# The Red Book Magazine/Volume 42/Number 5/Well Lost

Extracted from The Red Book Magazine, 1924 March pp. 42–46, 114, 116, 118, 120, 122. Accompanying illustrations may be omitted.
He dragged her toward the door, and her scornful hatred insulted him in this moment of life or death: “Not with you!”
Well Lost
By
F. Britten Austin
Illustrated by Ernest Fuhr
“PULL! Pull, you gumpheaded— Or we'll swamp!” Slewed awkwardly half broadside on, the boat lifted to the pitch-black sky on the flank of a pitch-black wave that boiled suddenly in white foam as its crest slid under her, dropped her sickeningly to renewed brief windlessness in a moving-walled dungeon of the night.
Mr. Antony Drahan tugged desperately at the heavy oar whose butt thumped viciously through his sopped dress-shirt front, striving in a blind concentration of all his faculties to keep her head to the sea. He did not need the exasperated yell of the old seaman unstably erect against the half-stepped mast in the center of the boat to point the urgency of the effort. The danger announced itself as the clumsy boat rolled almost gunwale-under, rose again with a drenching scud of heavy spray flying from the bows that miraculously, for a moment, he held breasting the overcurling surge that rushed out of the blackness. Then he backed water with all his strength on the one oar to keep her straight, prevent that suicidal slew-round as she dived again.
There was only one other effective pair of hands in the boat, and they were more than occupied in trying to step the mast, to hoist the rag of sail that was their one chance of safety. Mr. Drahan, drenched, buffeted, faint and gasping, his arms almost torn out of their sockets, battled doggedly, despairingly, with a strength that he would never have credited to himself, to hold the boat for yet a necessary minute or two longer at an approximation to a safe angle of impact. That minute or two seemed an eternity. They came to an end at last. The mast stuck up to the black sky in drunken variations of verticality; the yard of the sail lay horizontally across the thwarts, ready to hoist. For yet another moment the growlingly blasphemous old sailor—he had not seen his face yet—crouched fumbling at a locker.
“Got any sort of light, Guvnor?” he asked.
Matches were useless, of course-—pulp after his immersion. He remembered suddenly the spirit-lighter in his pocket, felt for it with one hand that hardly dared relinquish the oar, tossed it to him. The sailor grabbed for it on the floor of the boat.
A little spark of light sprang into existence between carefully curved hands, and Mr. Drahan saw the man's face suddenly illuminated, gray-whiskered, against the flame of a wire-bound lantern, saw the yellow star climb to the short mast-top to trace wild convoluted ellipses on the black sky above his head. The sailor stumbled back over the thwarts to the stern, halliards and sheets in his hand.
“All right, Guvnor! Easy! Let 'er come round! That's it! Pull! Steady! Ship your oar!” As he shouted, he hauled up the little sail, the boat came round stern-on to the black hurrying hills of water, fled before them nose-down, nose-up, was over- taken in a squatter of foam as the crest raced past her from the unseen to the unseen, sank back upon the flank, was lifted again up and forward. Mr. Drahan pulled in his heavy oar, crumpled over it, spent and gasping.
The sailor's voice roused him at its second repetition.
“You'd better come and look after that lady o' yourn!”
It was many years since Mr. Drahan had been spoken to in so peremptory a voice—not, in fact, since Mr. Drahan had started in business for himself at the age of eighteen. And with the passage of time, his interlocutors had grown ever more deferential, until Antony Drahan had almost forgotten what it was like not to be addressed as a multimillionaire is addressed. Struggling with the oar, the sailorman's uncomplimentary vehemence had been a trifle not to be noticed in his urgency of toil. Now, relaxed, the surprise of it made him look up sharply in an instinctive rallying of an identity that could not conceive itself as other than the master. Then he checked himself from resentment, savored an ironic sense of humor. This fellow didn't know who he was—had no idea that he was Mr. Antony Drahan of the Transatlantic Trust! He left himself the joke—what was the good of revealing himself, anyway? His mind cogitated the little problem, came to its decision in a flash—and from the manner, his consciousness opened suddenly to the content of the fellow's words. It was as if an unwilling something in his mind had stubbornly withheld it as long as possible from his concern.
“I'd better give a look at her,” he thought, beating down an unacknowledged, unworthy reluctance. He glanced back at himself, in a past scarcely yet to be measured in more than minutes,—fighting for life in black choking water, but holding up in an unrelaxing clutch a leaden, hair-streaming burden,—as at another man. The moment of blind, instinctive action was over. Here, in this lull of safety, where the boat drove dizzily before the wind with her yellow mast-light like a low star gone mad across the pitch-black sky, he had come to himself again.
He stumbled awkwardly over the thwarts to where the sailor sat, tiller in one hand, mainsheet in the other. At the steersman's feet, in the well of the boat, a woman lay stretched and motion- less. Drahan bent over her. Her shoulders were bare in the thin evening-gown that clung to her like a sopped rag, her long wet hair wrapped about it. In the dim, uncertain light of the careering masthead lamp, she looked a drowned corpse, beyond help. He touched her.
