle into a drift, and he fastens the wheel and motions for me to follow him down into the cabin. The space between the decks is small; and there, bolt-upright, the true captain sits. His broad-brim is placed beside him; his legs are stiffly crossed; his drab vesture is buttoned up to his chin; and spectacles on nose, he considers the contract laid out across the table, ready for an eager man’s signature.
I wonder why I see no sailors mingling there, none save him and me.
“You say you’re our man,” says the captain in a hollow tone. “You want to ship aboard the Shade.” He throws open a chest, and drawing forth the ship’s articles, places pen and ink before him. I think it high time to settle with myself at what terms I am willing to engage for the voyage.
“I pay no wages,” says the captain, “but all hands receive their lay, proportioned to the degree of importance of one’s duties in the ship’s company. Being a green hand, your lay won’t be large—”
“—but considering that I’m used to the sea, can steer a ship, splice a rope—”
“Your lay won’t be large,” he says.
“But—”
“Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth, where moth and rust do corrupt.”
“Yet surely—”
“Your soul may be drawing ten inches of water, or ten fathoms, I cannot tell,” he says, “but the lay earned here is not the flesh of fish or anything else to be turned for currency.”
I am struck dumb by this obvious truth. Now that I have gone down to sea, money serves me no purpose, good or ill. Without another question or any understanding of my fate, I sit with him at the table and go to sign the papers. What else is there to be done? Already we are boldly launched upon the deep and lost in its unshored immensities, and the ship’s weedy hull rolls side by side with the barnacled hulls of leviathans.
Only, I find the papers signed already and by my hand.
The captain nods at my surprise, and I can barely hear him say, “The rich man cannot cross the gulf between them.”
I feel the current push us forward, and at his command, I rush topside while the captain stays at his papers. The deck is full with its sailors, and a new man, lean and pale, steers the wheel; his bone-white face traces the lines of his skull. Behind him, we leave a turbid wake; pale waters, paler cheeks. The envious currents sidelong swell to whelm my track; let them; but first we pass.
Over unsounded gorges, through the rifled hearts of mountains, under torrents’ beds, unerringly we rush. Yonder, just beneath the goblet’s rim, the warm waters blush like wine, and our gold bow plumbs the blue. Time was, when as the sunrise nobly spurred me, so the sunset soothed. No more. This sunken light brightens not these sailors, lost in the midst of paradise.
The ship is more than matched; she’s overmanned; and by a crew drawn half-dead from the sea. I climb to address him who steers the ship and of him ask the question the captain never answered. He eyes me dark and sunken and laughs a face full of teeth.
“Never have your shore-bound acquaintances dreamed the trade to which you now are plied,” he says. “Soon you’ll wrench their wretched souls from this fiendish sea.”
—Thaddeus Thomas
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