# The Eternal Challenge

Extracted from Everybody's Magazine, Jan 1912, pp. 17–27. Accompanying illustrations may be omitted.
The ETERNAL CHALLENGE
by
INEZ HAYNES GILLMORE
AUTHOR OF “PHOEBE AND ERNEST,” “JANEY," ETC.
ILLUSTRATIONS BY ANTON O. FISCHER
This story has nothing whatever to do with the shipwreck that began it.
Picture to yourself a pair of islands lying side by side, long, narrow, as like as the two halves of a split peanut. About them stretches the ocean—a great, flat plane, moving as heavily as a flood of molten metal, cut into a clean circle by the incisive horizon line. Above them lifts the sky—a great, deep bowl, as vividly colored as the richest old stained glass, eternally dropping cloud-shadows to flutter across the islands and melt into the sea. Between them runs a channel, shaped like a funnel, the broad end north, the narrow end south—a channel not of waves but of white-maned sea-horses leaping over jags of rock, to claw with tooth and nail at the cliff-sides of the islands.
Sometime, eons ago, the twin islands must have been one island. For the rocky hill-height of the south side of the one is on a level with the rocky hill-height of the south side of the other, and each drops abruptly to a perilous, rocky coast. Similarly, the green tropical tangle of the north side of the other is perfectly matched by the green tropical tangle of the north side of the one, and each is banded with a broad ribbon of silvery sand. On the rocky south coast the water chums into eddies and whirlpools. On the sandy north coast it breaks in huge combers. Without ceasing they come in, these combers—for the a shift from east to west, and from west to east, of the currents back of them is the only indication of a change in tide. A dozen waves are always in the process of formation, unbroken line on unbroken line, mountains of jade with crests of crystal that lift and rear, until suddenly they leap too high and topple to a creamy and thunderous destruction.
Centuries ago, a seismic disturbance cut the island in two as neatly as a knife halves an apple. The sea, tearing into the broad opening of the funnel, found its way impeded by broken-off boulders and splinters of rock. Most of these it never dislodged. But some its first tumultuous rush carried through the narrow neck of the funnel a short distance out to sea. So to this day the channel waters rip a boiling white course half a mile due south, straight through the purple ocean.
The curious thing about this chasm was that its narrowest point, the very mouth of the funnel, had reft the greatest eminence of the old island. So each of the new islands ran up to a hill which ended abruptly in a cliff. So close were these cliffs, and yet so high above the boiling, churning waves, that a whisper would carry from one to the other. You would have said that a strong man could leap across.
Illustration: THEY ALWAYS WALKED CLOSE—HIS HAND ON HER SHOULDER. THEY WERE PERFECTLY HAPPY.
It was a spot made up of two parts of beauty and one of menace. John Lawford and Molly Ernst took the beauty and let the menace go. When they crawled back to life after the disaster which cast them insensible on to the sands, it looked a paradise to them. It fairly dripped with beauty, and, as the days went by, the story of their love and wooing wrote itself all over the landscape. Indeed, their nomenclature of the place marked, as by a series of poetic notches, the progress of their love-affair.
They named the island on which they lived Molly Isle and its hill Mount Ernst. They named its twin John Isle, and its hill Mount Lawford. The channel between they named the Funnel.
A certain little arroyo on Molly Isle, by day emerald-green shot with sunlight bars of pure gold, became, under the moon, a thing of magic, shadow-dark, dusk-soft, laced with cobwebs of silver. One night, Molly and John, standing there, recited to each other from the Book of Common Prayer:
“I, Molly, take thee, John——”
“I, John, take thee, Molly——”
Thereafter, they referred to that arroyo as Honeymoon Hollow. Other names grew out of their association, but it is not necessary to set them down here.
Only one fear haunted Molly and John in the long two months before they married, and in the long three months subsequent—it was that they might be rescued.
“Of course, we want to go back to civilization some day, John,” Molly would say, “but not before two years, do you think?”
“Not before ten,” John would respond fervently.