“Aint dead, is she?” queried the sailor.
“No.”
He looked at her, then, with difficulty as the boat rose and lurched and dived; he dragged her out of the pool of swishing water in which she lay, propped her, half-sitting, against a thwart. She made no movement, limp and senseless in his arms, her bare shoulders like ice to his touch. He hesitated a moment, then stripped off his dinner-jacket, put it round her. It was sopped through, of course, but then everything was wet—it was at least something. Thank God, despite the violence of wind and sea, this Pacific night was warm! Yet— He felt the chill of her. Again an unworthy little reluctance in him gave way. He slithered down beside her, drew her to him, held her close in his arms, her deathlike head heavy on his shoulder, striving to communicate to her a little of his own scant bodily warmth.
“Not your wife, I suppose?” the old sailor threw at him as the boat slid swiftly down into a black hollow where the wind was suddenly stilled.
“Yes,” he replied curtly.
They relapsed into silence. The sailor, crouching at the tiller as, rather by feel than by sight, he nursed the boat through the foaming, overtopping perils that surged momentarily out of the blackness, distracted his concentrated attention by no unnecessary words. Antony Drahan sat cramped and still, clutching that cold body tightly to him. Presently he felt a flutter of life in it. She sighed, passed almost insensibly out of coma into the drugged sleep of utter exhaustion. Drahan spoke, out of a vacancy of thought.
“You were talking in your sleep,” she went on. “Gnashing your teeth and calling: 'Hennessey!' It would have scared him if he'd heard you.”
“Where are you making for?”
“Gawd knows! We're just running. Aint nothing else to be done in this sea.”
“No other lights?”
“No.” The rugged old face just seen in the faint illumination of the circling masthead lamp spoke with a gruff economy of energy. “Guess we're the only ones left.”
The curt statement pierced the numbness of his spirit with a little shock of horror. Good God! There must have been at least eight hundred people on the Melanesian! They were sickeningly vivid to him, in a spontaneous flash of retrospective visualization, laughing and chattering. on the brilliantly lighted decks, in the hotel-like saloons where the first-class passengers congregated for bridge or poker, in the serene confidence of evening-dress, the bare-shouldered women languorous behind their fans. The orchestra was still playing from its palms in the great Louis XV dining-hall. It could not have been an hour ago. And now!
He shuddered at the thought of that cold blackness in which they were engulfed, that cold, swirling, choking, buffeting blackness into which he had been precipitated when the boat had tipped up, dangling from an unreleased fall, and that awful many-voiced shriek had overborne the howling wind—that bewildering, eddying, down-sucking, face-slapping, numbing, up-and-down blackness in which he had battled with one free arm, dragging his burden with a blind tenacity of grip, until his head had bobbed against that drifting boat and they had been, miraculously, dragged inboard. And there they were, safe—at any rate, temporarily—they two, of all people! He relinquished comprehension before the clumsy irony manifest in the scheme of things.
His brain began to work again, recapitulated the disaster, pieced the story together for himself. He felt again that sudden dull thud which jarred every fitting in the ship. How big she was—her steady progress had given no hint of this raging sea! He felt again that half-heard, half-felt, vague grinding underfoot, that sudden disturbing cessation of her engine-throb. He heard again that sudden wild ringing of bells all over the ship, the startling manifold shriek of shrill whistles, the trampling rush of crowding feet outside their cabin de luxe on the boat-deck.
He recalled how he and Adela had suddenly stopped in their coldly bitter interchange of unforgivable words, the look of her strange eyes that softened not in the sudden whiteness of her face. He had seized her wrist, dragged her toward the door, and she had resisted, coldly, stubbornly, head-high, the damned aristocrat still—the implacability of her scornful hatred of him had insulted him in this moment of life or death; her words rang in him still, never to be forgotten: “Not with you!” He had triumphed, by brute force, dragged her out to the deck among the swarm of people, now high-voiced in an unnerving clamor, now hushed in a dreadful silence.
He remembered the breathlessly ejaculated answer of the hurrying officer as they jostled in the throng: “Derelict! Ripped the bottom out of her!” The deck was already at an angle where they slid. And somehow or other he had got her into that boat, despite her dogged, foot-by-foot resistance, wrenching to get her wrist free from his grip. She had said it again: “Not with you!'
Oh, for God's sake, forget it! He forced his brain to function on other, wider aspects of their plight. Suppose they weren't picked up! He imagined the consternation in that immense sky-towering building in New York—the jubilant bear raids in Wall Street and the panic-stricken repercussions in London and Paris—the telegraph-wires of three continents busy with the crisscrossed multiplicity of feverish readjustments that must ensue. Who would carry on in his place? Hardwick? He had never dared to get off the wireless with Hardwick yet. And Hennessey would be out for blood, too—wrecking them first (he could imagine Hennessey's exultant devastating flood of selling-orders) and picking up the pieces afterward. If only there were a wireless miraculously available! Here, precariously preserved from this night-enshrouded sea, he was as exasperatingly impotent as though he were already dead.
