shelidonDecember 29, 20241 Comment on Winter Tales: “A Deadly Voyage” (2)

Second part of a Christmas ghost story by James Hume Nisbet. First part here.

Chapter II. John Dagget’s Dream

It is a much discussed question amongst psychologists how long a space of actual time it takes a dream of months or even years to occupy. Some say a minute is sufficiently long, others insist that the instant before waking is the longest time required; a dreamer may seem to fill out with crowded incidents the whole night through, and yet actually only dream a second.

Between the dropping of his three-parts consumed cigar from his relaxing fingers, as the soothing strain of distant music sent him to sleep, Mr. John Dagget had a very long and troubled dream—nightmare I suppose it ought to be called, since he had forgotten to take his customary glass of Benedictine. When he had last glanced drowsily at the time piece, it was a quarter to nine, when he woke up with a gasping yell and the perspiration rolling in large icy drops from his smooth brow and aquiline nose, the minute hand was pointing at seven minutes to the same hour, so that he had exactly been occupied eight minutes in the falling asleep, sleeping and waking up.

The first portion of the dream was pleasant rather than otherwise to a man of his temperament, but as it progressed, it grew in intensity and horror, an orthodox Christmas Eve dream with a grand climax.

He saw himself as a boy at school, liked by all his school-mates for his good looks and animal strength and spirits, and chuckled as he took advantage of this affection and fidelity to gather in and cheat them out of their pocket money. Then from school days he passed to his courting season and again he chuckled unctuously at the advantages his fine appearance and plausible tongue gave him over less fortunate rivals; his life hitherto had been one continued march of triumph, with a heavy baggage of loot. How easy and cheaply it had been for him to hood-wink his own relations as well as a confiding world, and keep up the character of being a “King amongst men” for good nature and generosity; the house he took from one sister under the plea that all he wanted was to be able to vote, the five hundred pounds he wheedled out of his grandmother, just before her death in order that she might get better interest for it, the legacy he borrowed from his other sister, the mother of Mary, and forgot to pay back again; the ease with which he smoothed all difficulties out of his way as he went on suavely, so that even that wronged sister thought him the proper trustee for her daughter and her fortune. At this stage of his retrospective vision, it felt as if the soul of the man was congratulating the shark-like spirit of the boy upon his early development in smart tricks.

His bride in her first infatuation smiled upon him tenderly as she placed her money-bags implicitly under his entire control and enabled him to launch out into big speculations, such as the buying up of rotten ships, and the provisioning of them with putrid meat from the condemned stores of Government, all unquestioned by law, and good enough for the poor wretches who were sent to their death by this plausible and dreaming ogre; again he chuckled contentedly as the record of ship after ship missing passed before him; he did not want to see them again with their putrid stores and rotten planks, let the scurvy-devoured wretches gnaw at each other on their bare raft, or go to the bottom with the leaky over-laden craft on which they had been simple enough to trust themselves, so long as he got the insurance offices to pay up the full value for a sound ship, good stores and that over weight of cargo; better that they should all drown if on the return voyage, for then he could defraud the widows out of their dead husbands’ wages in addition to his other clear profits.

A splendid part of the dream this, for it tickled the fancy to think how much easier it was to cheat the widows and fatherless children than it had been even to gull his school-mates and relations; all he had to say was that the drowned men had drawn the greater portion of their wages in advance to spend in debauchery in foreign parts and then pay what he pleased to the poor starving applicants, as a kind of charity, besides robbing the dead of the respect of their widows, all matters of congratulation and profit so far.

Some of the widows made by the foundering of his last ship were coming that night, headed by the clergyman, to appeal to him. One of them had received a letter posted before her husband sailed, in a foreboding spirit and telling her what was due to him. Well let them come, he was prepared with his cooked books to make that dead man out a liar and so save a clear twenty pounds; he had also his creature and dependent Richard Harris upstairs to back him out, for he had posted him carefully up to his duty that afternoon. As it was Christmas Eve, he would hood-wink the pastor by giving a ten-pound cheque to the deserving poor of his parish, and distribute another five pounds as charity amongst the widows, who came clamouring at the heels of the clergyman, so he would get his name up for benevolence and save five pounds from the one man, besides the entire wages of the rest of the crew. Not much for a man of his position, yet even the discount on a shilling must be considered in a business like his.

