# Wild Blood/Chapter 7

pp. 127–161.

### FATE, THE HUSSY, IS BOLDLY CHEATED

MR. DAVENANT subtly encouraged me and Hawkins to remember Williams's outburst. He sounded me with a chill delicacy. How did I feel about it? His words were not that blunt, and scarcely anything more than his manner asked the question.
It was well—or maybe it was unfortunate—that he sounded me first. Hawkins would have been responsive, bluntly so. He did not like Davenant anyway. And Hawkins's brain was not supple enough to be artful and devious.
Of course he would lie, as any man should. All honest men do at times. But Hawkins was particular about his lies, as well as sensitive about the color of his jaw and nose.
He might have mistaken Davenant's interest as literally adding insult to injury. In which case he would have shown even less finesse than he had. Without being properly prodded, it would have never occurred to him to encourage Davenant's sympathy. It would probably not have occurred to him that it was sympathy.
Now I—I exploded into hearty curses. But not until I had taken several precautionary glances in many directions. Davenant thought I was guarding against Williams. I was making sure that no silent, feminine figure in a long black cape was near.
I assured him that Hawkins was filled with a consuming fire that flowed through his veins like molten coals; that his belly had become a furnace.
He poured a judicious word or two into my ear to heighten what he thought was my anger, but did not commit himself. Williams had been unjust. He had seen all. He was very lonely. Couldn't I step into his room some time for a little friendly talk?
“If that charming niece of yours should fall overboard and stay there,” I said, but not aloud, “I would look with more favor on your cabin as a hatchery of plots. But Raikes used to sneak in there—and Tom Gibson is wondering why it happened.”
Aloud I expressed my thanks and intentions of accepting.
“By the way,” he asked, looking at me from the corners of his eyes and trying not to appear very interested, “do you know why he is eager to get to Dakaru?”
No, I couldn't imagine why.
He probably thought that I lied. My luck runs that way.
Davenant walked off. Erect, with head well up, he stood perhaps watching nothing but his own thoughts. It was a comfortable gray day, with the sea tossing itself into crests that fell sizzling down the steep glassy sides of waves, and with the shrouds humming at times before the gusty blows of the wind.
I studied his back, tall and square and reserved in bearing. He had dignity, the dignity of manners. Williams had dignity of another kind—with the utter lack of manners; the dignity of a sheer, menacing personality.
I could imagine Davenant at ease among jewel-encrusted dowagers and men who bowed from the waist, moving among them with cold grace, eying them with a sort of insolent sharpness that somehow would not be impolite.
Said I to myself: “The Lord in His goodness protects us innocents by making such as you wear on his countenance the devil's mark.”
But my knowledge then of the devil was not nearly so intimate as is needful to secure an honest man from harm.
Hawkins was reluctant to accept any kind of intimacy with Davenant. He did not like him, or that woman with the serpent's lidless eyes. We would get ourselves into trouble. It was one thing to be hanged for piracy, another to be beaten to death for mutiny.
Joke? He could see Williams taking a thing like that as a joke. No. In years to come he expected to have grandchildren scrambling about his knees. How disappointed those grandchildren would be if they were never born, and so missed the tales he would tell as an ancient mariner.
He would, he said, cut a throat or bash a head cheerfully. It depended on whose throat or head. Mine, for instance, gladly.
I coaxed; what a good joke it would be to play on Davenant! Hawkins replied that the devil did not have a sense of humor. I urged that we could find out what he was after at Dakaru; that it was a rare chance; Davenant himself had already the idea that we were mutinous.
Hawkins objected. How much of it was fear of Williams, how much of it was the unvoiceable admiration that some men have for others who batter them in a fair fight, would be difficult to say. Maybe Hawkins had caught something of that gleam from Williams's personality that fascinated me, made me, almost unwillingly at times, loyal to him, a follower.
I told Hawkins he had no finesse. He agreed, saying that whatever it was, he didn't want any either; that just then all he wanted was something to eat. So, declining to be serious, I gave up—but at the first chance conveyed to Davenant that Hawkins was desperate for vengeance.
“Raikes is a navigator, isn't he?” he asked in that stiff way of his that was very nearly awkward.
He knew better than I what Raikes had told him, but perhaps believing that all men were liars—as they are—wanted to see what I thought of it.
I assured him that Raikes might possibly hit some part of the mainland—or some similiar large landfall—by dead reckoning.
“Then Williams is the only man who can set a course?”
There was a bit of reluctance in his slow, cold words, as if he grudgingly gave Williams that credit.
“Oh, no,” I assured him, rushing recklessly into his good opinion. “Half what Williams knows, I taught him. The only reason he hasn't been letting me take the bearings is because he doesn't want any one to know where he is heading.”
“You are a good navigator?” he asked, drawing his lips back in an effort at an encouraging smile.
It was not a smile, but it tempted me to affirm what I had said.
“That simplifies matters. Very much. Very much indeed.”
He spoke to me, but his thoughts were evidently busy elsewhere. Then—
“You know it is no crime to kill an outlaw.”
The sentence was harsh. I have seen men killed. And maybe one or two will point a finger at me when we're all lined up for God to judge. But to murder in cold blood—not though the “outlaw” were my own enemy!
His saying that made me realize vividly, as I had not done before, how every hand was against Williams. It was no crime to kill him. The law would bless his murderer with gold. If he bowed down and worshiped the law, it would curse his murderer with the wrath of hemp.
“Thou shalt have no gods but my tablets,” saith the Law.