Dead! The thought awakened another in him—there would be obituary notices. He'd like to read 'em, he thought, with a grim self-satisfaction. Whatever they said of him, they'd have to admit that he had counted—some. He'd got pretty well all there was to be got out of life, except— He switched off the thought of that tall, white-faced woman, searing him with her contemptuous eyes as he raged against her armor of cold, aristocratic beauty—refused to hear that deadly: “Not with you!”
Outside the realm of his thought, he closed tighter round that senseless icy body. The woman he tried to warm was impersonal to him in a protective instinct, no longer she.
His mind went over her to that last hour on the ship, reconstructed that drama whose full implications had been blurred by the thought-stooping rush of events. He was in the sitting-room of his suite de luxe; a batch of radiograms had been handed to him as he got up from dinner—multifarious reports, appeals, queries. Janson, the perfect secretary unobtrusively efficient, had slit them open as was his wont, passed him those imperative of his personal attention.
Adela—she had never looked more beautiful, her fine eyes calm upon him—was going to dance; she had promised the Mainwarings. That was antecedent; he was in the spacious sitting-room of hs suite de luxe, the ship heaving and subsiding so slowly and evenly that its motion was almost imperceptible. Sitting back in his chair, cigar in mouth, his eyes fixed on the ceiling, he had already dictated half a dozen summary decisions.
And then Janson had said, in his quiet, clear voice—curious how he had no premonition that he was unlocking disaster: “There's that matter of Eberstein in Hamburg, sir?”
Confound it, so there was. He had postponed the answer to Eberstein for consideration. What had he done with that radiogram? He remembered—he had crumpled it into the jacket-pocket of the lounge-suit he had been wearing that afternoon. He'd better have another look at it; it was an artfully phrased question. The jacket was in his cabin, where he had changed for dinner. “All right, Janson, go on typing those others—I'll fetch it,” he had said. And he also had gone blindly on the path of Fate.
The jacket was not in his cabin..... Where the devil? He remembered that he had gone through into Adela's cabin, stripped it off while he spoke to her. It ought to be there now—her maid was still eating with the second class, had not cleared up yet. He went through the communicating door. Yes, there was the jacket. Before he reached it, the ship lurched and rolled on an unusually heavy wave. Adela's jewel-case—how careless to leave it out; but the suite was locked, of course—went slithering across the dressing-table. He was too late to save it. It crashed upon the floor, burst open in an eruption of glittering stones. He went down on hands and knees to pick them up. Among them was a small folded piece of paper. He opened it mechanically. It was a cablegram: “Drahan (A) Melanesian Honolulu Thinking of you keep a stiff lip love George.”
He had stared at it for a full minute while credibility asserted itself. “George?” George Addiscombe! His mind leaped to the identification. George Addiscombe! Then—then—he looked at the damning words; felt suddenly sick and ill. But how had that cablegram come without his seeing it? His eye fell on the bracketed “A” after his name—a prearranged code, then? And Janson—she must have bribed Janson! Bribed Janson! For a moment the bottom fell out of the universe.
HE managed somehow to get up, to steady himself to the armchair where he thudded down, gasping, for an attempt at clear thought. Adela! Adela and George Addiscombe! She—she wasn't the cold statue, then, that—that these three years long he had accepted her to be. The fellow had dared to cable to her, secretly. “Love—George.” The worthless dandified squanderer! He had dared to tell her to keep a stiff lip in implied difficult endurance of—of him, Antony Drahan, to whom she owed everything! A savage, bitter anger surged up in him. They'd play with him, would they—make a mock of him—corrupt his servants—deceive him—him who with a word could make or break a thousand George Addiscombes!
And Adela! He couldn't believe it of her. He didn't know whether he loved her, but he had respected her, regarded her almost with awe—the rarest, most dearly bought of all his acquisitions. She had seemed of a stuff too fine for common domestic intercourse; he had assumed that—let her live her own remote dignified inner life, content so that she symbolized to all men the regality of his success. He had never flattered himself that she loved him—she had never pretended to; but she owed it to him to p!ay fair with him, to be grateful to him—yes, by heaven! to be grateful to him! Everything that money could buy had been hers—he had grudged nothing, gloried in a reckless outpouring at her feet—houses, jewels, furs, cars—her damned family would have starved had it not been for him. Even this trip round the world, taking him from his job, was the costly gratification of a whim of hers.
He had risen unsteadily to his feet, gone into the sitting-room.
“Janson, ask Mrs. Drahan to be good enough to come to me here.”
“Yes sir.” Janson had gone unsuspectingly.
He had waited, a cold cigar between his teeth, staring at the graph-chart (freights and expenses) of one of his shipping-lines upon the wall, realizing after a minute or two that it had no meaning for him.