Richard Harris, the son of that old schoolmate who had followed him about like a dog at school, and who had trusted him blindly to the last, although he had cheated him wholesale then, who had been so happy and satisfied to lose even his pocket money as long as he, John Dagget, condescended to notice him or give him a friendly pat on the shoulder, who afterwards went out squatting in Australia and realized a limited fortune—forty thousand pounds, and was foolish enough to entrust his son and money to the tender mercies of this black-bearded wolf; ah! it was almost too funny to this dreamer to see old Dick Harris and his sister Nell Gray putting their lambkins into his claws with all their own wool, forty thousand the one, thirty thousand the other, trusted to him alone without a check, to do with and manage as he liked.

He had brought his dream down to the present day, where all was prosperity and comfort. Never once had he been stopped in his career. The bank respected him, for he had a balance to his credit there which would inspire respect from a bank to any man, he was in perfect health, with an appetite for moderate enjoyment which he was too keen-witted to spoil by over-indulgence, he stood high with the church, for a little charity spreads out very far with these simple-minded disposers of that article; he was firm in his principles of the rights of employers over the rights of employés, so that he was trusted by his confederates as a right good man, with an impressive manner, an imposing presence, a heavy bank account and a keen brain; he had good books, good pictures, good statuary because he had good advisers, a perfect cook and tailor, with tobacconist and wine merchant sans reproche; what more did the man require who had no Parliamentary aspirations, who had only one ambition and that was to rake in the shekels!

He had no reason to congratulate himself on his smartness or business capacity, as he entered upon the second portion of his eight minutes’ dream. Like Dante when visiting the Inferno, he could only look and wonder as procession after procession of drowned sailors, with their despairing wives and children swept before him, all pointing at him and shrieking the words: “Murderer” and “Thief” as a chorus, that is the sailors cried “Thief” and the wives wailed “Murderer” as each crowd thought of the wrong nearest to them.

Yet this did not disturb him over much, for he had heard the terms often before, and as for the spectres, his soul was impervious to the influence of such airy shapes.

His sister passed with a cry “Restore”; his grandmother passed him with downcast head as one ashamed; his mother trailed her feet as if heavily ironed; his wife looked at him with fixed and stony eyes as one who looks upon a hated enemy.

At last from the abyss from which they were all passing forth, came his friend and former school-mate Richard Harris, with eyes in which horror and appeal were strangely blended; unlike the others he did not pass on, but rushing forward caught the sleeper by the hand, shouting as he used to do in the dormitory when the usher was coming.

“They have found you out, Jack; come with me and I’ll make you safe.”

With that intuitive instinct of dreamers, he now knew that his robberies of Richard and Mary were known, and with a convulsive clutch at the spectre hand of his friend he turned to go with him, that horror of the night-mare-haunted for the first time laying hold of him.

He had no fear of his old school friend, although he had outraged his trust, for he had been in the habit of wronging all his friends and yet being received kindly by them and trusted. It was part of his fine physique and goodly presence to be so trusted, and he took it all for granted as his just due when in a dilemma.

“This way,” whispered his old friend, as he led the way down an alley and into a deserted house; “you must disguise yourself, put on this rough seaman’s suit, and I’ll get you on board the first outward-bound.”

His aesthetic tastes revolted against this suit of coarse serge, but not so much as at the wanton clipping short of his fine black beard, which followed shortly afterwards, yet it had to be endured, for he knew by instinct that outraged justice was after him.

Then he was smuggled on board a ship as a Federation recruit; the sailors looked askance at this fresh-water hand, who did not even know the correct way to come aboard, but he did not mind that, he was safe for a time.

By and bye the captain entered upon his duties and the moorings were loosed, then he knew that he was upon his own next outward-bound, leaky hulk, about which this very skipper had warned him as being untrustworthy for a single voyage, and on board of which were his most ancient and latest stores of provisions; some of the salt meat and pork were twenty years old and had been specially scraped and resalted for this vessel by his own orders; as this thought occurred to him, with the receding shores of old England, his horror became accentuated and the clammy sweat began to start upon his face.