A wise commandant, no doubt; but I know intimately whom it had banned, and the Law never recognizes personality—the only thing of value that a man can have. I could feel Davenant's sense of security. Cold and dark he stood, with his thumbs slipped into his side coat pockets, egging me on with that vindicating sentence, “It is no crime to kill an outlaw.”
“I know. I know. But it's damned dangerous at times,” I answered.
His eyes narrowed and he smiled the gleaming toothful smile through the crack that was his mouth, the mouth covered with black hair; and gave me a pitying, supercilious look.
“Not afraid, exactly,” I explained. “But, you know, he pays well. Particularly those who strike at him—and miss!”
Said Davenant slowly, impressively, his eyes fast on me: “I can pay ten times better than he.”
Pause.
“Particularly those who back from a bargain!”
I wished that I were drunk. Curious little shivers ran up and down my back. I wasn't fashioned to fence threats with men, or do bold things. Put me out of a jesting humor and my tongue was thick as a knotted fist, but with no such force to it.
And this fellow seemed impalpably closing in on me, getting me clinched, getting my signature down in my own blood to a bargain of his own terms. Yet there was nothing tangible to protest against. The threat didn't frighten me.
But some way the joke I was playing on him did not seem to have so much of a point as I had expected. Any minute I could laugh and tell him he was a fool. That is, if I could laugh. But he seemed getting at me with something more than words.
“Who sups with the devil must have a long spoon,” says the proverb.
I wriggled about a bit. I was not cultivating Davenant's intimacy for the pleasure of his company, or merely to laugh at him for a dupe. He was not the sort of man one laughs at, any more than was that dark niece of his one to be taunted. The same sinister strain was in them. Perhaps one could be an antidote for the other, as poison neutralizes poison.
My purpose was to ferret out Davenant's plans at Dakaru. Williams wanted to know. So did I. It was strange, the way he was trying to get there. It was more strange that he should be going at all.
I mentioned “rewards” and what hope of having them if we went on to Dakaru.
He mentioned the reward on Williams's head.
I replied that one didn't need lay a course for Dakaru to get that. No. It would be necessary to put about for Sydney. And as I would then be the only man on the ship who could navigate, why—there must need be inducements for going on to Dakaru.
He said the ship would be mine.
“When you haven't a clear title to give it to me—and Hawkins?”
I brought Hawkins in as a labored afterthought.
“Dakaru belongs to me and to my—to Dula Davenant. Wealth is there. You may help yourself.”
A tempting offer, with Grahame and his savage overseers, armed, watchful, more watchful than on a previous visit.
I suggested that Grahame might not recognize the ownership or my right to compensation. I felt I was getting near to Davenant's secrecy.
“Grahame will have nothing to say,” he replied irritably.
“That isn't like what Raikes told me,” I flashed.
Just said it, without thinking. Raikes, of course, had told me nothing.
“What did Raikes tell you?” Davenant demanded, his head settling down slightly on his shoulder and his eyes catching hold of my face.
It was as if he looked from a mask. The same, or much the same, as Miss Davenant looked; as if a close-fitting mask were over the face and only the eyes revealed. Sometimes her eyes seemed half-hidden too.
“Ask him,” I countered maliciously, feeling my spirits rise a little at having Davenant seem to be at a slight disadvantage.
“If Raikes told you the truth,” he said slowly with something of menace in his voice—just whom the menace was directed at, would be hard to say—“you know why Dakaru belongs to me. That”—a sharp snap of finger and thumb—“for Raikes!”
“But that”—imitating the snap of finger and thumb—“won't impress Grahame.”
“No. But this will.”
He half-turned and pushed back the tail of his coat, and his hand touched the butt of a revolver.
It impressed me, too. It was not so much of a braggart's gesture as it may seem; for though it was, of course, deliberately theatrical, it was accompanied by that slow, white smile.
The next few days we had our troubles. Hawkins said old Neptune had the stomachache.
I didn't know where we were, and much of the time I did not care. It was a case of water, water everywhere—and nothing to drink; for the perfidious Hawkins had raided my small store and been caught in the act by Raulson, the cook. Between them and the forecastle nothing was left but the carpenter's chest where I had cached a half dozen bottles. And that was not left long. The wind came up out of a glowing sky some time near midnight and stripped the masts with thunderous booms, and away we went, scudding under bare poles. Great combers rode the Sally Martin, stamping her under. She was lifted and shaken, as if to jar her ballast and turn her keel to the clouds.
Rain fell. It came in driving shafts of water, not as drops. By morning two boats were smashed, and th$ jolly-boat was gone from across the stern where she had been lashed.
The seas were tremendous. I was caught between the rails, and my lungs were strained to the bursting-point before the deck rose clear; and my arms were nearly jerked from their sockets as my hands held on, while feet and legs swayed about. Had the sea been enraged at the impudence of a few insects strutting about on a thing of wood, the waves could not have seemed more sentiently determined to pound us to pieces.
Two men went overboard and were swept away into the night of wild water with only the faintest of cry out of the darkness. The others tumbled into the flooded forecastle and stayed there.
There was no working the ship, not though we had all been able sailors. There was nothing to do. Aft we were all frightened though some showed it in a way that others did not.
Probably because I was, I say the others were frightened. There is nothing I like more than a mild storm at sea, with the thunder comfortably in the distance, like deep reports from far battle-fields, with the waves surging and white, but not leaping the rail, a veritable host of watery pirates. But this mad storm shook my ribs clatteringly together.
Raikes and Hawkins and I, Miss Davenant and Davenant, in the fearful communion of those hours, stood about in the passageway like quiet strangers. That is, for a time—in the first appalling burst of the rage that shook heaven and sea, it seemed as if a second horde of evil angels were being driven out by the bolts of archangels.