And then she had appeared, superb, queenly in her evening-gown, Janson deferential behind her.
“You want me, Antony?” He could hear her calmly self-confident voice now.
He had found it difficult to speak, had only been able to look straight into those large innocently questioning eyes—to hand her that cablegram.
She had taken it, glanced at it, crushed it in her hand, turned and looked at him. There had been a silence.
He broke it, in a voice that sounded not his own.
“Janson, you're sacked! From this moment!”
“Sir?” He remembered how Janson's face had suddenly blanched. (And half an hour later the man was dead! Ironic!)
She had turned to him in expostulating protest.
“Antony!”
“I don't permit my servants to be bribed—even by my wife!” His tone had cut like a whiplash.
She had flushed up in sudden indignation. “I did not bribe Mr. Janson!”
He had turned to the trembling secretary. “Did you suppress that cablegram?”
“Yes sir—but—but I did it because—because there's nothing in the world I wouldn't do for Mrs. Drahan!”
“That will do. Get out of here—and vou get off at Singapore.”
Janson had gone, and they stood confronting each other in sience.
“Well?” she had said.
“You don't deny it, then?” He had been near soluttering, had had to keep a tight hand on himself.
SHE had shrugged her bare shoulders, superbly disdainful of answer.
“You've got nothing to say for yourself?”
“It may as well come now—you can put me off also at Singapore.” She had been insultingly cool, self-controlled.
“Not before I've told you what I think of you!” he had burst out, his voice thick in his throat. And he had told her—had recapitulated all he had done for her, her family saved from ruin, the things he had lavished on her, the Golconda of precious things she had accepted from him—with what return?
She had held up a deprecating, weary hand.
“I know. You bought and paid for me—for three years you have implied it at every moment. There is no need to tell me.”
“I made a bad bargain.” He was master of himself again, his tone coldly bitter.
She had looked at him from her dignity, her eyes somber in their steadiness. “Yes. Perhaps.”
The impudence of it! He had felt himself go white. “You realize what you've thrown away, don't you?”
She had nodded, the slightest undulation of her superb head.
“Yes. Five million dollars last year, wasn't it? I ought to know. For three years I have heard nothing else—I have heard money, money, money, nothing but money, until,”—she spoke with a measured precision that sent every word at him to full effect,—“until my soul has ached—ached to escape from it.”
“To George Addiscombe?” He had smiled over tight teeth, in icy sarcasm.
She had shrugged her shoulders.
“At least, life to him is more than a sordid marketplace.”
It was the final outrage. He had gripped himself, framing already the phrase that should annihilate, from his side also, the last possibility of reconciliation—and then had come the shock, the sudden pandemonium of the shrieking whistles, the nightmare at the boats, that tense rebellious struggle where she tried to wrench away her wrist: “Not with you!”
He shivered in the boat that went, spray-drenched, wallowing, dizzily up, sickeningly down, in the racing seas that whelmed with the black night. He felt faint and hungry. If only he could sleep—as she was sleeping! He remembered suddenly that there were some cigarettes in his case. They might, with luck, be dry. The case was in his dinner-jacket, about the woman slumbering shiveringly close against him. He felt for it, with precaution.
She stirred, murmured out of a dream: “George—George!”
He set his teeth, opened the cigarette-case, tossed one to the gruffly grateful steersman, reclaimed his spirit-lighter, lit his own, puffed staring at the yellow mast-light gyrating against the black sky. And then, imperceptibly—he was in his New York office, feverishly, fiercely exultant as he took measure after measure to deal with Hennessey. ... . He was—he was in oblivion; he was crumpled in the mindless, dreamless sleep that is Nature's mercy.
JUST within that rim of shade where the coconut-palms ceased upon the dazzling white beach, a powerfully built man, clad only in the remnants of tattered black sea-stained trousers, sat watching a spitted fish broil over a crackling fire of husks. By the side of him lay the primitive net with which he had caught it, a torn-open shirt (his name yet visible on the collar-band) roughly fastened to two short pieces of driftwood. Just beyond, a spring of clear water went in a rivulet down to the scarcely ruffled placidity of the lagoon. Half a mile out, in long semi-circular simultaneity of appearance, the spray shot up, white and glittering, from the inclosing reef, its deep-toned boom a sound so continuous as to lapse out of notice. Nearer at hand, some hundreds of yards along the beach, the skeletal wreckage of a boat lay half submerged, half upon the sand, lapped by tiny waves that failed to break.
The fish was cooked. The man removed it to a palm-leaf, threw a handful of husks upon the fire to keep it in existence, called:
“Adela!”
A woman appeared from among the close-set trunks of the palm-grove, her arms full of dried fronds and fibrous husks. For her only garment, a length of torn, stained silk—in which Captain Molyneux of the Rue Royale would have failed to recognize one of his most exquisite creations—was wrapped around her waist. Her brown hair cascaded loose about her shoulders. Her skin was reddened by the sun, white only on the undersides of her arms. Yet she was beautiful—beautiful as a nymph emerging from a sacred grove. The adult dignity of civilized attire had fallen from her; she was freshly girlish in this reversion to the primitive. She deposited her load, sat down.
