FICTION AT SEA.
It is quiet now on deck. The singing forward has ceased, the watch is set, and the larboard watch, who are to come on at midnight, are below—including the tall corporal of marines, whom we heard just now singing bass. But the little monkey of a boy, who took the tenor part in “O Julia!” belongs to the starboard watch, and now has another occupation on hand.
Seated on a tub turned upside down, close to the foremast, he is reading aloud, by the light of a lantern, out of an “awfully fine” book.
The boy (his name is Jozef) can read “real first-rate”; and from each of the listeners seated round him he is to receive the sum of two cents.
The book which he now has before him, and which is covered with oil-stains, because he has to hold it so close to the lantern,—the book which is so “awfully fine,” is entitled “Count Matatskai; or, The Bandit with the Grey Beard: A Story from the Mountains.”
Count Matatskai is a youthful nobleman who has fallen in love with a mountain maiden, the beautiful but fierce Krimhelia, daughter of a chamois-hunter. After various meetings on the rocks by moonlight, with a faithful old servitorincognitoin the background, Krimhelia makes up her mind to accept the Count’s love, and fly with him to a distant country, where counts and the daughters of chamois-hunters stand precisely on the same social footing. But now a difficulty occurs, and it is this: Krimhelia has sworn an oath to avenge the death of her father, who has been killed in a fight with the band commanded by the Grey-Bearded Brigand.
This is the point Jozef has reached in the story. Several of his audience have already dropped asleep; but the readerdoes not notice it—he is too much absorbed in his narrative,—and continues, in his “first-rate” manner, which—heard at a distance—reminds one of nothing so much as of the soft but continuous murmur of a babbling brook—commas and other stops being, in this method, so entirely left in the background, or else occurring in such remarkable places, that a reporter would have been forced to reproduce his text somewhat as follows:—
“Krimhelia looked the Count straight in the face.
“Look at me Count said she do you see this glittering dagger as sure as the moon, hangs yonder in heaven and illuminates my pale features so surely will I thrust this, dagger into the heart of the Bandit, with the Grey Beard first and before I throw myself as your consort into your arms but why so pale Count and why do you tremble so?”
Now Jozef is interrupted by the master-tailor, a thin, little man, of whom it is commonly said on board that he knows a thing or two more than most people.
“Now, I know,” says he, in his piping voice.
“What d’ye know?” asks the boatswain, who has little or no opinion of the master-tailor.
“As how the gentleman—the Count, I mean—and the other,—the Bandit with the Grey Beard,—that both of them are one and the same man.”
“Well, you calico-spoiler—you know that, do you? Well—I know that too, and all of us know it right enough; but you needn’t take another man’s share in the reading for all that. Go ahead, boy!”
The master-tailor is looked at with contempt from various quarters, and Jozef pursues his reading with a chapter describing how Count Matatskai comes home in a bad temper.
“The Count threw himself down on a couch adorned with costly velvet, relieve me of my riding-boots—thus he spoke to the grey-headed old servant Gabario who, broughthim a silver goblet with sparkling wine saying, that this was his favourite wine from the great vineyard south of the castle but, the Count made a gesture of refusal with his left hand and said me liketh no wine Gabario avaunt and saddle—my horse!”
This was the end of the chapter, and Jozef took breath.
“It’s a capital thing,” said the boatswain, “when a man can have the things for the ordering in that way. What comes next, Jozef?”
The boatswain is beginning to feel sleepy, and would therefore like Jozef to tell him the end at once; but this Jozef is by no means inclined to do,—he goes ahead valiantly, and by degrees, though he does not observe it, his whole audience drops asleep. At last, when he has reached the closing scene, there is no one to listen to it but the master-tailor, who can scarcely keep his small grey eyes open.
“Just hear this, now!” says Jozef, who—though he has read the book through twice before—is as enthusiastic over this passage as the first time. “Now you must listen! Now the Count is sitting up alone in the rocks, in a ... cavern, they call it, ... and now he is the Bandit with the Grey Beard; and the other robbers are sitting in the back of the cavern round a great big fire, and some of them are lying asleep, and the others are roasting great pieces of meat at the fire, and they’re drinking wine with it ... out of gold cups that they’ve stolen.... But the Bandit with the Grey Beard— ...he’ssitting all by himself, you see,—and now Krimhelia comes in—you know—the young lady he thinks so much of.”
And Jozef resumes his reading—how Krimhelia approaches, cautiously, with the glittering dagger; how the Grey-Bearded Bandit, looking up, suddenly sees her standing behind him; how Krimhelia seizes him by the beard and drives the dagger into his heart; and how, at the samemoment, the long grey beard comes off in her hand, and she looks with horror on the “pallid dying countenance” of Count Matatskai.
Now follows a dialogue between the dying bandit chief and the “almost fainting” Krimhelia, who is “filled with consternation”; in the course of which the tailor finally closes his eyes unobserved.
Now comes the closing scene; the other robbers come out from behind the fire, Krimhelia takes to flight, and climbs to the top of a steep dark rock on the edge of a “yawning abyss.”
As Jozef reads, he bends over his book, leans his head on his hands, and sees the whole thing taking place before his eyes. He sees Krimhelia standing on the top of the rock. The day is breaking in the east. The robbers are pursuing her, and begin to climb the rock....
Jozef reads on,—at a passionately accelerated pace, and with the most singular stops imaginable:—
“There she stood proudly—like a queen with her long, loose hair and her shining white face standing out sharply against the red sunrise-tinted sky with horror—she saw in the unfathomable depth at her feet the bandits approaching. Already the foremost was stretching out his hand to seize her and she saw, the morning-light falling on his horrible features when suddenly, her ear was struck by a sound of men’s voices singing beneath her in the valley she listens, it is the morning song of her brothers, she lifts her hands skywards and looks up to the paling moon and the stars ‘Ic-come’! she cries” (all in one word) “... and with aHOARSEshriek she flings herself down into the abyss at the same moment the Bandit Chief drew his last breath and the Count Matatskai was no moreTHE END.”
“That’s all!” said Jozef. “That’s fine, ain’t it? ... Oh! lor! ... they’re all asleep.”
Jozef cannot at once get over a slight feeling of indignationagainst an audience, capable of dropping-off “in the middle of a bit like that,”—but as it is not an isolated experience on his part, he soon makes up his mind to pay no further attention to it. He takes the lantern away, goes forward, and lies down on the deck with the oil-stained book under his head—looking up at the moon right above him, and beginning to see, in the air, all sorts of figures, which gradually acquire a likeness to Count Matatskai and the “young lady he thinks so much of.”
A. Werumeus Buning.
A. Werumeus Buning.
A. Werumeus Buning.
A. Werumeus Buning.