He never told her that he saw no chance of rescue. He did not want to mar her certainty of a present happiness by any sense of insecurity. But after the accident to its machinery which set the ship helplessly adrift with an iron demon pounding its entrails out, they had floated far out of the beaten paths of the Pacific. They would be discovered only by chance.
In the meantime they were happy as perhaps no two have ever been happy since that innocent period before the primal pair plucked disaster from the Tree of Knowledge.
Everything made for happiness.
In the first place, neither of them had any ties to harass them. In the second place, the excitements of the new life were of the tensest. In the third place, under the most extraordinary circumstances, they were running through all the pleasures of acquaintanceship, friendship, love.
An orphan from childhood, Molly had come out on a government appointment to teach in the Philippines. John had been drifting about the world since his fifteenth year. He had never had a home, and had never thought he wanted one. Molly had never had a home and had always thought she wanted one. The home which they made on Molly Isle suited them perfectly because they never stayed in it.
At first the necessity of keeping alive blocked out every other problem. Later, as the possibilities of the island developed, their responsibilities dwindled into one—merely that of keeping their fire.
Every morning they made a tour of the beach, seeking what the tide had brought them in the night. It was weeks before the dead ship at the bottom of the sea ceased to be generous. Gruesome gifts came—the first ten days, John and Molly had recourse often to an improvised burial service, and a graveyard was the first public institution on Molly Isle. But, in the main, the ship gave them real treasure—wood, coal, furniture, canned goods, tools, canvas, kitchen clutter, trunks—all the paraphernalia of a floating hotel. Everything was fish to their net—the more useless the catch, the greater the risks they took to secure it. One day they found the shore strewn with a set of “The World's Best Literature,” sifted into a hundred-odd volumes, bloated, bulging out of their covers.
“Oh!” exclaimed Molly, examining these finds after they had dried; “I'm so glad that we're both short on general culture! We're going to read these aloud to each other.”
Three months later she laughed when she recalled that they had not yet opened one of them—except for that important occasion with the Book of Common Prayer. The canned adventure of books seems flat, stale, and tame when Fate lays a fresh kill of romance daily at your feet. And they, remember, were living in a world as virgin as Mars. It called to them with a hundred voices.
After their labor with the day's flotsam and jetsam, with the house and with the garden, there were the hunting and fishing; the daily examination of the traps which John had set; the exploring walks across the island; the bathing-hour—one long fight in the rush of the broken combers; the late afternoon walk up Mount Ernst into the color-riot of the sunset; the swift twilight; the evenings on the beach, where they lay in a ripple of the sand, warmly secure from the tide but shaken by its thunders; the nights under a sky of murky velvet, sagging almost to their touch with its weight of stars; the awakenings into dawn and dew and bird-calls.
Illustration: THE MORNING BROKE—SHE WAS STILL THERE, A VOICELESS PICTURE OF WOE.
John had floated about the world for twenty years, but Molly was, in his own phrase, “a new one on him.”
“Everything's always been wrong with me from my birth,” was the way Molly put it. And she always added that pathetic “bromidiom” of the modern woman, “I ought to have been born a man.”
Everything had been wrong with Molly partly because of circumstance, partly because of Molly herself. She was disqualified by taste for the domestic life; yet nothing in her except an inherent restlessness justified any other existence. A woman of indefinite capacity but with no specific gift, she was lashed by sporadic ambitions; yet she lacked both the perseverance and the concentration which bring ability to fruition. A college education had rolled off her mind, leaving no trace; but it had served to take her away from the little town in the Middle West where she had lived, eating her heart out.
It is another way to say it that, in the absence of one absorbing ambition, it was necessary for her happiness that both brain and hand be busy. As yet, neither had been busy enough.
The island life agreed with her physically. It brought out every mental power.
“If I'd stayed at home one year longer, I'd have killed myself,” she said over and over to John. “I'm a born buccaneer, come to my own through accident.”
The island life brought out something else in her—something pagan, and yet deeper than pagan—a something of primeval woman.
“Do you know why I love you so much, John?” she said more than once. “It's because I own you absolutely. Other women might tire of you for that reason, but it brings out all that's best in me. It's not only because you're my all—it's because I'm your all that I'm crazy about you. If there were another woman on this island to take your attention—or a man even—I couldn't love you so much.”