ANTONY DRAHAN divided the fish into two equal portions with a pocket-knife, reached for a jaggedly burst-open canister of ship's biscuits close at hand.
“These biscuits wont last for more than a few days longer. We must try to find some breadfruit. It ought to grow on this island. Looks like a melon. I remember reading about it once. You cook it between hot stones.” He spoke, not easily conversational, but through a cold constraint, his sentences harshly detached from one another, avoiding a direct glance at her.
She parted the loose hair from her brows to look meditatively out to sea.
“Yes.” Her tone also was devoid of intimacy. “I was thinking about that this morning. I found a tree that looked like it. I meant to ask you. I was thinking of a lot of things, in case—” She broke off. “Antony, do you think there's really any chance of being picked up? Are we near the usual track of ships?”
He shrugged his shoulders.
“I don't know. Nothing has passed these three days. We were about sixty hours in that boat, running before the wind.”
She made no further remark and they ate in silence. His mind reverted to a many-times worried-over calculation: what were they doing—seven or eight knots, or perhaps more, or less? He had no idea. It had blown half a gale, but they had driven saggingly in that sea—say, seven—sixty hours—about four hundred miles.
From these calculations, unsatisfying in their lack of stable basis, he found himself looking at a picture of themselves in the boat—the old, gray-whiskered sailor steering, hour after hour at his post with only those brief intermissions in the broiling heat of the two ensuing days when he had slept and the passenger had, after careful instruction, been intrusted with nursing the boat through the racing ever-overtaking surges. Adela, white and silent, her face expressionless as she stared at the threatening sea, sitting against a thwart—himself, when they could abstain no longer for very faintness, doling out the water, the dry biscuit that was their ration. They had been spared the worst of sufferings. The boat had been provisioned upon the davits, contained a keg of water, two canisters of biscuits—of which this upon the beach was the second. He remembered his clumsy efforts to open the tin with the hatchet (for cutting the falls?) stowed away in the locker..... And then that dawn, pale above the dark water, with the palm-trees, seen one moment, lost the next, tiny against the sky. They had been driving almost straight toward them, had scarcely needed to alter their course.
He found himself looking at the terror of the reef as they approached it, the great white walls shooting up in ceaseless boom and crash, the hiss of their descent hardly completed before the next breaker rolled in. And then that sudden relief in their anxious tension as they coasted round looking for an entrance—the narrow gap of dark swirling water between the leaping sheets of surf—their rush toward it, borne formidably forward on the breast of a great lifting roller—the half-heard shout of the old sailor as he lost steerage-power in its velocity—the thunderous stunning deluge that crashed down upon them, beating them under—that desperate swim, dragging once more a leaden burden, through an agony of imagined sharks, to the gleaming beach that seemed almost to recede—his fall, face forward, gasping, on the hot sand where he had lain impotent for long minutes before he could sit up and look for the old sailor—in vain.
He saw himself dragging Adela to the shade of the palm-trees, saw her at long last revive, her eyes open at him in a long strange stare, her lips move for her first words:
“You've—saved me—again?”
“Thank God!” His ejaculation had been automatic, his mind not yet functioning to full embracement of antecedent complications of existence.
“I don't know.” And, with her slowly uttered words, the mists had rolled back from memory—from that last five minutes in their gilded stateroom—that coldly bitter conflict arrested at its climax, suspended, unresolved.
HE looked round now to her where she sat, shoulder-draped with her hair, found her eyes full on him.
“You're thinking of—Hennessey?” she asked.
Hostility leaped up in him, sensitively suspicious of a taunt. He did not an-swer. Her reference to Hennessey, evocative of one aspect of the ravaging preoccupations he concealed within himself, was a touch on the yet raw wound she had contemptuously inflicted. If he had brooded, he had reason enough. Heaven knew what was happening beyond that narrow sea-horizon which held him prisoner—a life-work, a whole empire of power, crumbling to ruin! She went on:
“You were talking in your sleep last night. I heard you and crawled out of my shelter to see what it was. For a moment, I thought you had met someone else upon the island. But you were sound asleep, gnashing your teeth, and calling out: 'HennéSsey!—Hennessey!'” She half smiled. “It would have scared him, I think, if he'd heard you.” He it was perhaps not a taunt. “It's hard luck for you, Antony.”
He looked at her, clad in that shredded rag of clothing, her hands scratched and bleeding from the labors of a primitive squaw, saw her suddenly, by contrast, in that world which had been hers. He saw her quietly smiling, beautiful, exquisitely gowned, in that palatial home where her slightest want was ministered to by a multitude of deferential servants; saw her queening it in those thronged receptions where he thrilled with the pride of precious possession, noted the awed admiration of other men, the whispering of the women she outshone; saw her as he had seen her, in London, Paris and Rome, with ambassadors, princes, aristocrats of that medieval-rooted Europe bowing over her hand as they did not bow to other women. That was her life, her appointed destiny—to grace civilization with her costly perfection of femininity, would be her life with—with George Addiscombe or another man when they got out of this, if ever they did, parted in cold fulfillment of that truncated crisis on the ship.