Then Hawkins, nearly drunk and always weary on his feet, sat on the deck and soon sprawled in sleep, mumbling prayers and oaths in a nightmare of unrest. Raikes leaned nervously from side to side, his one glittering eye turning about like the gaze of a restless, trapped animal. From time to time he said it was “a hell of a night,” indifferent as to whether he was answered or heard.
All of us were soaked, for all had rushed on deck at the first arousing blast; and a thin sheet of salt water swashed about our feet. Hawkins lay in it, head on arm, indifferently. Though the night was not cold, we were chilled; a nervousness leaves one chilled.
Davenant was dressed, even to shirt and coat, but not collar. It took such a storm to make him forgetful of his immaculate appearance. He stared from one to the other of us, and stood listening—until thrown off balance by the violent lurches of the ship.
He said little. I remember his asking me if we were “doomed.”
“And damned,” I answered.
“A hell of a night!” Raikes put in, aroused by the sound of voices.
“Do you think the ship will sink?” Miss Davenant asked me.
I was honest and told her that I thought it would. I did not see how we could go long with such wind and waves without being piled on to a reef.
I did not explain all that to her, but I judged we were not more than three or four hundred miles off the mainland; and there are enough reefs and islands scattered about in those waters to wreck all the navies of the world in a week of bad nights; and there is something in the midst of a storm that makes one feel it will never end, that the order of nature has been changed, that the ship is dead and forever damned.
“Yes,” I told her.
It may; have been the heroic part for me to have assured her otherwise, to have given her hope and all that which brave men do for fair women in times of peril. But she did not need my words. She took my answer with a steady look and shook her head slightly. No. She knew we would not.
It was not fear of death that made her hope. I remembered afterward that she was a fatalist. The earth can blow up, the sky cave in, but the fatalists have counted the sands that mark the hour and know that one by one the little grains must trickle through before Death dares smite the glass.
Her hair was loose. It had evidently been caught up in one swift swoop and pinned carelessly. She wore her cape, and under it the silken, thin hem of a nightgown hung. It touched the deck unless held up, and when she was thrown and put out her hands to steady and catch herself it fell to the water.
Her stockingless feet were thrust into slippers, through one of the slits in her cape her bare arm was extended, bracing herself now here, now there.
She was afraid, of course. We all were; anybody would have been; anybody always is in conditions of the kind, though there was none of that panicky excitement or agitation that traditionally—and seldom in reality—goes with fear. The man who has no fear in him is a clod. And she was vibrant, strung taut, her black eyes widened into a kind of unaffected wonder.
A few times her hand flew to her ear to shut out the thunder that seemed striking the deck. At such stunning, deafening, ear-crashing peals, that came stroke on stroke like the ragged volley of monstrous cannon fired within arm's reach overhead, I flinched as from an impending blow.
Two lanterns swung from beams, but the lightning, as if passing through the calked seams, reached our eyes dazzlingly, reached mine even through tightened lids.
Once, half-blinded by the sudden, instantaneous glare that, streaming like the swish of a flaming sword close as to strike off the end of a nose, came through the skylight, I tightened my eyes, turned my face down and pressed against them with both fists. And the ship lay on her beams' end.
Miss Davenant was flung against me. I caught her with circling arms. We slipped unsteadily, half-fell, and rocked with the righting of the ship—my arm still about her. It is difficult to speak of that half-minute and say what I mean, and not convey to too susceptible imaginations something that I did not mean. The contact was thrilling, but in some way not personal. When I dropped my arm she stepped back with a little laugh. There was no embarrassment about her, no thanks. And the laugh was not merriment so much as a kind of nervousness—something so natural as to be strange. Strange because I had been more than a little awed by her; awed by the embodied mystery and aloofness of her. But her body was soft and warm—a woman's.
No one noticed, though Davenant and Raikes could scarcely have helped seeing.
Hawkins rolled willy-nilly, grunted and swore; half- raising himself, he looked about in a stupid daze, damned wind, sea, ship, and fell drowsily against the bulkhead. He soon slipped prone, and slept.
She probably did not give the slight incident a second's thought. But I was awakened, made aware that for all of her pose and stiffness, her tragic aspect, she was a woman; her flesh was not marble, her breath was warm. Yet the psychic distance between us was not decreased. She had fallen against me as she might have fallen against a stanchion; and laughed as she might have laughed then at her awkward mishap. But I had seen behind her mask—not necessarily understanding her the better for it. A woman whose body is heated by heart- beats, who is in spite of her rôle not the character she plays, is more intricate and bewildering than even a symbol.
At the risk of being misunderstood, I put it down that I liked her—without, perhaps, thinking any the better of her. I mean that I knew she was dangerous, I felt that she was wicked; but somehow I realized that it was not the cold, dispassionate fierceness of mere wickedness. In other words, that she was human.
A slight occasion for such subtle perceptions, no doubt. But I say that no man, whether by a moment's inadvertence or an evening's coaxing, ever embraced a woman without being the wiser for it. Some definite, convincing—though not necessarily correct—stimulus struck through his myriad surface nerves and, most often, reached his heart; or, as in my case, threw strong, though rather confused, impressions on his mind. Or, to make all this abracadabraic phrasing simple, I felt she was not—as I had feared—a mad woman. That two seconds of nervous, almost girlish, laughter was sane. And the way she drew from me was spontaneous, unaffected. Those were the only utterly natural things I had seen from her. Then too her body had been soft, pliant, warm.
I knew she was a murderess, but somehow those impressions dulled, blurred the knowledge. Besides, there was a storm overhead; and incidents of casual significance hit with dominant vividness, take on undue importance, at such time.