John laughed. What man was ever offended by such a declaration! It did not hurt her selfish cause in his eyes that he watched her grow beautiful.
When the ship went down, she was just a girl, big and chunky, red-headed and pasty-skinned, her face beginning to fall into the lines which mean a thwarted personality. Now she was no longer chunky, nor was she yellow or creased. Cast in the beginning in heroic lines, she had fulfilled all her promises. Bare-armed, bare-legged, she did not walk—she strode. Under the great, golden-brown freckles which dappled it, her skin was as white as a pond-lily petal. Her crisp red hair, nailed flat to her head by long, curving hairpins of John's amateur make, sparkled like a helmet of carved copper. Her gray eyes were wide-open, clear, joyous, triumphant.
In John, all the lovable qualities of the professional drifter disguised the selfishness of the irresponsible. He had never known any duty but that of his own pleasure. Until he met Molly, women had been unconsidered trifles in his life, important only as they allied themselves with that pleasure. He was a perfect specimen of a certain New England type—the long, lean, clean-cut, dusky type which looks Hindu until you've been to India; Arabian until you've been to Arabia; Egyptian until you've been to Egypt. He had grown long-haired. His white teeth flashed milky in a face in which a hint of red glowed through the bronze. Not an ounce of unnecessary flesh impeded the roll of his wire-strong muscles.
In a month they knew the island as a man knows his pocket. John had already drawn a tentative map. He had come to many conclusions about it. It was near enough to the tropics to offer an equable climate; not quite near enough for the debilitating tropic heat. It was far enough away to escape the monotonous rainy season.
Birds sang epithalamium on twigs level with their hands. Fish of a delicate deliciousness leaped from the water into their laps. A baby mountain, a toy river, cataracts of needle fineness, ponds the size of hand-mirrors, valleys that were mere dimples—it was a world in miniature, with everything that threatened or offended left out. John knew, before Molly began to realize, that just its calm, dead, even perfection would pall long before a land offering greater hardships of heat or cold.
But in the meantime no shadow had fallen across their happiness. They ruled over their island kingdom—a god-king and a goddess-queen. They talked constantly, for each had the gift of articulateness. They always walked close—his hand on her shoulder. They were perfectly happy.
And yet——
Environment has made man the radical force in the human current—woman the conservative. He is centrifugal, she centripetal. Perhaps woman's first adventure with the serpent in the Garden of Eden taught her her lesson. Certain it is that she is willing to let well enough alone. It is the male who wants to know. Because these male creatures have wanted to know, the dark places of the earth, the abysses of the sea, the heights of the air, lie bare to the world's gaze. Because these female creatures are willing to stay put, homes have multiplied until they made cities. But between that instinct on the part of the male to explore the unknown lands, and that desire of the female to stay at home, lies a chasm which is filled with women's tears.
“By Jove! I'd like to take John Isle apart and see what makes it work,” John said one afternoon. He was busy driving stakes. With nothing left to do, John had decided that another room should be added to their home. “It makes me sick to think that I can't get over there.”
“It's too bad that we can't,” Molly answered placidly, “but of course it's out of the question.” Molly was thinking of something which she had just said to John—a discovery which she had made—a wonderful discovery, too.
“Do you know, John,” she had said, “this is a real Lotus Land. It will be impossible for us ever to be unhappy here. It will be almost impossible for us ever to do wrong. It's an expurgated world like the one Helen Keller lives in. There can be no evil here. There can be no jealousies or misunderstandings or estrangements, for there's nothing to be jealous or misunderstood or estranged about.”
“It's the only problem that stumps me—how I'm going to get over there,” John went on.
“Oh, we'll find a way sometime, I suppose,” Molly answered, still placid.
That was all there was to the first discussion. Molly did not even notice that twice her “we” had corrected his “I.”
Two days later, they sat on the top of Mount Ernst, studying the sunset.
“The north and east coasts must be thick with ship-truck—the Lord Himself only knows how much floated there,” John said.