He who had been so long accustomed to the best of everything, to be forced for hunger’s sake to feed upon that scurvy-producing and rankly-pickled pork and beef with the weevilly biscuits which he knew were all the forecastle hands could get; when he thought upon this dire disaster and reconsidered the information which he had received about the gaping condition of the decayed planks, he almost wished that a storm would rise in the Channel and land them upon the Goodwin Sands, or founder them in the Bay of Biscay.

It seemed to him that days had passed while he wallowed in the poisoned atmosphere of the forecastle, too sick even to heed the kickings he received from the legitimate seamen when he would not get up to help them in their hard duties of pumping out that everlasting filling hold; a fierce gnawing of morbid hunger pervaded his whole being which would not be controlled even by the horrible nausea which the smell from the putrid mess produced.

Strong men round him were already beginning to cast their teeth, with their gums and limbs becoming swollen and helpless, still that fierce gnawing of hunger tore up his vitals like rusty knives; he must eat, even if the punishment were death.

The apprentice boy, a lank and languid skeleton, came down the fok’s’le steps with the men’s allowance, holding the dish with one feeble hand and the other clutching his nose to keep the deadly fumes from entering. Each hungry man as he reached out a lank hand for his share, held with the other his nostrils firmly closed while he bolted the allowance with shut eyes so as not to see its colour.

The dreamer could no longer keep his fast. With a wolfish eye he watched the lad advance, then for the moment the deadly fumes overcame him, but ravenously he reached out his hand and clutched the meagre and foul allotment.

What was it — beef, pork, or compressed weeds? It looked like boiled grass in colour, like nothing he had ever experienced before for odour; he, the epicure and sybarite! But his appetite was like that of the starving wolf, he must take it whatever it was.

As he approached that lump of putrid, twenty-year-old, thrice round the world, pickled condiment, his pampered heart grew sick and faint within him, and the perspiration rolled in huge beads from his craven brow. Spectres of drowned victims! he would have hailed the myriad of accusing victims rather than that one small lunch. Nearer, nearer, the agony of the damned is in him as it approaches his lips, and he has not the manliness to close his eyes and nostrils. With a huge uplifting of his whole inward man as when the demon of a nightmare is about to touch one, he flung the loathed lump from him, and awoke.

Seven minutes to nine o’clock! That dream had filled out a long life-time.

The yell with which he sprang from his chair was not a very loud one, so that it had not disturbed the high-bred equanimity of James the footman as with a double knock at the door he entered with the coffee and cognac for his master.

He did not appear to notice the rather wild appearance of his master as he passed him, but turned his back to the well-padded chair, as he, James, arranged the coffee-pot and cup on the table; by the time he had arranged this to his satisfaction, the shipowner had recovered his presence of mind, wiped the damp dew from his forehead, and was, like Richard III., himself again.

“There’s a party as is enquiring for you, sir, as I’ve told to wait for the present in the ’all. The parson, with a string of women dressed in black behind him, widders per usual I should say they was.”

James is a privileged person, he has often seen widows waiting there for an audience before, and his master generally cracks a joke fitted to the occasion with him about them; on this occasion, however, the master answers his faithful and jocular servant somewhat briefly.

“Show them in, James, I am ready now to receive them.”

As James leaves the library sedately and leisurely, his master pours out and swallows a glass of cognac neat, and next makes a sudden gulp at the brandy-flavoured coffee, and then cutting and lighting another cigar, he resumes once more his easy chair and waits like a senator on the coming of his victims.

A moment afterwards they appear, headed by the Rev. Mr. Charles Penwiper, who greets his patron’s eye with a deprecating but gentle smile, as much as to say, “This ungrateful position is forced upon me, but I must do my duty to all parties concerned.” Six red-eyed, yet vengeful widows follow after him, and look at the owner of Federation Hall like the spectres who have lately passed him in his dreams; he is easy once more, however, as Pharaoh was after the plague had passed; spectres and widows are not so appalling as his own special brand of salt beef and pickled pork to face.

“Have a weed, Mr. Penwiper?”
“Not at present,” replies the mediator softly.

“James, ask Mr. Richard Harris to step down here,” replied Mr. John Dagget urbanely, as he puffed out an extensive cloud after his faithful and appreciative servitor, and then turned about with a gracious smile to face the widows.

To be continued tomorrow…