The Seven Coffins

I was young; I was ridiculously, exultantly young; I did not bear malice toward a soul in the world; I was determined to be a success; I made decisions easily, and did not know the meaning of fatigue; I did not believe that anything untoward could happen to me; yet I was modest, too, and people said that I had other good qualities; I only faintly apprehended that in every human being there are two human beings, a player and a counterplayer; I was 23, and my confidence was such that I did not even know that I was confident; and I knew little of the laws of fate or compensation.

My girl, whom I had lost and might rewin, wrote me from New York that she was bored and lonely and was I ever coming back. That was enough. At once, without thinking about it at all, I threw up my job in London and engaged passage home on the first ship available, which was the R.M.S. Capricornus. In those days, aircraft did not draw their tight, taut skeins over the melon of the Atlantic.

But, jubilant as I was, I knew that throwing up my job, which had been hard to get, was a serious matter. For 14 months I had worked in the London bureau of the Chicago Star, and I loved it. After paying for my passage on the Capricornus, I had $140 in the world.

Who cared?

Everything excited me. I walked to the end of the dock in Southampton, in windy rain that bit to the bone, watching the huge white ship, which had streets like a city, load up. Rain crawled under my collar and I pulled it out with a finger.

Swinging in a net above me, dripping with rain, was an object that seemed to me strange, but of familiar shape.

"What's that?" I asked a junior officer, pointing up.

His face split into a greasy smile, with the rain splashing it.

"Ah! That's a coffin, sir."

"A what?"

"A coffin. Yes, sir, we carry seven of 'em this trip, seven stout coffins, made of the firmest oak and lined with lead."

A whistle shrieked. The second coffin started its voyage into a hatch that led to the dark hold. I watched.

"They're very heavy, sir."

"So I gather. What do you need seven coffins for?"

"This ship will be setting out on a cruise, sir. We call first at New York on our regular run, pick up the cruise passengers and then start the cruise--a hundred and thirteen days, right around the world. Costs a fine penny, the fare does." He wiped more rain from his face, while the soaring wind made a balloon of his oilskin, turning him into a hunchback. "Plenty of the passengers on a luxury cruise like this are old people, sir. Some are bound to die. Average on a long cruise, two or three. But we carry seven coffins, sir, in case of need."

"Why don't you bury the bodies at sea?"

"Ah, no, sir. The old man, or the old lady, as the case may be, wants to go home neat and be salted down in the family earth."

Bells began to ring. I watched another coffin swing through the hatch.

"Thanks," I said. "See you on the voyage."

"'K you."

I hopped aboard. I climbed to the topmost deck and grasped the white rails, which were slimy with cold rain. We set off, and almost at once began to roll and shudder. The sea looked like ink mixed with milk.

I paid no attention. My mind suddenly became aflame with a story I might write about those seven coffins. I had a gin fizz and sat myself down in the smoking room and scribbled notes.

Those coffins, deep in the hold, heavy, empty, menacing, awaited prey. They were instruments of fate. Perhaps the Capricornus would be ten days out of New York, perhaps two weeks...sailing placidly with its cruise passengers under a painted moon, somewhere in the Caribbean...perhaps Jamaica. A death on board--sudden, unaccountable. Perhaps it was that old man, with a face creased like a tortoise shell, his goggles making his eyes look like those of an animal, who had been flirting with the young girl in the bright pink sweater...And then the girl herself--in circumstances equally sinister, equally inexplicable. Now, having heard about the seven coffins lying balefully in wait below, our ship's company began to worry. The sleek, somewhat fat, white Capricornus completed the first leg of its voyage, pierced the Panama Canal and burrowed through the long rollers of the Pacific. Our third death came near Honolulu--disconcerting! A middle-aged Viennese woman who played cards placidly every night with her daughter, who looked older than she was and pronounced bridge "pritch," toppled over with a heart attack.