“North—east coasts of what?” Molly asked.
“John Isle. Everything we didn't get went there.”
“There are some things it's welcome to,” Molly said with a shudder.
John burst out laughing. “Ridiculous how these two little picayune islands are cut off from each other! Impossible to launch a boat on the north coast because of the surf. I don't believe even those Kanaka beggars could get a boat through combers like that. Besides, we haven't any boat. Impossible to make it from the south coast because of that fierce current from the Funnel. Say, Moll, do you suppose a North American Indian could shoot the Funnel?”
“I don't believe any one could,” said Molly.
John squinted across the Funnel. Just in front of him, ridiculously near, inaccessibly far, Mount Lawford presented a height, the twin of Mount Ernst. “Just think how easy if we only had the goods—if there were a sizable tree on the island, I could make as good a little bridge as anybody would want.”
“I suppose there are swimmers that could get through the Funnel,” he continued, “but if you will excuse me. I'd just as soon leave it to them as thinks they can.”
“Oh, I'll excuse you,” Molly laughed. “If you think that in order to please me you've got to swim the Funnel, it shows how little you understand the nature of your child-wife.”
And again she blithely turned the subject without in the least realizing that she was sailing away from a dangerous topic.
“I believe,” said John the next day, “that a raft's the thing we want.” They were busy wattling withes, and this remark came out of an interval of concentration which Molly believed had to do entirely with his work. “I think I can beat those rapids. Yes, my love, I'm going to make John Isle via the Funnel. I'll start at the northern corner of Molly Isle, and if I haven't landed on John Isle by the time we reach the southwestern corner, it's only because—oh, but I'm sure I can do it!”
Molly stopped work to look at him. And for the first time she realized that the Sword of Damocles quivered over her head. “Do you mean to tell me, John Lawford, that you are really thinking of sailing over to John Isle?”
Illustration: THE MAN GAZED. HIS LIPS MADE MOTIONS ONLY; NO SOUND CAME.
“Certainly,” John said. “Why not? Not a-sailing, though. My yacht's out of commission. Poling a raft.”
“Why not!” Molly repeated in a gasp. “It will be the death of you—that's why not.”
“Not while I know it,” John responded flippantly. “No, a curious thing about me is that I never get killed—I can't at this moment recall a single time. Violent deaths don't seem to run in the family.”
“John,” said Molly, clasping her hands, “it would kill me if you left me alone in this place for an hour; and as for thinking of crossing the Funnel on a raft—promise that you will never mention the subject again.”
“Of course I won't,” John answered lightly; “you're missis here. You know that, little girl. Whatever you say goes—see?”
Molly was gay that night with the gaiety of the woman who is acknowledged queen. True to his promise, John never mentioned the subject again; but the next day, Molly noted, with a sinking of the heart, that he began work on a raft. He said that he wanted to have it ready in case of an emergency.
It is unnecessary to trace the steps by which this expedition became a bone of contention between them. But what at first was only a whim became at last an obsession with John because Molly made it one. Discussion grew into argument. Argument became first covert, then open, quarrel. It did not help that John had all the obstinacy of the male, and Molly all the perversity of the female. There came days when their conversation was one long wrangle. There came evenings when they sat apart, grimly silent. It may be that if Molly had once volunteered to let John go, he would have given up his project without a pang. It may be that if John had once begged Molly's permission, she would have helped him with might and main. Be that as it may, at the end all Molly's wiles, smiles, tears, and sulks were equally ineffective against John's smiling obstinacy. At the end, none of John's good-humored sallies could draw Molly from a defiant dumbness. The day came when Molly stood on the beach and watched John put off into the raging current of the Funnel. She saw plainly all that happened; but mercifully it did not last long.
