第 二十八 章 · Chapter XXVIII

There is no need of going into an extended recital of our suffering in

the small boat during the many days we were driven and drifted, here and

there, willy-nilly, across the ocean. The high wind blew from the

north-west for twenty-four hours, when it fell calm, and in the night

sprang up from the south-west. This was dead in our teeth, but I took in

the sea-anchor and set sail, hauling a course on the wind which took us

in a south-south-easterly direction. It was an even choice between this

and the west-north-westerly course which the wind permitted; but the warm

airs of the south fanned my desire for a warmer sea and swayed my

decision.

In three hours—it was midnight, I well remember, and as dark as I had

ever seen it on the sea—the wind, still blowing out of the south-west,

rose furiously, and once again I was compelled to set the sea-anchor.

Day broke and found me wan-eyed and the ocean lashed white, the boat

pitching, almost on end, to its drag. We were in imminent danger of

being swamped by the whitecaps. As it was, spray and spume came aboard

in such quantities that I bailed without cessation. The blankets were

soaking. Everything was wet except Maud, and she, in oilskins, rubber

boots, and sou’wester, was dry, all but her face and hands and a stray

wisp of hair. She relieved me at the bailing-hole from time to time, and

bravely she threw out the water and faced the storm. All things are

relative. It was no more than a stiff blow, but to us, fighting for life

in our frail craft, it was indeed a storm.

Cold and cheerless, the wind beating on our faces, the white seas roaring

by, we struggled through the day. Night came, but neither of us slept.

Day came, and still the wind beat on our faces and the white seas roared

past. By the second night Maud was falling asleep from exhaustion. I

covered her with oilskins and a tarpaulin. She was comparatively dry,

but she was numb with the cold. I feared greatly that she might die in

the night; but day broke, cold and cheerless, with the same clouded sky

and beating wind and roaring seas.

I had had no sleep for forty-eight hours. I was wet and chilled to the

marrow, till I felt more dead than alive. My body was stiff from

exertion as well as from cold, and my aching muscles gave me the severest

torture whenever I used them, and I used them continually. And all the

time we were being driven off into the north-east, directly away from

Japan and toward bleak Bering Sea.

And still we lived, and the boat lived, and the wind blew unabated. In

fact, toward nightfall of the third day it increased a trifle and

something more. The boat’s bow plunged under a crest, and we came

through quarter-full of water. I bailed like a madman. The liability of

shipping another such sea was enormously increased by the water that

weighed the boat down and robbed it of its buoyancy. And another such

sea meant the end. When I had the boat empty again I was forced to take

away the tarpaulin which covered Maud, in order that I might lash it down

across the bow. It was well I did, for it covered the boat fully a third

of the way aft, and three times, in the next several hours, it flung off

the bulk of the down-rushing water when the bow shoved under the seas.

Maud’s condition was pitiable. She sat crouched in the bottom of the

boat, her lips blue, her face grey and plainly showing the pain she

suffered. But ever her eyes looked bravely at me, and ever her lips

uttered brave words.

The worst of the storm must have blown that night, though little I

noticed it. I had succumbed and slept where I sat in the stern-sheets.

The morning of the fourth day found the wind diminished to a gentle

whisper, the sea dying down and the sun shining upon us. Oh, the blessed

sun! How we bathed our poor bodies in its delicious warmth, reviving

like bugs and crawling things after a storm. We smiled again, said

amusing things, and waxed optimistic over our situation. Yet it was, if

anything, worse than ever. We were farther from Japan than the night we

left the _Ghost_. Nor could I more than roughly guess our latitude and

longitude. At a calculation of a two-mile drift per hour, during the

seventy and odd hours of the storm, we had been driven at least one

hundred and fifty miles to the north-east. But was such calculated drift

correct? For all I knew, it might have been four miles per hour instead

of two. In which case we were another hundred and fifty miles to the

bad.