“It's hard luck for us both,” he said curtly.
SHE did not immediately answer—spoke, when she did, out of another plane of thought.
“You must let me cook next time. I must learn to do things.”
He shrugged his shoulders.
“As you like.”
There was another silence before she spoke again, in a sudden seriousness of apprehension.
“Antony—supposing we never get picked up?”
The corners of his mouth went down in a grim smile.
“Humorous, isn't it? We two—of all people! I sympathize with you.”
She looked at him, said nothing. Somehow, he felt a bit of a brute. He cogitated for a moment or two, wishing at the back of his mind that he had some tobacco, chewed a reed of grass to help his thought.
“Look here, Adela,” he said suddenly, “we've got to face things out—as you say, we may never get picked up. We can't go on with that—that little discussion of ours left unfinished between us.”
“No,” she said, staring out to the sea.
“Well, listen to what I've been thinking. All that business—we wont go into the rights and wrongs of it now—is outside this isolated little world into which we've been pitched like Adam and Eve. It belongs to that other world where I m Antony Drahan of the Transatlantic Trust and you are—”
“Your odalisque.” She spoke still staring out to the sea.
“I don't quite know what that means—but Ill take your word for it. Anyway, this is the proposition I want to make. While we're here, we'll shut down on that little argument, just as it was shut down for us on that ship—forget it. We'll make the best job we can of things, together, until we're picked up. And then—”
“And then?” She still looked away from him.
“Then we go back to where we left off.” He paused for a glance at her, chewed at his stiff grass. “I want to tell you this, Adela: I never supposed you were in love with me—as a matter of fact, I hadn't much time to go in for sentiment myself, as you know—but I had no idea you loathed me. I'm sorry. I wouldn't keep a dog that was unwilling, let alone a wife. So you can make your mind easy about that. And I'll provide for you too—so, whatever man you go to, you need never talk of being bought and paid for again. I dare say, from one point of view, there's some compensation due to you. For what has happened to have occurred, I must have made you pretty miserable.” He paused for a moment, evidently crushing back the potentialities of that topic. “Is it a deal?”
Her eyes came round to him, uncertain of him.
“You are bribing me again?”
“No.” He laughed grimly. “I'm not in a position to bribe. For the first time in my life I'm in a place where if I wrote a check for a million dollars it wouldn't be any use. I'm merely making an amicable proposition. While we're on this island, we forget that we were ever man and wife. When we're picked up, we go back to where we left off. Is it a deal?”
She nodded, with a grave smile, held out her hand to him.
“Until we're picked up—”
He sprang to his feet.
“Come along, then. Who knows? A ship may pass at any minute. We've got to get a beacon ready for her—that's the first thing—something that'll make a smoke visible twenty miles off.”
HE snatched up the hatchet, for which he had dived perilously many times that morning, strode off into the palm-grove. She walked at his side, silent through the interlaced and deepening shadows. He conned over one or two commonplace conversational openings in an awkwardly felt incumbency of speech, left them unsaid.
It was she who spoke first.
“Adam,” she said, smiling at him a little timidly, their new relationship unexplored between them, “we're like that, aren't we? Adam and Eve—alone—in a new beginning of the world.”
He looked round to her, relaxed in their mutually smiling glance.
“Sure,” he agreed. “Adam and Eve!” He chuckled. “We might keep that up—it gives us a lead.”
“Do you think they were a little frightened of each other at first?” she mused, the smile of fanciful thought still on the face half seen between her long hair. “There was everything to learn about each other.”
He was silent for a moment.
“I guess we're like that too,” he said, suddenly. He stopped before a gale-wrecked palm, full length in an offering of its crest of sere fronds. “What about this stuff for our fire?”
THEY labored through the afternoon, to and from the palm-grove and a little spur of the shore crowned by a bare outcrop of rock. The pile of dead palm-fronds, splintered wood, mosses and dried grass rose imposingly. As they labored, constraint dropped from them. They talked with a direct and unembarrassed simplicity of speech unknown to them in that awkwardly incomplete intimacy when they called each other husband and wife in that New York house. He was surprised by her quick wit, by her unexpectedly sensible suggestions for the organization of their existence, as they came close together in their toil. He admired the unrepining pluckiness with which she accepted the situation—set it, privately, as a model for himself. He, too, would make the best of it, be cheerful—even if Hennessey was doing his diabolical damnedest. He pledged himself to it as he carried down armload after armload of fuel for that eventual fire which might, even yet, bring him face to face with Hennessey, in the nick of time—laughed at her as she dubbed herself squaw.
