2. CHAPTER II.
Next day there was a calm, which added not a little to
my impatience of the ship. And, furthermore, by certain
nameless associations revived in me my old impressions upon
first witnessing as a landsman this phenomenon of the sea.
Those impressions may merit a page.
To a landsman a calm is no joke. It not only revolutionizes
his abdomen, but unsettles his mind; tempts him to
recant his belief in the eternal fitness of things; in short,
almost makes an infidel of him.
At first he is taken by surprise, never having dreamt of a
state of existence where existence itself seems suspended.
He shakes himself in his coat, to see whether it be empty
or no. He closes his eyes, to test the reality of the glassy
expanse. He fetches a deep breath, by way of experiment,
and for the sake of witnessing the effect. If a reader of
books, Priestley on Necessity occurs to him; and he believes
in that old Sir Anthony Absolute to the very last chapter.
His faith in Malte Brun, however, begins to fail; for the
geography, which from boyhood he had implicitly confided in,
always assured him, that though expatiating all over the
globe, the sea was at least margined by land. That over
against America, for example, was Asia. But it is a calm,
and he grows madly skeptical.
To his alarmed fancy, parallels and meridians become
emphatically what they are merely designated as being: imaginary
lines drawn round the earth's surface.
The log assures him that he is in such a place; but the
log is a liar; for no place, nor any thing possessed of a local
angularity, is to be lighted upon in the watery waste.
At length horrible doubts overtake him as to the captain's
competency to navigate his ship. The ignoramus
must have lost his way, and drifted into the outer confines
of creation, the region of the everlasting lull, introductory to
a positive vacuity.
Thoughts of eternity thicken. He begins to feel anxious
concerning his soul.
The stillness of the calm is awful. His voice begins to
grow strange and portentous. He feels it in him like something
swallowed too big for the esophagus. It keeps up a
sort of involuntary interior humming in him, like a live
beetle. His cranium is a dome full of reverberations. The
hollows of his very bones are as whispering galleries. He
is afraid to speak loud, lest he be stunned; like the man in
the bass drum.
But more than all else is the consciousness of his utter
helplessness. Succor or sympathy there is none. Penitence
for embarking avails not. The final satisfaction of despairing
may not be his with a relish. Vain the idea of idling
out the calm. He may sleep if he can, or purposely delude
himself into a crazy fancy, that he is merely at leisure.
All this he may compass; but he may not lounge; for
to lounge is to be idle; to be idle implies an absence of any
thing to do; whereas there is a calm to be endured: enough
to attend to, Heaven knows.
His physical organization, obviously intended for locomotion,
becomes a fixture; for where the calm leaves him, there
he remains. Even his undoubted vested rights, comprised
in his glorious liberty of volition, become as naught. For
of what use? He wills to go: to get away from the calm:
as ashore he would avoid the plague. But he can not; and
how foolish to revolve expedients. It is more hopeless than
a bad marriage in a land where there is no Doctors' Commons.
He has taken the ship to wife, for better or for
worse, for calm or for gale; and she is not to be shuffled
off. With yards akimbo, she says unto him scornfully,
as the old beldam said to the little dwarf:—“Help yourself.”
And all this, and more than this, is a calm.