Now tremors of apprehension did, indeed, shake the Capricornus. Our fourth victim was a stockbroker who collapsed after a game of deck tennis off the China coast. The feeling of irreversible doom and terror, (continued on page 310)Seven Coffins(continued from page 199) commingled with suspense, increased its grip on our frightened company. Next? Three more passengers must die, before the hunger of those coffins would be satisfied. There were still 39 days to go. All seven coffins must be loaded full. Fancifully, my thoughts raced forward. Near Bombay the coffins claimed their fifth victim, and something akin to panic swept our stricken ship. Now, I thought, we must get some philosophy into this morbid little tale. Why do people die? At the moment when life has no more to give them? No--not necessarily--because the sixth victim was a four-year-old girl, her life not formed. That death, from an absurdly inconsequential fall, took place in the Indian Ocean, as the Horn of Africa, a dark bull, rose in the mists ahead. How does fate pick and choose? With what dire capriciousness does it descend! Who will be next? Is there no answer to the puzzles of the universe? We floated the length of the pellucid Mediterranean, and then on a moonlit night off Tangier came a strangled yelp of anguish from cabin 86. Seventh...

A crash woke me out of my concentration. There came a peculiar grinding shift in the ship's motion. I felt the Capricornus rise out of the sea from the stern, flounder and then settle back with a series of loud, flat, zigzag bangs. We must have been lifted right out of the water so that the screws were exposed. Glasses, dishes, ashtrays slid off tables; stewards ran; a woman screamed. I was so shaken that I could not work out details of the seventh death. Could the coffins be clamoring for us, even now?

That evening, immediately after dinner, bracing myself along the narrow streets of the ship, I returned to my cabin and, using my old trunk tipped on end as a kind of table, wrote at wild, exhilarated speed a draft of this story.

The next morning I woke up late, tried to adjust myself to the ship's roll, and could not at first remember whether the episode of the coffins was real or if I had dreamed it. But there, neatly stacked on the edge of the flat old trunk, were a dozen or more pages in close handwriting. I opened the trunk and, without reading them, stuffed the pages in.

The R.M.S. Capricornus was not particularly crowded, since the cruise passengers were not yet aboard, and I had a cabin to myself. But it was set low in the ship, and very small.

"You'll be needing your dinner suit pressed for tonight," the steward said when he came with my breakfast. He held the tray on a sharp slant, to make up for the list of the cabin. The steward's face seemed to hold an aware, welcoming and surprised permanent smile; he had glazed red cheeks, as if the blood would at any moment flow to the surface, and a small, strong ball of chin.

The steward went on, "It's blowing up something lively, and no mistake about it." The cabin creaked, and he lurched sideways sharply. "Glass down to your knees. This trunk, sir," the steward continued. "We'll have to lash it down or send it to the baggage room."

"Look out," I said. "It's heavy."

"Heavy is the word for it, sir." He was trying to lift it onto the bunk above mine, after discovering that it would not fit underneath.

"Won't do," he said. "If it catches you falling, it could smash your leg."

"OK, have it taken to the baggage room."

Now I should explain that I am a hoarder, and I have been a hoarder all my life. In that trunk, carefully packed, was the sum total of my life so far. Perhaps I should also explain that I had had a remarkably lucky and fruitful 14 months in London. I had met artists, musicians, journalists and writers by the score. In those days, youthful American journalists were a comparatively rare phenomenon in London (most of my kind went to Paris), and my job had given me enthralling opportunities. No people are as genuinely kind as the British. And so in my trunk were innumerable mementos of my visit. Perhaps it was silly of me to treasure them so immeasurably. A letter from Joseph Conrad; an autographed book from H. G. Wells; a sketch signed by Augustus John; clippings of all the news stories I had written; all the notes I had carefully taken on various conversations with the eminent; my diary; and, of course, my manuscripts, including 40,000 words of a novel. I had never had time to type these out. That could wait. And I had further treasures, which went right down to the roots of my past, because, when I had left New York to go to London, I had taken with me all my earlier stock of precious possessions. Letters from my girl, and from other girls; some books carefully annotated; my scrapbook of work done for the Sentinel in New York, with the clippings held on big buff pages with rows of gluey dots; snapshots; pictures; and, above all, notes, notes, notes, out of which would come stories, stories, stories--all of this had gone into the trunk and had given me joy in London and would be a source of delight to me, as well as a brain bank, an idea bank, a memory bank, for years to come.

