There & Back

“I’m so glad! Do go on.”

She was eager as any child. Coleridge could not have desired a better listener.

“I know! I know!” she said presently. “We were caught in a calm as we came home! My father is fond of the sea, and brought us round the Cape in a sailing-vessel. It was horrid. It lasted only three days, but I felt as if I should die. It wasn’t long enough, I suppose, to draw out the creeping things.”

“Perhaps it wasn’t near enough to the equator for them,” answered Richard, and went on:—

“Ah! well a-day! what evil looks
Had I from old and young;
Instead of the cross, the Albatross
About my neck was hung.”

“Poor man! And in such weather!” exclaimed Barbara. “And such a huge creature! I see! They thought now the killing of the bird had brought the calm, and they would have their revenge! A bad set, those sailors! People that deserve punishment always want to punish. Do go on.”

When the skeleton-ship came, her eyes grew with listening like those of one in a trance.

“What a horrid, live dead woman!” she said. “Her whiteness is worse than any blackness. But I wish he had told us what Death was like!”

“In the first edition,” returned Richard, much delighted that she missed what constructive symmetry required, “there is a description of Death. I doubt if you would like it, though. You don’t like horrid things?”

“I do—if they should be horrid, and are horrid enough.”

“Coleridge thought afterwards it was better to leave it out!”

“Tell it me, anyhow.”

“His bones were black with many a crack,
All black and bare, I ween;
Jet-black and bare, save where with rust,
Of mouldy damps and charnel crust,
They were patched with purple and green.

“—There! What do you think of that?”

“He is nothing like so horrid as the woman!”

“She is more horrid in the first edition.”

“How?”

“Her lips are red, her looks are free,
Her locks are yellow as gold;
Her skin is as white as leprosy,
And she is far liker Death than he;
Her flesh makes the still air cold.”

“I do think that is worse. Tell me again how the other goes.”

“The Night-Mare Life-in-death was she,
Who thicks man’s blood with cold.”

“Yes, the other is worse! I can hardly tell why, except it be that you get at the sense of it easier. What does the Nightmare Life-in-Death mean?”

“I don’t know. I can’t quite get at it.”

How should he? Richard was too close to the awful phantom to know that this was her portrait.

“There’s another dreadful stanza in the first edition,” he went on. “It is repeated in the second, but left out in the last. I fancy the poet let himself be overpersuaded to omit it. The poem was not actually printed without it until after his death: he had only put it in the errata, to be omitted.—When the woman whistles with joy at having won the ancient Mariner,

“‘A gust of wind sterte up behind,’

“—as if, like the sailors, she had whistled for it:—

“‘A gust of wind sterte up behind,
And whistled through his bones;
Through the holes of his eyes and the hole of his mouth,
Half whistles and half groans;’

“and the spectre-bark is blown along by this breath coming out of the bosom of the skeleton.”

“I think it was a great mistake to leave that verse out!” said Barbara. “There is no nasty horror in it! There is a little in the description of Death!”

“I think with you,” returned Richard, more and more astonished at the insight of a girl who had read next to nothing. “Our lecturer at King’s,” he went on, “pointed out to us, in this part, what some call a blunder.”

“What is it?”

“I will give you the verses again; and you see if you can pick it out.”

“Do, please.”

“—Till clombe above the eastern bar The horned Moon, with one bright star Within the nether tip.”

“I never saw a star there! But I see nothing wrong.”

“Which is the nearest to us of the heavenly bodies?”

“The moon, I suppose.”

“Certainly:—how, then, could a star come between us and it? For if the star were within the tip of the moon, it must be between us and the dark part of the moon!”

“I see! How stupid of me! But let me think!—If the star were just on the edge of the moon, between the horns, it would almost look as if it were within the tips—might it not?”

“That’s the best that can be said for it anyhow,—except indeed that the poor ignorant sailor might, in the midst of such horrors, well make the blunder.—By the way, in the first edition it stood as you have just said: the line was,

“‘Almost within the tips.’”

“What did he change it to?”