Where we were I did not know, though there was quite a likelihood that we

were in the vicinity of the _Ghost_. There were seals about us, and I

was prepared to sight a sealing-schooner at any time. We did sight one,

in the afternoon, when the north-west breeze had sprung up freshly once

more. But the strange schooner lost itself on the sky-line and we alone

occupied the circle of the sea.

Came days of fog, when even Maud’s spirit drooped and there were no merry

words upon her lips; days of calm, when we floated on the lonely

immensity of sea, oppressed by its greatness and yet marvelling at the

miracle of tiny life, for we still lived and struggled to live; days of

sleet and wind and snow-squalls, when nothing could keep us warm; or days

of drizzling rain, when we filled our water-breakers from the drip of the

wet sail.

And ever I loved Maud with an increasing love. She was so many-sided, so

many-mooded—“protean-mooded” I called her. But I called her this, and

other and dearer things, in my thoughts only. Though the declaration of

my love urged and trembled on my tongue a thousand times, I knew that it

was no time for such a declaration. If for no other reason, it was no

time, when one was protecting and trying to save a woman, to ask that

woman for her love. Delicate as was the situation, not alone in this but

in other ways, I flattered myself that I was able to deal delicately with

it; and also I flattered myself that by look or sign I gave no

advertisement of the love I felt for her. We were like good comrades,

and we grew better comrades as the days went by.

One thing about her which surprised me was her lack of timidity and fear.

The terrible sea, the frail boat, the storms, the suffering, the

strangeness and isolation of the situation,—all that should have

frightened a robust woman,—seemed to make no impression upon her who had

known life only in its most sheltered and consummately artificial

aspects, and who was herself all fire and dew and mist, sublimated

spirit, all that was soft and tender and clinging in woman. And yet I am

wrong. She _was_ timid and afraid, but she possessed courage. The flesh

and the qualms of the flesh she was heir to, but the flesh bore heavily

only on the flesh. And she was spirit, first and always spirit,

etherealized essence of life, calm as her calm eyes, and sure of

permanence in the changing order of the universe.

Came days of storm, days and nights of storm, when the ocean menaced us

with its roaring whiteness, and the wind smote our struggling boat with a

Titan’s buffets. And ever we were flung off, farther and farther, to the

north-east. It was in such a storm, and the worst that we had

experienced, that I cast a weary glance to leeward, not in quest of

anything, but more from the weariness of facing the elemental strife, and

in mute appeal, almost, to the wrathful powers to cease and let us be.

What I saw I could not at first believe. Days and nights of

sleeplessness and anxiety had doubtless turned my head. I looked back at

Maud, to identify myself, as it were, in time and space. The sight of

her dear wet cheeks, her flying hair, and her brave brown eyes convinced

me that my vision was still healthy. Again I turned my face to leeward,

and again I saw the jutting promontory, black and high and naked, the

raging surf that broke about its base and beat its front high up with

spouting fountains, the black and forbidding coast-line running toward the

south-east and fringed with a tremendous scarf of white.

“Maud,” I said. “Maud.”

She turned her head and beheld the sight.

“It cannot be Alaska!” she cried.

“Alas, no,” I answered, and asked, “Can you swim?”

She shook her head.

“Neither can I,” I said. “So we must get ashore without swimming, in

some opening between the rocks through which we can drive the boat and

clamber out. But we must be quick, most quick—and sure.”

I spoke with a confidence she knew I did not feel, for she looked at me

with that unfaltering gaze of hers and said:

“I have not thanked you yet for all you have done for me but—”

She hesitated, as if in doubt how best to word her gratitude.

“Well?” I said, brutally, for I was not quite pleased with her thanking

me.

“You might help me,” she smiled.

“To acknowledge your obligations before you die? Not at all. We are not

going to die. We shall land on that island, and we shall be snug and

sheltered before the day is done.”