John went smoothly in the beginning, not quite beating the current, as his slanting progress proved. At first he called all kinds of cheerful remarks back to her; they stopped suddenly, the last cut off in the middle. It was getting a little harder—he was putting every inch of his strength into an effort to keep away from something—she could not make out which rock—she saw his figure relax as with relief, but he did not speak or turn again. Another current took him—he swung with it—swung out of it. A third caught him, jammed the raft against a high sliver of rock—neatly overturned it—it seemed a long time before John's head appeared. But he was quite master of himself, swimming expertly, floating a bit, then swimming again—he was going to make it—the current took him again—once it threw him up—twice it dashed him down—once for a long time she did not see him at all—rocks kept coming in between—he came up finally in a stretch of clear water, swam—dropped out of sight—bobbed up—floated in a dizzy circle—was sucked under—shot up and fell sideways—drifted like a log—sank——
Molly ran back and forth along the beach, screaming to her Creator for help. She stopped that after a long time and stood still, watching fixedly the spot where she had seen him go down. She called his name until she was hoarse. Night came and found her there. The morning broke—she was still there, a voiceless, formless figure of woe.
Afterward she realized that it was only because her reason was a blank that she waited there—she was not conscious of expecting anything. But an hour after sunrise something pulled itself up to man-height on the opposite shore and waved a hand to her. Conversation was impossible over the beating of the surf at that point in the Funnel. Perhaps she thought he could feel her screams of encouragement. But even as she screamed the figure fell. And that was the last she saw of him that day.
Their first conversation was held many days later, after John had recovered sufficient strength to hobble to the top of Mount Lawford. Two rods away, on the top of Mount Ernst, Molly stretched her arms to him, her eyes streaming.
“I look as if I'd been run through a meat-chopper,” he said, when he became articulate, “and I've got one sprained foot and a pretty bad shoulder. Nothing serious, though.” His white teeth flashed an encouraging smile to her.
The long night-vigil had done spiritual wonders to Molly. She said none of the things which, for three weeks, had been constantly on her lips. Instead, she murmured brokenly the other words which had been long absent from them. John drank them down.
“How long before—” she concluded.
John understood and his brow furrowed. “Well, of course I've got to get into condition again. And then—you were right, Molly, I should never have attempted it. But sometimes—I don't know if a woman ever could understand this—the very devil gets into a man, especially when he's opposed. Oh, I guess it's the eternal challenge of the universe. You have to keep proving yourself to yourself, that you're no older than you were and that you have all your courage with you still. It was the only thing in sight to do. I had to do it. I felt that it was my job.”
“I understand,” Molly said. “But, oh, don't ever do it again!” It is to be questioned if John understood the logic of the following statement coming after the precious one; but every woman will. “I'm never going to set myself in the way of anything you want to do as long as I live.”
“I'll never put it up to you again, Molly,” John said. “I'm going to begin on a raft in a day or two. I don't believe it will take more than a week at most.”
“Only a week?” Molly gleamed.
Twice a day, thereafter, in the morning after sunrise, in the evening after sunset, they had long talks. Starting together with a wave of the hand, they could follow each the progress of the other as they ascended the twin heights. As their paths neared, they sang out joyous greetings. Molly always finished her end of the walk on a dead run, throwing herself down on the top with a quick, panted: “Oh, talk to me, John—I'm hungry for the sound of your voice.”
John's talk, always entertaining, was now actually full of news. “John Isle is simply covered with ship-truck,” he proclaimed at the second tête-à-tête. “Everything you can think of: trunks with all kinds of female clothes in them; hard and soft drinks—we can have a wine cellar now; olive-oil—we'll have a salad course after this; the ship doctor's kit, and enough miscellaneous clutter to stock Mars.” He stopped to stare down into the boiling neck of the Funnel. “Know what I'm going to do? I'm going to start all these things across the Funnel from the northern end of John Isle. They'll have to land somewhere on Molly Isle. It will be your job to collect them—see?”
So, for a week or more they worked together, though separated. And the work on the new raft went on. Occasionally, in the midst of it, an impulse to talk would seize one or the other. A signal, and they dropped everything to fly to the hilltops. It seemed always as if something new and wonderful grew out of these talks—the fruit of their love-in-loneliness. All that was most charming in Molly came to the surface. She even indulged in much long distance coquetry and John wooed her all over again.
One morning, Molly was late at the starting-place. John waited an unconscionable time; then, alarmed at the delay, tried to beat the noise of the rapids with a series of shrill whistles.