I went up the companion and slipped the cover slightly. Nothing was visible except under the flashes of lightning, too often blinding; only there was occasionally the spectral white outline of a foam-crested wave that washed up out of the darkness. Wind, water and thunder filled the air; I doubted not that they filled the universe with stormy orchestration.
I tried to tell myself that death under the volleying thunders of Heaven's cannon, with the sea piling mountains of water for the grave-mound, with the epitaph scrawled in slithering foam, was death and nothing more or less than if one died abed. However, as a philospher I was a failure. It was no use to assure myself that though all the artillery of a nation might speak at the death of a king, and architects heap marble monuments over him, and poets write their fine lines for bronze tablets, yet all this would wear away and Judgment Dawn would find his burial-ground no more identified than a grave on the sea's bottom.
Had I been abed, with a charitable priest praying God to condone my sins, I would probably have thought what a miserable way to salute Death, and wanted to go down at sea with the full majesty of storm heralding the end.
The truth is, of course, that I didn't want anything to do with death; and just at that minute I could not remember any of those comforting maxims of philosophers that make a healthy man on a quiet day so reconciled to the embrace of the Dark Angel's fleshless arms. Not much. I wanted a warm inn and a rainy night, a dear and careless maiden with bright eyes to click a stone mug with mine and join in the chorus of some deep-throated song that told the devil to go to hell and stay there.
I had no hope. Something more than the tossing ship, the flying wind and low-bent clouds puffing thunder and lightning, had got into me. I was frightened by an inner sense of tragedy as well as by the awful and more theatric fulminations, concatenations, bombilations, topsy-turvy flings of wood and water, and general uproar and outburst, as if Omnipotence were in an ultimate rage. Perhaps my sense of the dramatic made me feel that God would not skimp His climax. He had a shipload of Jonahs and an ocean of whales, but nobody to throw us overboard into their mouths—so down must go the ship and all of us end our evil lives.
Evil, evil, evil? And what had we done?
Drunk, stolen and fought, and neglected to pray except at such moments as this—when the forgotten prayers could not be remembered.
I wondered if Williams prayed. There at helm he stood, feet to the bolted grating, his hands clinched at the wheel-spokes. The poop was fairly clear of the water, but waves hit him, rushed over him, pulled, wrestled and tugged at him, again and again.
He did nothing more there than a lashing on the helm could have done, would have done. He had to go before the wind though we went out of his course, and except for the flares of lightning he could not see forward of mizzen; nor was there a lookout.
It always seemed incredible that a ship, any man's ship, even one of the monstrous modern crew-driven iron-clads, could live through a real storm. The old ocean is big; its depth would engulf the highest mountain-range nor leave a peak to mark the spot; all the dry land of earth could be shoveled into the seven seas, eaten, absorbed, vanished. And men treat that old ocean with insolent familiarity; pit their wood and will against it—and win.
Williams was out there perfectly aware that he could do nothing, except by the luckiest of chances. Even so he went through his days, and nights, seemingly without fear and with no hope. Just determination. Determination to go on, as if it were the fight and not the end, not the winning, that concerned him.
He had something in him that answered every challenge, even that of such a night as this. He would not quit, he would not shirk, he would not lash the helm and go below, trusting his luck and God. He may have had more faith in God than that—faith that He would not refuse good fortune to one who made the utter effort.
I doubt if Williams ever thought of God. Perhaps the men who serve Him most do not; at least the canting, prayful kind, the melancholic brotherhood so concerned with what is righteous and what is not, and praising God as courtiers do a crotchety king, appear to my biased eyes as serving Him less than laying up riches and honor for themselves in Heaven—the merchant princes of Eternity! But myself being one of the unregenerate of the earth, of course I am full of hope that by some inadvertence I shall have a harp and crown without having worked for it.
I was aware of somebody standing beside me, pushing against me. For some time we stood peering like peepers that had come upon fearful mysteries, our eyes just above the lowered companion cover.
The sea was a thousand molten hills. Lightning laced the sky with fiery chords, vanishing in half-seconds, but illuminating—more illuminating than if the noon sun had been instantly turned on and off.
Thunders smote. Wind roared. Clouds of flying spray rose to meet the rain—downpouring as if all the deep-bottomed vessel of the sky were being emptied.
“Oh, this is wonderful—wonderful!” she half-sobbed.
I twisted myself around and tried to look at her.
I demanded what she would call terrible. I did not speak in any conversational spirit. I was irritated; or at least irritation must have been the basis of my feeling. There I was, frightened, shaken, by as fierce a storm as ever smote the sea—or I was willing to believe that it was—and she was admiring it.
She perhaps did not hear my question. Anybody who could not hear the terrible menace of the shrieking wind and solid blows of the water, beating like a legion of rams against our frail wooden walls, should not have been expected to hear absurd questions.
Presently: “This is the first thing of my life that has wholly satisfied me.”
She was not talking to me. But I leaned close to her ear and shouted: “How?”
“And all you men are down here!”
There was a queer mingling of scorn and admiration in that. Evidently she was not in a mood to be questioned. Or maybe she really did not hear, her attention being concentrated.
Williams's was a striking figure amid the hurricane. He stood rigid as if cast in bronze, and naked except for trousers cut away at the knees.
The deck rose and fell, down, down, down with the long slow drop of a pitching ship, then up as if being raised to the clouds. From time to time the water came over with a hoarse, engulfing rush and buried him to his waist, to his neck, occasionally it seemed covering him from sight. It was a distinct surprise to see him emerge each time, though I knew very well he could not be swept away. There was nothing courageous in his being there, though she thought it was the height of heroism. There was, however, a good deal of that strange quality of his which seemed to seize on the hardest, most grinding strain, and meet it.
