The Little Mermaid, part ii
The Shipwreck.
continued from part i; continued in parts iii, iv, v, & vi
Hans Christian Andersen has rightly called the prince’s ship swanlike. Its hull curved like a wineglass, and its lacy white wake trailed like a wedding-veil, and its sails were full-bellied, quickened by the Western Wind. The sisters knew it would be full of men and treasure.
The little mermaid did as her sisters had taught her. First she swam out silently to scout, to take the ship’s shape and size, so she could decide where among the rocks it would be best for her to draw it, to crack it up, as otters crack oysters against searocks, and where she could most safely sit and sing through the shipwreck, protected from the crashing of flotsam and jetsam.
How different ships looked above the sea’s surface, skating smoothly over the water! She was used to exploring them when they were sunk and stilled, their only motion the swaying of seaweed that grew from them. And how funny the men looked aboard ship, compared to underwater! She had not expected their herky-jerky movements. Their stepping reminded her of crabs.
The next step was to sing little snatches of her song. Not enough, yet, to fully hypnotize her listeners, for if they jumped now, the ship would simply float away. Just enough to turn them towards her trap.
Only one person lived to recall her song, and even he didn’t remember it very well; he told somewhat different renditions to many people, complicating my research. But the recovered fragment goes like this:
Desire means forgetting
all that came before;
Leave what you knew
and come to my shore.As she sang, the ship veered, and drew closer to her sunken mountain, and she continued swimming about the ship, leaping and singing, spying on the decks and peeking into portholes. At first glance, the men had looked awkward as puppets. But as she watched, she saw they had their own kind of choppy grace. One of them in particular was very beautiful. His ratios were not quite as regular as those incarnated in her statue. But he had the beauty of color—she noticed the golden circlet glistening in his hair—and unlike the statue, he had movement. She grew fascinated by how deftly he bore himself in the light unsupportive medium of air. Used as she was to the sinuous undulations of swimming, his upright stance was exotic to her. The straight line of his body, even in motion, had to her something of the dignity of her statue’s stillness.
Her fascination with him added to the charm of her voice. By then, her hearers were deeply enchanted. Many sailors jumped, and her sisters rejoiced as they picked them off. But the little mermaid hardly noticed. The prince had fully engrossed her. As she climbed onto her island, and lured the boat towards the rocks, she could think of nothing but how glad she was to watch him, how glad that he listened to her, how glad that he was coming towards her, his strong legs as he hoisted himself over the gunwale, the movement of his shoulders as he dove—
—just then, the clashing of the ship against the rocks startled her from her song. Then she perceived the danger. The prince could be broken among the wreckage, or stolen by one of her sisters, if she did not act. Panicked, she dove after him, even in the thickest tangle of “the beams and planks which strewed the surface of the sea, forgetting that they could crush her to pieces.” She chased him by the glint of his golden crown.
But on finding him, she was not sure why she wanted to find him, what she wanted from him. Her first impulse was to pull him down and eat him all by herself. But she could not stand to think that he would never move again, never again carry himself so straight. He must not die.
She brought him to the surface, and his white face slowly grew ruddy again, and she thought of bringing him to the top of her mountain, which to him would seem like an island. But she knew he could not live there for long, any more than she could live in the little tidal pools that formed and dried on the surface of that island. She must find another shore.
So she swam through sunset, and through night, and through dawn, holding his head above the water, growing almost exhausted by the time that the sand began to slowly and then quickly rise beneath her, and she saw that they were close to land. She dragged him ashore near the gardens of a holy place. “There she laid him in the warm sunshine,” and a little seawater dribbled from his mouth. She watched him with great anxiety—but “then bells sounded in the large white building,” and many people emerged, and the little mermaid saw that one of them had noticed something odd enough to investigate, and was approaching them. Her quick instincts told her to retreat into the foam, for if mermaids are man’s enemy when they have the advantage of the sea, what might men not do to her on the land? But first she snatched his golden circlet from his head. She stayed nearby in the foam long enough to watch that he was found by his kind. Then she returned with her prize to her sisters.
She would not tell them what had happened. But from that time she was very sick:
Sad, solemne, sowre, and full of fancies fraile She woxe; yet wist she neither how, nor why, She wist not, silly Mayd, what she did aile.
And from that time she was often away from them, so often that she missed many meals, and grew yet sicker, and would not tell them where she went. But I will tell you. Sometimes she was in her grotto, examining her statue, but its beauty now made her even more restless and dissatisfied. And more and more often, she was exploring the human world, to the degree that she could from the water: skirting shorelines, swimming up rivers till she was sicker yet with saltlessness, watching us walk, and work, and do other things that mermaids do not do. She even found the castle by the seashore where the prince paced and sighed—his kingdom was not far from their rock, that’s how he came across them—and watched him do so for many hours at a time.
Her illness and her secrets and her absence worried her sisters greatly, and it reached the point where they all agreed that the only resort was to consult the sea witch. And the little mermaid was in such despair that she agreed.