I spoke stoutly, but I did not believe a word. Nor was I prompted to lie

through fear. I felt no fear, though I was sure of death in that boiling

surge amongst the rocks which was rapidly growing nearer. It was

impossible to hoist sail and claw off that shore. The wind would

instantly capsize the boat; the seas would swamp it the moment it fell

into the trough; and, besides, the sail, lashed to the spare oars,

dragged in the sea ahead of us.

As I say, I was not afraid to meet my own death, there, a few hundred

yards to leeward; but I was appalled at the thought that Maud must die.

My cursed imagination saw her beaten and mangled against the rocks, and

it was too terrible. I strove to compel myself to think we would make

the landing safely, and so I spoke, not what I believed, but what I

preferred to believe.

I recoiled before contemplation of that frightful death, and for a moment

I entertained the wild idea of seizing Maud in my arms and leaping

overboard. Then I resolved to wait, and at the last moment, when we

entered on the final stretch, to take her in my arms and proclaim my

love, and, with her in my embrace, to make the desperate struggle and

die.

Instinctively we drew closer together in the bottom of the boat. I felt

her mittened hand come out to mine. And thus, without speech, we waited

the end. We were not far off the line the wind made with the western

edge of the promontory, and I watched in the hope that some set of the

current or send of the sea would drift us past before we reached the

surf.

“We shall go clear,” I said, with a confidence which I knew deceived

neither of us.

“By God, we _will_ go clear!” I cried, five minutes later.

The oath left my lips in my excitement—the first, I do believe, in my

life, unless “trouble it,” an expletive of my youth, be accounted an

oath.

“I beg your pardon,” I said.

“You have convinced me of your sincerity,” she said, with a faint smile.

“I do know, now, that we shall go clear.”

I had seen a distant headland past the extreme edge of the promontory,

and as we looked we could see grow the intervening coastline of what was

evidently a deep cove. At the same time there broke upon our ears a

continuous and mighty bellowing. It partook of the magnitude and volume

of distant thunder, and it came to us directly from leeward, rising above

the crash of the surf and travelling directly in the teeth of the storm.

As we passed the point the whole cove burst upon our view, a half-moon of

white sandy beach upon which broke a huge surf, and which was covered

with myriads of seals. It was from them that the great bellowing went

up.

“A rookery!” I cried. “Now are we indeed saved. There must be men and

cruisers to protect them from the seal-hunters. Possibly there is a

station ashore.”

But as I studied the surf which beat upon the beach, I said, “Still bad,

but not so bad. And now, if the gods be truly kind, we shall drift by

that next headland and come upon a perfectly sheltered beach, where we

may land without wetting our feet.”

And the gods were kind. The first and second headlands were directly in

line with the south-west wind; but once around the second,—and we went

perilously near,—we picked up the third headland, still in line with the

wind and with the other two. But the cove that intervened! It

penetrated deep into the land, and the tide, setting in, drifted us under

the shelter of the point. Here the sea was calm, save for a heavy but

smooth ground-swell, and I took in the sea-anchor and began to row. From

the point the shore curved away, more and more to the south and west,

until at last it disclosed a cove within the cove, a little land-locked

harbour, the water level as a pond, broken only by tiny ripples where

vagrant breaths and wisps of the storm hurtled down from over the

frowning wall of rock that backed the beach a hundred feet inshore.

Here were no seals whatever. The boat’s stern touched the hard shingle.

I sprang out, extending my hand to Maud. The next moment she was beside

me. As my fingers released hers, she clutched for my arm hastily. At

the same moment I swayed, as about to fall to the sand. This was the

startling effect of the cessation of motion. We had been so long upon

the moving, rocking sea that the stable land was a shock to us. We

expected the beach to lift up this way and that, and the rocky walls to

swing back and forth like the sides of a ship; and when we braced

ourselves, automatically, for these various expected movements, their

non-occurrence quite overcame our equilibrium.

“I really must sit down,” Maud said, with a nervous laugh and a dizzy

gesture, and forthwith she sat down on the sand.

I attended to making the boat secure and joined her. Thus we landed on

Endeavour Island, as we came to it, land-sick from long custom of the

sea.