Even that old trunk itself had a savor and a special memory for me. It was the kind called in that era a "steamer" trunk (perhaps they are still called that): broad, flat, bound by wooden slats on a fibrous ocher frame; shabby, splintered; but my own; and equipped with a big brass lock that swung loosely on a swivel. My family had used it for years for summer trips from New Jersey up to Maine and back, and my mother gave it to me when I set out for London.

I had gone to London because compulsion drove me there. I wanted to live abroad and alone and, if necessary, starve in a garret in the accepted literary fashion. Of course, my girl was mixed up with all of this. We had had a quarrel--or perhaps I should say misunderstanding--when she could no longer accept with grace my indecisiveness, and she spurned me or I spurned her; people really did use words like spurn in those days. And now I was going back to her. But was I? I thought of her straight fall of yellow hair, her widely set straight-ahead blue eyes--sunshine in the morning, light on a pool of wheat. I was mad about her, yes. But now I had the strange feeling that she had somehow become incidental to this whole mysterious process. What counted, so to speak, was the architecture of my own life, its essential body and design, which, such was my youth and inexperience, I still thought I could control. It was time for me to be coming home, and that was all there was to it.

I would certainly miss London, though. I had built up some wonderful relationships there. I thought of my boss, who wore knife-edge shiny white collars on blue shirts and enjoyed the game of golf. I thought of the acrid bile-colored fog and the house in Bloomsbury where I had a room and which gave the impression that everything in life had always been, and would always be, just so, and even of such sights as the array of large glazed hams at Fortnum & Mason that somehow reminded me of medieval warriors in cuirasses.

I finished breakfast--that first morning on the Capricornus--and felt green in the stomach. Tables in the dining saloon had been equipped with borders to keep the dishes from rolling off, and the stairways were crisscrossed with taut thongs to keep passengers from falling. With effort I reached the smoking room and looked out. Solid slabs of black water, veined like marble, crashed down on the deck, as the ship dipped, careened, rose on its haunches like a charger, shook itself, and seemed to pirouette, all 23,000 tons of it.

I made my way to the wireless room and sent my girl a radiogram. I wondered if she would reply. She was a reticent girl: not much given to extravagance or gestures. But with what quality for understanding!

The weight of the storm, its animal thrust and fury, increased all that day and became worse the next. On the third afternoon came the piano episode. The grand piano in the lounge burst loose from its thongs and, like an ivory elephant, slid charging across the salon, upsetting tables, smashing chairs and scattering passengers. I jumped up and tried to run uphill against the cant of the ship, and the piano, bearing down near me, plunged into a wall of potted palms, crushing them. First to one side, then the other, the piano chased us, as we scrambled to avoid it. We did not know whether to scream, cry or laugh hysterically. But this was no laughing matter. A steward, sliding down the slope of the room, was caught by the piano and pinioned on the floor. The legs of the piano broke and, smashing against the podium, it turned over--and began to play!--that is, it gave forth weird hollow twangs as the keyboard was torn loose and its wiring ripped asunder.

To control this charging monster, subdue it, corral it, tie it fast again, took four men two solid hours.

Later that day we heard through the grapevine (which became an armored chain of rumor binding us together) that several accidents had occurred: Three passengers were in the ship's hospital with broken bones. We learned that the roll of the Capricornus had reached a fabulous degree, that the solid marble waves measured an unprecedented height, and that hatch number three had been broached and flooded. I struggled forward and stared out. The deck was a tangled mass of broken booms, cordage snapped and ventilators bent and swollen. And that was the night when those of us who were still capable of doing so gathered in the smoking room and heard the news that for 24 hours the Capricornus had not moved forward a single inch, but, indeed, had been blown backward off her course.

Even so, a modicum of normal shipboard life went on; a few hardy souls did what people always did on transatlantic liners in those days--argued unendingly about chances on the ship's pool, drank Black Velvet, listened to music like the Meditation from Thaïs and, assembling for dinner, put on evening shirts with stiff winged collars.

Our ship's company, typical of a winter crossing in that day, was not particularly distinguished. We had with us a covey of merchandise buyers, a professional gambler or two and smart, but somehow seedy, elderly ladies returning home after the autumn in Florence. I became part of a reasonably agreeable band of younger people, and we made our own adhesive small group in the forward bar. That evening I clambered toward our table, moving slowly up the incline made by the ship's slant, and met, as usual, the American consular attaché from Alexandria returning home on leave, the scholar in Old English who had just put in a year at Oxford, the somewhat peremptory, stiff-necked architect with the highly polished fingernails, and a dreary young woman writer who wore her hair in a complicated bang and endlessly fiddled with heavy, ornate strings of beads.