Being covered and lost under water meant nothing to him. He was a good deal like a porpoise. But the blow of the water—that was something.
“I couldn't be afraid with——”
Her sentence stopped. The deck had been boarded by a moving mountain. I shot the cover fast to keep from being drenched.
At once her hands were pushing against it frantically.
“Let me see! Quick. I'm afraid—I must see!”
“Want to be drowned?”
“He'll be drowned!”
“No more 'an a fish.”
“Open this——”
She pushed at me.
“You cowards!”
“Water—through here—smother us.”
“Open it!”
Her fists were beating against the cover.
“He's all right.”
“Open it! Why don't you open it!”
“Now listen——”
“Open it! Open it! Open it!”
From below Davenant called up apprehensively to know what was the matter.
I looked over my shoulder. Raikes had taken a step up the companion.
“You get back,” I shouted.
He stepped irresolutely down.
Miss Davenant had stopped talking and was struggling. Savagely, as if struggling for air, she pushed and beat and jabbed. Her strength was surprising.
She slipped the cover. The mountain had slid off. The deck was clear of water.
In a flare of lightning Williams was still there as if he had passed through nothing more than a wisp of fog. He was leaning slightly forward, eyes set to pierce the darkness, or rather to catch the farthest distance in the quick thrusts of lightning.
“Can't I go out there?” she asked.
She didn't expect me to say anything other than, “No.” At least I was sure she didn't. So I said:
“Of course. You'll be carried over quicker 'an you can ask God for mercy.”
“I'll never ask for mercy!”
It sounded as if she was speaking between clinched teeth. Perhaps she was. The surprises of her were infinite. That was a crazy thing to say at such a time.
“What would you do out there?”
“I would feel at home—at last!”
She said it almost gaily, in sudden good humor, but not as pleasantry. I believe she meant it. Perhaps the repressed, tearing, destructive powers within her found expression in the unlimited noise of sky and surge of water.
There is nothing intelligible about women when they break, as most of them do at some time or other, from under the seal of Solomon, or of other wise men, fathers, brothers, husbands; and like the jinn out of the fisherman's bronze bottle, take on the strange shapes and release stranger forces which, since they are common to almost all women, must be called feminine.
I said something about being afraid, that it was surprising in her not being; and asked if she did not know what fear was. It was a good chance for her to assume conceited falsehood and deny it. But she did not. She said that she had been afraid all of her life—but never in thunder-storms.
“I am terribly afraid of him!” she whispered in a hurried confessional, jerking her head slightly to indicate the foot of the stairs.
At that moment, and for that moment only, she seemed young, girlish. I have often wondered as to her age.
“Raikes?”
“No-no!” Then, whispered with teeth shut: “The black beast!”
“Davenant?”
Maybe she nodded, or it may have been the jerk of the ship. And the sudden warning shh-sh-h may not have, possibly did not, come from her. The water hissing about the deck and the sibilant spray may have made the sound. My imagination, being nimble, often plays tricks.
“They can't hear us. Why?” I asked.
“No.” Then with cutting indifference: “He is no worse than others.”
Not dawn, but a barely palpable gray, oozed out of the black sky. The thunders were being withdrawn to a distance, like a retreating rear-guard. The wind, dying, was still a whistling blast, but not a fury. The sea was wild, moving forward with billowing rushes; and the Sally Martin went with it, headlong, plunging and rearing.
I had been up and down the companion several times, restlessly wondering what to do. I was tired and I ached, and there was no place for rest.
Raikes had disappeared, probably to his bunk, where no doubt he lay in wet clothes. Davenant sat on a chair by the doorway of his cabin, looking worn and drawn, but watchfully waiting for—what?
Probably at the back of his head had been the vague idea of taking to the boats if the ship floundered. It would have been as safe to cling to a pine-knot on a lake of fire. Besides, the boats were smashed.
Where did these people get their vitality, I wondered. For two hours Miss Davenant had been standing on the companion. Williams, of course—I was not surprised at anything he did. I sometimes thought that he sought exhaustion in any way and form the better to sleep.
Hawkins had more than vitality; he had a magic sense of oblivion. He simply had drawn a little circle around himself and shut the night terrors out. Not altogether, though, for there had been mumbled oaths.
I came down and put a foot into his ribs.
I told him this wouldn't do. He stirred, rumbling mightily, and put his hands to his head, groaning.
“I wish it had been poison,” I said.
He had, I am sure, drunk at least two quarts the previous evening—and all it did was make him drowsy. He smacked his dry lips, wanting water.
“We came near throwing you over to lighten ballast,” I said.
“Why didn't you?” he growled. “I'm sick, man. Lord, what's happenin' now?”
A ton of water came down the stairs, and a shout from the deck above. The schooner rocked drunkenly, bobbing in a seaway. A fine jamboree. I looked up the companion. The cover was off. Miss Davenant was not in sight.
As I started up I glanced sidewise and carried with me an impression of Davenant's indignant, astonished face, the salt spray dripping from his black beard. He was wet as a drowned cat, and seemed to have a feline aversion to the water—at least on his beard.
Again the shout from the deck. It was Williams calling.
Up I tumbled with a hundred fears at my throat, and not one of them shameful. I was sure Dula Davenant had been washed over. She wasn't but I came near being, for I leaped out into a waist-high wave—much of which went on down the companion and threw Davenant, who was following, back against Hawkins.