At last the pyre was finished, head high. They stood regarding it.
“I wonder when we shall light it?” she said.
He shrugged his sun-red shoulders.
“Who knows?” he replied. “Perhaps tomorrow—perhaps not for months. But we must be always ready.” He turned to her with a smile. “Now, Eve, since you're the squaw, it's your job to see that the cooking-fire never goes out. I used the last spark in my lighter on it yesterday. And whichever one of us sees a sail or a smudge of smoke on the horizon, must run and kindle this with a brand from it, not wasting a moment. That's the first law in this Eden.”
Together they went along the curving shore to the encampment where the smoke of their cooking-fire still went up like a blue thread. He stood, hatchet in hand, contemplating the primitive palm-frond shelter he had put up for her that first day.
“I guess I'll put up a better shanty for you than that,” he remarked, “something with a little more room to it.”
Her eyes came round to him, large-orbed, as though something had stopped inside her. He met her glance.
“I don't read more into the bargain than you meant,” he said. “I'll rig up a shelter for myself over there.”
Her visible relief hurt him but he enforced stoicism upon himself. It was an explicit part of the bargain. As man and wife, they had divorced that night in the suite de luxe of that ship surging blindly forward to the sudden shock upon the derelict. And presently another ship would come.
HE watched her as she disappeared between the palm-trunks, and a sudden pang went through him, a sudden hypernaturally acute perception of her white-limbed reality. It was as if he saw her for the first time—the woman he had called wife. “And there,” the thought shot through him, “there—where I could give her everything—she loathed me, loathed me with an aching soul!” Here? But this was only a game of make-believe, terminated the moment their beacon- smoke should rise into the sky. Or was there, fugitive behind those eyes of hers, a something else—a something new—something that could not peep out when he came home, his soul harshly exultant with a conflict won over telephone and ticker? He ridiculed himself, summoned up, for antidote, an all-too-vivid vision of her frigidly hostile dignity as she stood crumpling that damning cablegram, heard again that searing “Not with you!” Nevertheless, as he went about his new job of building her a shelter, his thoughts had to be forced to remain on the exasperating problem of what Hennessey might be up to at that moment.
THEY sat, in a warm night of unimaginable stars, near the glow of their campfire, red in the somber blueness opening to the shore. Their conversation had ceased, minutes back. Its last note of quiet amicability still persisted through the silence. Their thoughts had gone far away.
He was remembering that it was still daylight in New York. He saw the deep cañons filled with feverishly hurrying men. He saw himself in his office—in the momentary pause of thought before giving a sharply decisive answer into the telephone. A nostalgia for it all clutched him. He craved for the will-subdued excitement of conflict with distant mercilessly shrewd hostile brains, craved for the intoxicating flash of his interest from quarter to quarter of the globe. What was happening to those Anatolian oil-concessions? That freight-war he had initiated against the other South American lines—had Hardwick compromised, frightened at responsibility now that the chief was not there to direct the fight? If only he could get back for just a day! He'd bet all he owned that, in his wild-Irishman eagerness, Hennessey had over-sold the market! If he could only get back! He worried at his not yet customary beard.
And she? She spoke out of her reverie.
“It scarcely seems real to me. I have to force myself to believe that it was really I who lived in that great house of ours with everything done for me, with nothing to do but to get up, put on a new Paris frock, loll back in a motorcar, talk inanities with a lot of other idle women. That gala-night at the opera—do you remember?—it was only a month ago today, the night before we started.”
He did remember, remembered how mysteriously beautiful she had looked, Cleopatra-like in a magnificence of pearls—George Addiscombe had been there too—he suppressed the thought.
“Supposing a ship came now,” she commenced again, musingly, “and we went back to it all—”
He grunted, skeptically, staring out over the dark sea where no ship's light twinkled. He thought of the pyre, undisturbed as they had built it, ready when the moment came.
“And then we should say good-by,” she went on, following her thought.
“Yes. Then we say good-by,” he agreed curtly, his voice toneless.
“But now—after this—we shall shake hands when we say good-by, sha'n't we?” Her eyes came round to him in the night. He forbore to look at them.
“Yes. I guess we shall shake hands,” he admitted.
“All we've done!” she said, reminiscently. “I understand now why—over there, in that other world we've dropped out of—you did so much. You can't help it. It's born in you; you are bound to organize, to create. Here, what you have done—out of nothing—it is wonderful! We have lived—almost civilized even to the needles you hammered out of the nails of the boat, and the thread you twisted out of fiber. What a terrible brain yours is—always thinking!”
He smiled, flattered.
“You've done your share too,” he said. “Wonderfully! I'd never have guessed you had it in you.”
She looked out to the dark sea.
“It's absurd to say it—but I've been happy,” she murmured, rather to herself than to him.
There was a silence where he went suddenly tremulous.
“Adela—”
She turned to him, held up an admonishing finger.
“Eve,” she corrected. “Adela is out there, in that other world beyond the horizon—waiting to part from her millionaire husband.”