On the fringe of our circle--romance!--was a king's messenger, whose name was Heard. He had risen to get a commission in the army and had been badly wounded in the last battle of the Marne. His rank, that of major, entitled him during the War to be known as a "t.g.," or temporary gentleman, as the quaint phraseology of those days put it. Now his career as a courier for the Foreign Office was fixed and substantial, but he was a gloomy character. Since he knew everything that went on behind the scenes on the voyage, he was an invaluable source of scuttlebutt. He was the only male passenger who did not deign to dress for dinner. This night he told us that the latest word from the bridge was that we would be two full days late arriving in New York.

A radiogram arrived from my girl that night, saying that she would meet me at the pier. My heart danced. I trembled. So she really did want me back. And I thought of her divine youthful selfishness, her beautifully shaped head, and her eyes at once candid, guarded and serene.

The storm began to abate the next day. Blue water still slapped against my porthole and we did not seem to be able to get rid of the roll we had accumulated; but the worst was over. Now the surface of the sea resembled an iron skin, with wrinkled corrugations; along the crest of each swell there appeared white lines of icy foam, as if the sea itself had been cut by gashes and was tired out, panting, exhausted by its own titanic convulsion; these slashes in its surface gave it a chance to resume ordinary breath.

Late that afternoon I saw our captain for the first time; he had not left the bridge for 76 hours, and had had no sleep at all the two worst nights when we were hove to. He was walking down a forward corridor with a severe face and martinetlike brisk steps, with an engineer and the baggagemaster close behind him. Clearly he was in a rage, and he seemed to be persistently refusing to listen to what his underlings had to say. "But them coffins, sir--" I heard the baggagemaster expostulate, in the words of one who thought that explanation should produce forgiveness. The captain brushed past me and gave no answer to the baggagemaster. He kept making the gesture of a man washing his hands roughly; his teeth were clenched, and his face bore an expression of outrage, fury and dismay.

" 'Eard the news?" Major Heard, with his throaty grumble, greeted me that evening. "Whole bloody baggage room was flooded--everything in it ground to bits. Going to make no end of trouble for all concerned, ould boy!"

I stared at him.

"My confidential bags are saife, of course, strapped down in the purser's office. But all the rest of it--fourteen bags was the sum total--is gone, lost! Not a traice remains!"

I felt faint. My trunk!

Major Heard explained what had happened. Those lead-lined coffins, pried loose from their niches in the hold by the tremendous crash of ocean water flooding hatch number three, had torn through the partition to the baggage room, and there, for two whole days, had made savage chaos. Surging from side to side, unfettered, they had crashed, banged and slammed through everything the hold contained. Deep in the pit of the ship, wallowing in several feet of water, they had ripped their way from bulkhead to bulkhead, grinding through trunks and packing cases, smashing crates, pulverizing boxes, tearing bags and bales apart, snapping bonds. Hour after hour for two whole days those coffins had careened back and forth, crushing, pounding, grinding--relentless, triumphant, possessed of a murderous uncontrollable will of their own--until everything in the baggage room was pulped.

I rushed to the purser's office, where a crowd had formed. The captain, with the purser at his side, stood before a knot of gesticulating passengers. He waved aside the ejaculations of remonstrance, the angry threats, the unbelieving cries of protest, and said over and over again, doggedly and with his face blotched by shame, "Nothing whatever remains of anything deposited in the hold. The loss is total. Tons of water descended through the burst hatch, and certain objects unfortunately became loose and swirled through the water till everything was destroyed, ground to a pulp."

He marched briskly off.

In a smooth voice, the purser sought to give comfort. "Before the end of the voyage, list your claims and they will be dealt with by the proper authorities." A weeping woman clung to him. He slid away. "Excuse me, moddum, but I can do nothing about your shipment of lace. All objects have been obliterated."

My manuscripts, my letters, my books and records, my 40,000 words of novel!

It could not be true.

It was true.