The booming oaths of Hawkins rose above the seething and splash of water. I heard them from where I was stranded—with a whole side of ribs apparently broken—against the rail.
For a moment my sense of sight was confused; I saw so much at once. For one thing there in the misty haze of a black morning, on our lee, a mile or so ahead, lay wallowing helplessly what had been a proud full-rigger. She lay half-under, stern down, probably from a leak and shifted ballast, and slowly turned around and round—a living derelict.
The mainmast had perhaps been sprung, and cut away. At least it was gone, and the others remained. Some of the sails were furled, and others were gone with only wisps of flying rope. She had evidently been caught by surprise.
There were clusters of black spots in the fore-rigging where the crew hung like insects. Below them wolfish waves leaped; yes, with even foam-flecked jaws.
But I turned my eyes from the foundering ship to look at our own helm, where Williams stood with his arms actually about Dula Davenant. What really happened of course I never knew. But I did know about the only thing that could have happened.
Perhaps with the lessening rage of the sea she peered farther and farther out, until—either reckless or catching sight of the wrecked ship—she ran on deck. A wave caught her, and she was swept or struggled close enough for Williams to snatch her.
In doing so he let go the helm, and the schooner promptly veered. There was no other way for him to hold her and grasp the helm too, than by pressing her between wheel and his breast; and he had shouted.
It may have been mean of me; it may have been even a little vicious; but said I to myself, even as I pressed a hand to my aching side—
“A woman gets what she wants though men die and ships go down, though sky and sea clamor and fight.”
Further meditations were interrupted. Davenant and Hawkins and Raikes were on deck, scrambling and sliding about, and grasping whatever they could to hold on, and staring across to the wreck.
“McGuire!”
Williams did not need add:
“Come here and take this woman.”
He conveyed it in one word. With much wavering I made it across the deck, and caught her arm and waist.
“I won't go down there,” she said firmly, holding back.
She was soaking wet. Even the heavy cape sought clingingly the curves of her body.
“It's dangerous——”
“I don't care.”
It wasn't stubbornness. It was intention. She did not intend to go below—and she didn't.
At that moment if Williams had said to throw her overboard I would have been pleased. It was for a raging second precisely what I wanted to do.
I let go, throwing up all responsibility for her. She could do as she pleased. She braced herself between the companion and skylight and remained there, all eyes.
No ribs of mine were broken, but it would have made no difference had they been. Williams gave me the wheel and cut himself loose from the grating. He said to let her drift down close to the wreck.
“For God's sake, you're not goin' to try——”
But he was gone.
Seas were still coming at intervals over the waist, but he plunged forward, roused the forecastle, broke out hawsers, bent an end to a spar and cast it over in the desperate, mad hope of having it drift down against the wreck. It was dangerous business, as well as seemingly futile.
In the first place there was little more than blind luck to carry us near enough; and being carried that near gave the risk of collision. Moreover the chance of any man leaping into the water and reaching the hawser or spar was not to be thought of; and of living through it, if he did, was even less to be believed.
But excitement got into us. For the first time, and that after a wearing, dispiriting night, there were rushing and eagerness among the men as they anxiously paid out the hawser and calculated the diminishing distance. The sodden stern of the wreck, so low in the water that the mizzen-yards were under, gave her a slower drift.
There is something eternal in men that makes them strive to help the danger-stricken; an ennobling quality that may be sheltered from view for the better part of a lifetime, but it appears with sudden flare of courage when the risk is greatest, the chance least hopeful. Strangers all; and when one ship comes down on another in distress, the daring sacrifice is made.
The yearning to help is intense, often more overpowering than the desire to live—a thing scarcely believable unless one reflects on the records, authenticated, of the sea. The ocean is a fearful mistress, and her lovers must be fierce men, ready to pay with flesh, blood and bones—as in the wooing of other mistresses they pay with their gold and their honor—and there is no jealousy between them, at least not in the midst of danger.
All that we could do had been done. And our crew waited, sometimes breast deep in water, unnoticing, indifferent.
A faint cheer, scarcely more than a distant echo, came from the rigging. It was thanks rather than hope; and acknowledgment of what, to those poor devils anyway, seemed chivalrous. It was more than chivalry. It was madness.
As we drifted closer and I hastily put down the helm, Williams said to let her drift, to collide with the wreck rather than miss it. One minute it looked as if a collision was unavoidable, the next that we would go by far out of reach. If we hit the wreck, we ourselves would be one; but Williams would dare anything.
The ocean is maddening in drawing out its strain on men's hearts. Its tragedies are slow. Fire breaks out and may last a day, or days. A ship that is lost takes, usually, many hours to fill and sink while men climb topmast yards as if to be nearer Heaven with their prayers. Storm-driven, a ship sights breakers ahead, and nothing is possible but to wait, minute on minute, till she strikes—or, by a miracle, misses.
Strange that the reliant, defiant, hard-fighting, audacious breed of seamen should be the ones who most frequently are stricken numb, or might as well be, certainly rendered powerless, while the forces about them move on slowly, inevitably, to the sad end or to the miracle.
So we drifted down on the wreck—we, shipping a sea at every roll, came broadside, rocking down the seaway. The spar, though cast astern, being lighter, floated more rapidly.
There was a chance that the hawser would come in contact with the wreck as we drifted by. There was also the hope that the spar would get caught in the wreck's rigging, and we would have a slightly better chance of getting some of the crew on board—if the hawser did not part, as it would be almost sure to do in that sea, with the wreck holding back.
There were all kinds of chances, but what must have been the sensation of the fifteen or twenty men in the rigging? Invisible dice were being shaken for their lives. No, not even a miracle could save them all. Perhaps nothing mortal could save any of them.