He took a deep breath.
“Eve!” His voice was unsteady. “Do you think that if we got back we might perhaps not—not part?”
He heard her breath also come in a deep inhalation as she stared out into the night.
“No,” she said, in a low voice. “No. It would be the same thing. You're not changed. In a month, you'd have no time for me. I couldn't start it again. Let us keep to our bargain—Adam!” She stressed the playful name as she forced a dimly seen smile for him.
He sat, dark and gloomy in this rebuff.
“Then you can't—under any circumstances—love me?” he said, with diffculty, jerking out the two final words.
She sighed.
“Perhaps—if Adela and Antony Drahan weren't always ghosts waiting to jump back into life out there, if,”—her smile came round to him, and his intently peering eyes saw its little twist of pathetic wistfulness—'if Eve lived yet a little longer with her Adam in this place where a million-dollar check isn't any use—who knows? Perhaps!” Her little laugh quivered as she rose abruptly to her feet. “Good night!”
He sat staring into the red embers, craving a cigar.
THE next day, at an hour when the sun dipped, immense and glowing, to the empty desolation of the ocean, he walked along the beach in quest of certain sea-birds' eggs that were edible enough when fresh laid. Eve (it had become almost habit in his mind to call her so) was back at the camp busy at the cooking-fire. They had not again referred to last night's topic; she had been disconcertingly normal when they met this morning. But all day they had gone roving together in search of fresh supplies of breadfruit. Her beauty, emphasized in its primitive exiguity of costume, haunted him as he walked now in solitude, conflicted with his exasperated imaginations of unchecked bear raids in that far-off, unreachable Wall Street where James Hennessey was now assuredly an unconstitutional king. His glance roved idly, seeing nothing in the double intermingling procession of his thoughts; that elusive tantalizing “Perhaps!” That quivering little laugh, ringing in his ears. “A little longer—” His thoughts vanished suddenly. He stopped—stared out to sea, incredulous of his vision. There, clear upon the yellowing horizon, was a smudge of smoke!
His first, almost automatic, impulse was to dash back to the cooking-fire for the brand that should light the signal, to shout as he ran. He turned for the action—saw her in the distance, her shoulders glimmering as she bent over the fire—checked suddenly. She had not seen that far-off wisp of smoke, did not see him. He glanced round at the heaped-up pyre, close above him on its platform of rock, hesitated, looked again out to sea. The steamer was passing hull-down on the horizon, but from its bridge his sudden column of smoke would be clearly visible. Then he looked once more, furtively, toward the woman absorbed in her task, unconscious of this dreamed-of chance of rescue, the woman whose “Perhaps!” rang in his ears. It was a libel of Mr. Antony Drahan's enemies to call him unscrupulous. He was not. He was fantastic, almost, in his adherence to the square deal. But now Mr. Antony Drahan, grotesque in a single garment of much tattered dress-trousers and tugging at a beard that would have made him almost unrecognizable to friends and enemies alike, was false to his gods. He stood stock still, watching that far-off steamer-smoke grow faint and small upon the horizon.
“I guess Hennessey can wait,” he muttered to himself.
He saw the last wisp of it disappear into the glowing semicircle of the sun.
HE turned back, empty-handed, along the beach, feeling himself suddenly, sickeningly, a traitor. He hadn't played the game. Adela had her right to rescue—to the resumption of the life that was hers—to that shake-hands and good-by to which they were pledged. He shrank, in his guilt of conscience, from meeting her eyes, from the necessary casual conversation with her, from even her mere propinquity. But he had to brace himself to it, did so, tried to smile as she looked up at him from the fire where the fish was ready broiled.
They were silent over their meal that night. The sun had gone down and the swift darkness shrouded them. They sat, both of them preoccupied, awkward in their rare speech. How she would turn on him, hating him, if she knew!
Suddenly she flung herself at him, lay warm and sobbing—sobbing—in his arms, her arms about his neck.
“Antony!—Antony darling! Forgive me! I've—I've let a ship go past!”
He gasped—the full implication of it breaking on him. She had let the ship go past!
He held her tight, soothed her.
“Never mind, little Eve—Adela dear! There's sure to be another.”
She still sobbed as she clung to him.
“I don't care whether there is or not! So long as I've got you!” He bent his head down in sudden tenderness to kiss her brow. She withdrew herself abruptly, pushed him back, looked into his eyes from the night. “Before—before you do that,” she said, “I want to tell you something. George—George Addiscombe was—was nothing!”
She lay in his arms, quite silent, while he thought. At last she whispered up to him—“Adam!”
“Eve!”
“Always?”
“Always.”
This work is in the public domain in the United States because it was published before January 1, 1929.
The longest-living author of this work died in 1941, so this work is in the public domain in countries and areas where the copyright term is the author's life plus 82 years or less. This work may be in the public domain in countries and areas with longer native copyright terms that apply the rule of the shorter term to foreign works.
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