At length he saw her emerge from the path which led to their home. Evidently she had not heard his calls, for it seemed a long time before she remembered his existence. Finally, there came a languid flutter of her hand. But she walked up the hill with an averted head and she walked as if she carried a mental burden. It was John who, nearing the top, ran as hard as his stiff leg would permit to the edge of Mount Lawford. “What is it, Molly?” he asked.
Molly's eyes had sunk and her cheek had paled. She did not speak. Her gaze fixed on him, she came straight toward the edge of the cliff. John had a sudden feeling that she was going to walk over the brink.
“Be careful, Molly!” he warned sharply. “What is it?” he repeated.
She did not speak, but her eyes still clung to his.
“What is—” he began again. But, suddenly, he knew. He, too, stood stock-still, staring. “Poor child!” he said after a long time.
Molly's face melted in the quiver that ran across it. “Come as soon as you can. I can't stand it alone any longer.”
John worked like a madman. Every night Molly asked him a hundred questions about the raft. Sometimes the news of his progress made her spirits rise to giddy heights. Sometimes she seemed to sink under it. Whatever her mood, it seemed to lash John to harder, closer work.
When he awoke one morning, no Molly came to greet him from the opposite shore. For fifteen minutes he paced back and forth, his imagination rioting. Casually, in the midst of it, he glanced toward Mount Ernst. A figure, whose draperies fluttered in the wind, crouched on its summit. He ran to the top of Mount Lawford.
“I didn't sleep all night,” she said somberly. “Finally, I couldn't stand it any longer. I came up here—hours ago—it seemed a little nearer to you, somehow.”
“You poor little girl!”
“You do love me, John?”
John's answer was inarticulate.
“Would you do anything for me?”
“I'd—I'd——”
“Will you promise to do one thing if I never ask anything else of you?”
“Oh, Molly—of course I promise.”
Molly's lips made words before her voice came. “Don't come back here until—until—until—” Both lips and voice refused to go on.
He caught it. “Until after?”
An expression came into her eyes which said, “Yes.”
“Oh, Molly,” he said, “I can't! Molly, how could I?”
“It's terrible, I know.” And on a sudden she had words in plenty. “But I'm afraid to let you try it again until after—you were nearly drowned the first time. You may be drowned the second. And if you are drowned, there is nothing for me—and it—but death. For, before God, if you drown, I will kill myself. But if you'll stay on John Isle so that I can see you and know you're alive and—well, I can go through anything—alone, too. Something in my heart tells me to do this. All night long for a week now, I've lain awake thinking. I keep seeing you struggling in the Funnel again. That picture of you sinking. Those hours after you went down—” She broke off with a fit of shuddering. “I could not go through that again. I will not. I'll kill myself if you start across. But when it's over and I have the courage to live—for it—even if you die, then you may come. Promise! Promise me! Promise me now!”
They talked the matter through that whole livelong day. John raged and stormed, pleaded and argued, but Molly was always immovable. To the end of his days, John regretted that he gave and kept his promise; but ultimately Molly had her way.
Followed the strangest months that ever a man passed. He had moments when he told himself that he was justified in breaking his word. Twenty times he made up his mind to swim the Funnel without letting her know. But for a time she kept so steady a watch on him that it would have been impossible to make the attempt by daylight without being discovered. It was out of the question by night. Later, he did not dare because of the effect on her.
In the meantime, they almost lived on the hilltops. John made a camp so that he could spend the night on Mount Lawford; and often Molly went back to their home only to sleep. Physically she was at her best. Mentally and spiritually, she was a broken thing.
And John—his hard labor collecting every shred of wreckage, of procuring and preparing fish and game to toss over to Molly, could not give him an instant's mental respite. For the first time in his life, Grief was his playmate and Worry his bedfellow. Depression dogged his footsteps and Despair sat on his pillow. For Molly's sake, he must not disperse these phantoms by confiding them to her, since one quiver of adverse emotion in him precipitated a cataclysm in her. He had to learn how to control, as with a grip of steel, a situation which he could not even touch. In spite of his care, Molly was harried by all kinds of strange moods: moods of utter panic and blind terror; moods of hope and perfect serenity; moments of feverish wild glee, and of stark, dead despair; moods of calm certainty of a happy outcome, and of perverse belief in inevitable tragedy. At her worst she threatened to throw herself into the Funnel before his eyes. At her best, she indulged in long rhapsodies over their future. John came to know many strange things—strangest of all how a man can love the creature which tortures while it clings.