From the time we had first seen them they had hung in the rigging, motionless or scarcely stirring—like flies on a screen in the cold. As they saw what was trying to be done, there was movement among them.
The ship had unmistakably been settling. She was now more than half under—her deck had a sharper slant, and the foremast was at times—in the course of the ship's slow, weary plunges, as if she was very tired and hope-forsaken—fairly parallel with the ocean. Her bows were thrust sharply out of the water.
In her slow turning around, like a watertop making its last, reeling revolutions, the upreared forecastle completely cut off from view the fore-rigging; then, the men coming into view again, we could see them scrambling about. There was a movement among them to get out on the yard, a cluster of forms; and one, two, three, dropped into the water. Distinct cries were heard.
“My God!” roared Hawkins. “They're fightin'!”
They were.
We were some two hundred or less yards off and could see plainly that those poor doomed wretches, right on the edge of life's end, were fighting madly to get out on the yard to what seemed to them the best position from which to jump for the black thread with the tooth-pick attached. Some were knocked off. Some jumped with the hope of scrambling up the forecastle to the bowsprit. None made it. For an instant we could see bodies tossed sprawlingly on a wave's crest, then submerged.
“Look at the big fellow—they're pullin' him off——”
“He's fallin'— No— There!”
“Ow!'
A man whom the others seemed instinctively to have turned on had been beating his way out on the yard-arm. He was pushed off his balance and seemed falling but caught himself and jerked down one above him who had kicked out.
Agilely the big man was back on the yard, enemies on both sides—but they were afraid. Foot by foot he worked himself out, turning every second to strike at any who came within reach from behind.
He moved on toward the two men in front. These gave way. They were crowded out—right out to the end, and among the cries heard seemed cries for mercy.
Perhaps not. Then the man on the extreme end turned against his companion; he aided the big fellow in throwing off the one between them. That is what it looked like.
Cries of anger went up from our deck, and I detected the sharp, quick, fierce exclamation of Dula Davenant under, rather than above, the voices of the others, of whom Hawkins's was the loudest. There were angry, outraged cries, too, from the rigging. But the man on the extreme end, if his purpose had been to placate the big fellow, gained nothing. The two bodies were merged for a moment, turned on the yard, heads down and legs encircling it—then one fell away.
The big fellow clawed himself up, twisted his head around and shook his fist at men behind him who had started out; but dared not come close. As he shook his fist he must have yelled a curse, for seconds later—after the fist was lowered and he had faced around, looking for the drifting spar—the oath reached us.
The other end of the yard was covered with men, and slowly the wreck revolved. Luck was to determine who should have the better chance.
It was now clear that the hawser would strike against the ship, but the heavy hawser sagged so low in the water that it would probably do no service as a thing to hold on to. The ship was going lower and lower, so slowly as to be imperceptible except by the higher reach of the waves as they leaped for the yard, hungrily.
A turn was taken around our mast and Williams, calculating how much to take in so as to bring the spar against the wreck, to give the men something graspable to leap for, had the hawser hauled in. Our deck was slippery and rocking.
The sea was running high but steadily, and the poop was flooded with spray, but no more big waves came over. If they had, the Sally Martin would have gone on her way alone.
The men gave a hand with a hearty shout. Even Davenant pulled, though without the shout. Hawkins laid his enormous weight against the line, and little Raikes yelled cheerily. To pull a hundred yards of hawser with a stop-water bent to it is work for a capstan, or better, for a donkey-engine.
Miss Davenant was shivering. Her face was pale, her lips were blue, actually blue as indigo. But from the way she looked at that hawser and the struggling, tugging men I knew that under her cape her hands were clenched and that she strained with them.
The spar actually struck the protruding keel of the wreck, coming almost directly below the yard where half a dozen men clung in a desperate companionship. Before it struck some had jumped—and were at once swirled away by the eager water.
It was not easy to be sure of what one saw in that brief time and amid that boiling foam and those lunging waves; but it seemed that two or three caught hold, and again and again it appeared that all were shaken off. They were so covered with water that one could not tell. Probably one was crushed, as it appeared when the spar bumped into the wreck.
We could distinctly hear men left in the rigging praying and one strong voice cursing.
The wreck was setting with that—no, this isn't a freak phrase—with that slow rapidity that comes over a ship, which, having struggled valiantly, gives up. That is, it sank steadily, perceptibly, and yet with a slowness that eminently befits the inevitable. There is no need for haste in doom.
We feared, and with reason as the ship was now rapidly sinking, that the spar would get caught in the rigging and be drawn down. Another five minutes and the proud four-master would be gone. If none came from her deck to ours, we would have to assure one another that the sight of her had not been a dream; that we really saw it. So completely, with such utter finality, does the ocean wipe out her tragedies.
There was one man left on that wreck who did not yield to the decisions of fortune. Luck decreed that he should be left dangling from the lee side when the spar came within reach; but luck seems to have been meant for those who do not care to put forward their own efforts.
He fought his way across that yard as he had not fought before. Men too timid to leap for the water and snatch at the only chance—no matter how desperate—to be rescued, were scarcely of the fiber to stop so determined a man as himself. He smote and pushed. Fellows—so it seemed—who would not jump for the chance of being saved fell away, frightened, to escape his blows. It may be that they had reached a suicidal despair, and plunged out of life to escape a last buffeting from heavy fists. No doubt they had had enough of blows. Most men have had enough to win tears from Heaven. Let us hope the records are honest that tell of suffering as well as of sin. If so, there will be roistering songs echoed through the marble halls, and strange-looking saints rolling drunkenly down the Golden Street.
