The Great Nocturnal by Jean Ray

Author:Jean Ray
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wakefield Press
Published: 2021-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

WHEN CHRIST WALKED ACROSS THE SEA

To be sure, the scientists in the depths of their observatories had foretold the event, but Inghram was a city with little industry and scant commerce, happy in its remote location, and the astronomers went unheard in that quarter.

Let that serve by way of introduction.

Thus the city found itself far inland, on the bank of a river so feeble that from time to time its channel required dredging. Nevertheless, David Stone imagined it to be a maritime city with a harbor, because a sort of tarry wharf1 extended from the door of his office to the shallow stretch of water.

“Is that a cloud rising behind the curtain of Italian poplars?” asked Snuffy, the senior clerk.

“It’s a sailboat,” argued David, “a yacht; it has put on some sail and they’re towing it. It has come straight from the sea.”

“Oh, a sailboat!” chuckled Snuffy. “On the Hulmar River,2 a boat from the sea. Hahaha!”

“And why not?” growled Stone furiously. “We have lots of seagulls around here.”

“That,” conceded Snuffy, “that is true … I can’t help it, but it’s true.”

“I see its high yards.”

“Those are tree branches.”

David Stone, who owned a struggling local business, lived in the magnificent idea that one day a ship, arriving right from the sea, would draw up alongside his ramshackle wharf.

If anyone tried to explain the shallowness of the river to him, he would bark:

“Where there is water, a ship may come.”

“Sure,” affirmed Snuffy, “but then why not in Mother Appleby’s laundry tub?”

But that evening he was watching the slow rise of a shadow behind the poplars with a degree of uneasiness.

“It is a cloud!” he cried finally, with a certain savage glee.

“Indeed,” consented David Stone with despair, “but perhaps tomorrow it will be a ship that …”

“Tomorrow,” taunted the clerk.

He never suspected how that single word was ripe with frightening implications.

“How dark and heavy it is!” said David. After that, the conversation dropped off.

Snuffy had begun adding the numbers.

“Business is not going well,” he muttered.

From the moment that a ship was no longer at issue, David Stone became a timid and sullen man.

“Do you think so, Snuffy?”

“There is nothing more to add! I want to know how you are going to pay the butcher this week.”

“Oh! We really cannot pay him?”

“No, we cannot pay him, and we shall starve!”

“Unless …” began David.

“… a ship arrives with all the gold of Africa in its hold, is that it?”

“I am most unfortunate,” admitted David Stone … “Say, Snuffy, who is that woman crossing the street with Hangfield?”

“She is an artiste, mis-ter,”3 the clerk said sternly. “She will be singing this very night at the theater in town, and the price of seats has more than tripled for the occasion. Hangfield is a rich man. He will certainly give her presents.”

“An artiste? I would like to hear her.”

“Well then, sell your wharf for firewood, Mis-ter Stone, and buy yourself a seat in the parterre; but your wharf will never burn, because it is rotten like a lousy mushroom.

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