As a newspaperman, I had certain inalienable privileges, one of which was the right of access, perhaps the most useful of all the properties a newspaperman possesses. I asked if I might see the damage for myself, and the same officer who had first pointed out the coffins to me on the Southampton dock was assigned to guide me. We went down and down, bouncing from one wall to the other--the ship still rolled like a coracle--until we reached a companionway ending in a locked door. The officer opened this, and I was able to peek down into the abyss of the baggage room, as from a perch. I gasped. To a depth of about three feet, the baggage room was filled solid with an oscillating, gurgling mass of dark-gray mud. Riding this evil quagmire were the seven coffins, like chariots, still not bound.

"No doubt the mass will be dredged through by experts on our arrival in New York," my escort said. "Some jewels may be retrieved."

Jewels? But what about my work, my precious and irretrievable work? What about my words on paper? I had lost everything precious to me in a disaster that was, I now sensed, irrevocable. Forlorn, desolate, I returned to my cabin. What afflicted me most was the sense of sheer unreasonable loss, and I have resented this loss--actively resented it--for almost 40 years. I was certainly in no mood for philosophizing and I had utterly no use at that bleak moment for abstract thought, but I knew that never again would I be able to think that life, my life, had a fixed skeleton, the solidity of design, or an inner architecture; never again could I say that it would be composed just so. Never again would I be able to assume that a man could control his own destiny. Perhaps, by some miracle, I might be able somehow to rewrite those 40,000 words of lost manuscript. (But I never did.) Even so, I could never be able to understand or forgive the utter capriciousness of this assault on the nature and continuity of my own existence. I thought again of that heaving mass of slimy, ugly mud. There in that odious and dismal grave lay my youth, wrecked.

Slowly we limped toward port under a sky dark but shiny with fins of rain. Now the rumor had it that the great muscles in the ship's hull itself had been mortally strained. There would be a long delay in New York; the cruise was canceled.

Were the coffins grinning? They had shown us ample foretaste of their power.

Lamely our company carried on. Something quite odd happened the last night. Our group stayed up very late and, when the smoking room closed, slid along the promenade deck to the forward bar. The ship was deserted. The king's messenger had a bottle of Scotch and, with his mustaches twitching, opened it. There appeared other bottles. We became boilingly drunk. Hysteria gripped us. We became testy, reckless, ugly, naked and frail--above all, frail.

First came a vicious little crap game; I lost every cent I had. Methodically the king's messenger began to smash glasses, as if he were revenging himself on his station; and the wife of the supercilious architect, who had seemed to be the epitome of calm respectability, stole half a dozen ashtrays, stuffing them in her bag with a sheepish grin. The Beowulf scholar became involved in an endless silly argument with the wife of the consul from Alexandria, and a fierce quarrel spurted out between the consul and the young woman writer who wore a bang and the loud beads, until the consul became violently sick in a pot of flowers. All around us, vulgarity and evil seemed to have been released.

At last we reached the North River and I saw my girl on the pier in her old nutria coat and peaked fur hat, under which descended the straight fall of yellow hair. Her face looked extraordinarily serious. Reporters, having heard about our storm (two small freighters had foundered an inch away), poured into the ship, and we of our company said hurried farewells, promised to meet again and knew we never would. I passed through Customs and an inspector found a bottle of D.O.M. in my valise and smashed it on the edge of the pier. I crushed my girl in my arms and we walked off the pier together. But I still felt a vast and overpowering misery, because I had discovered, somewhat late, that the universe--that is, nature--which should be our friend, contained malign forces I did not understand.

I tried to tell my girl everything in one burst as we stepped into the street and found a taxi making whiskers out of the slush. I was still stricken with rage, incredulity and--yes!--humiliation at my loss. Of course, I did not know at that moment that something quite odd, even extraordinary, would happen a week or two later. I got my old job back and my itemized claim for $1775.90, representing the damage caused by the coffins, was paid in full by the shipping company. The advertising department of my paper had, of course, intricate relations with the shipping interests, and maybe this was why my claim was settled so promptly. I do not know, but anyway I found that I had a small capital for the first time in my life, and I married my girl on it. If the structure of life is so mortally vulnerable to accident, it would be a good thing, I thought, to take advantage of moments and not wait for hours, days or years.