That big man did not hesitate. He leaped, and we could tell that he missed. As if to taunt him, a wave's crest flung the spar up so that for an instant it seemed suspended in air, and the figure of another man was hanging there wildly, formless as a rag.
But the man of a dozen battles in the rigging had not jumped to drown. He must have been a powerful swimmer. He drove for that spar as a man fights for life; and that was what he fought for.
“Slack away!” Williams cried.
And the hawser was paid out to give more drift to the spar; but before the line paid out had affected the position of the spar, the man had reached it. He clinched one arm about it, threw his feet over, and raised the other arm in a gesture of triumph. We heard his shout.
The next instant we saw that he was alone on the spar. I thought to myself, grudgingly admiring him, that he must be amphibian; perhaps scales were on his body. He was under water more than above it. How he managed to breathe I do not know.
Scientific men in their wisdom say that the rudimentary gills inherited from piscatorial ancestors are in the throats of all of us. I sometimes suspected natives of using those gills still; they seemed so indifferent as to whether they were under water or had their noses out. Williams was like that, too. And this man.
Williams again, was tense and active. His words cracked. Men jumped, not through fear but eagerness.
“Throw your weight to it, men. Heave-o! Now, altogether. Heave-o! Now—heave-o!”
And each heave-o was answered with a chorus of strained grunts. Hawkins, with a turn of the hawser about his enormous body, braced himself like an anchor with feet against the coaming of the companion and took up and held all the slack that came over the taffrail.
The spar now trailed dead astern, and we had passed the wreck. Williams stood first to the hawser, and after him a line of men like a tug-of-war team. At times the sea seemed to snap the spar back, and the hawser hummed out of the water, shivering spray; and at such moments, Williams and the others would have been forced to let the line play out except for Hawkins, braced like a mud-hook in a rock-pile.
The pull of the hawser and spar assisted me materially at the helm in bringing the schooner around so that the wind was astern, and the sickening, unsteadying roll as she had drifted down in the seaway was gone. I had my head turned over my shoulders most of the time. It may have been bad seamanship, but I never claimed—except deceitfully to Davenant—to have any other kind.
The wreck went down very slowly, but down, down, down, with sodden heaviness; and there were still figures in the rigging. When only the tip of the forecastle was visible the water about it was suddenly flung up as from an explosion. I had heard that decks blew up from air-pressure in sinking ships, but I thought it one of the myths of the sea.
There was more than the burst of water; a sullen, smothered roar followed, and the ship vanished—even the mast going hastily out of sight from where, for an instant, it had alone been visible like a desperate imploring arm.
No wreckage that I noticed came up; and for a few moments there was a white surge of waters, as if the wolf-waves had bent their heads to the feast. Then the high swells rolled over and over the spot, scattering the swirl of foam, and there was no mark or sign to tell where the mighty ship had gone. Only one left of her crew, and he was smotheringly wrapped about a piece of wood, from which any moment he might be washed.
“Was what he did murder?”
The question without being invited yelped at my thoughts.
“Was it murder to hasten by two ticks of the clock the death of doomed men? Murder to knock the weaker aside—who would have failed had they tried—and snatch his own life from the sea?
“I don't envy God,” I said to myself.
I felt that the man would never be brought on deck. Someway it seemed to me that, for one thing, Fate was too ironical to allow success to such overweening impudence from mere men. Fate might, in her cynical mood, bring our ship out of the night to sight the wreck; permit the incredible chance of hawser and wood to drift through a storming sea and reach that wreck; let one man of a score kick his fellows and Death, too, aside and beat through the waves to grasp that wood, and let him hang on until he was within reach of grasping, succoring arms—then pluck him off.
But as much as she had meddled with him, Fate did not know Hurricane Williams. That—a flip of a finger—for her; as for any of her sex. Fate was too feminine to have his respect.
Believe it or not, I don't care. But Williams in his madness probably guessed what Fate intended: that the man, weakened, half—more than half—strangled, would be shaken off when he was raised between water and deck. He would probably slip down the spar as a ring from a stick.
I am not telling this to be believed. I am telling it so I shall never have to reproach myself for shunning the truth for fear of being thought a liar.
What happened was this: When the hawser had been hauled in so that the man lay almost under our stern, and he made no move, gave no recognition of his near safety, and could not be aroused by shouts, but hung on as if frozen there in the death-grip, then Williams—carrying a line, but with none about him—slipped down that hawser, into the sea, and made the line fast about the body of the unconscious man. It is simple to tell it; and landsmen may believe it.
Then Williams, hand over hand, climbed up that swaying, rocking hawser, being bumped and battered against the ship, and was seized and dragged on board by the eager arms of men who had cursed him hourly from that Australian night when he had herded them on to a stolen ship. Together, hawser and line were hauled up; and the man did slip from the spar, and but for the line about his waist he would have plunged into the sea. His body was actually cramped rigid in the position of arms and legs circling the spar—such had been his determination to hang on. And he was dragged on board the Sally Martin a drowned man.
“Fate wins!” I said to myself.
But mere drowning was nothing to Williams. Feverishly he worked and set others to work, and they rubbed and slapped those big limbs into relaxation.
The body was lifted face down- so that water ran from the man's throat and nose, and for three unyielding hours men were kept at work over that unconscious figure—long after it began to breathe they rubbed and moved the arms to aid the lungs.
And not for a moment of any of that time was Dula Davenant off the deck. Her cheeks were no longer pale. They were flushed.
So it was that “Red” Shaylor, mate of the Roanoke, bound from San Francisco to Sydney, came on board the Sally Martin.