“Do you love me?” she always asked on first sight of him and, “Do you love me?” always when she left.
John invented strange litanies in answer to this recurrent question. Often he soothed her to sleep, chanting them.
Even in her unlovely moods, it was not difficult to answer in the affirmative. But toward the end, all her wildness left her—she became gentle and serene. A something which he described vaguely to himself as “holy”—it was really only the outer expression of an inner confidence—came into her air. Because of it, his love grew to adoration; and yet he half hated it. It seemed to raise a barrier between them. He wondered jealously if this strange being had ever been his wife, if he would ever dare to touch her hand again! Curiously enough, this new aspect almost broke his nerve; it began to twist itself into his psychology with a vague foreboding of disaster. It weakened him. Toward the end, the lump which means tears always rose in John's throat as he followed her slow climb up Mount Ernst. Often he ground his teeth. Often he clenched his hands. The gray began to appear over his temples.
There came the time when Molly climbed the hill only every other day. There came the time when she could walk only part way up the hill. There came the time when she appeared for a few moments, morning and evening, at the end of the path. There came the day when she did not appear at all.
On the morning of the second day, John started for Molly Isle. For months he had been experimenting with the currents on the north end of John Isle. For months he had been hardening himself for the conflict. Nevertheless he had not been in the water a quarter of an hour before he realized that it was going to be much harder crossing from John Isle to Molly Isle than from Molly to John. A third of the way over, the raft broke under him on a submerged rock; and thereafter it was his fight.
Never afterward could he give any consecutive account of the struggle. At first, details came back to him—of the dizzying din and surge of the waters; of eddies that boiled and currents that whirled; of a wave that seized him, passed him on with a strangling fumble, recovered him, shoved him back, thrust him forward again; of a succession of great waves which seemed, in collusion, to play a game with him even more cruel. But soon the thought of these things left him. They melted in his memory to a mere sense of noise and conflict and fatigue and trouble and pain.
In his first crossing of the Funnel, it had been an incitement to bravado that Molly was corporeally present. In his second struggle, it added to his strength that she seemed spiritually present. He did not see her. He could not hear her. He might not touch her. Yet she was there—that was it—just there, but with a curious, intermittent thereness. She left him at times. His sense of her nearness died. He understood dimly why she went, though. Somewhere another responsibility called to her. In her absence, death became a temptation. Again and again, he decided to let himself go. But, always, just as he was sinking into the rosy, soft cloud which would ease every thing, Molly would come again.
It was quiet in the little clearing where the hut stood—quiet with the dead, dry stillness of the tropic noon. Above, hung a purple sky shot by one huge eye of heat. About, creeping close, lay the jungle, already putting forth hundreds of tentacles to choke the innocent garden growths. A path, just beginning to sink back into the besieging bush, offered, through a tube of emerald, a distant view of rumpled peacock sea.
Suddenly a figure leaped into the opening and came running down the path. Branches tripped and pulled it. Thorns and brambles tore it, but it came speeding on. Sinister it seemed; and yet it was human—it was a man. A few rags hung from him. A multitude of cuts and bruises traced a network on his flesh. Blood poured from a gash in his forehead.
At the edge of the clearing the man stopped a moment. Fearfully he paused, peered, listened. Not a sound pricked the stillness. He leaped to the open door.
A thing lay in the farther corner of the room—a thing that seemed a heap of spent human flesh. The man gazed. His lips made motions only; no sound came. But as he stared, the thing moved. Its arms went weakly to its breast. They drew back a covering, and revealed a bundle of something tiny, something faintly stirring, to his gaze.
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 1970, so this work is in the public domain in countries and areas where the copyright term is the author's life plus 53 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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