_ There is no need of going into an extended recital of our suffering
in the small boat during the many days we were driven and drifted,
here and there, willy-nilly, across the ocean. The high wind blew
from the north-west for twenty-four hours, when it fell calm, and
in the night sprang up from the south-west. This was dead in our
teeth, but I took in the sea-anchor and set sail, hauling a course
on the wind which took us in a south-south-easterly direction. It
was an even choice between this and the west-north-westerly course
which the wind permitted; but the warm airs of the south fanned my
desire for a warmer sea and swayed my decision.
In three hours - it was midnight, I well remember, and as dark as I
had ever seen it on the sea - the wind, still blowing out of the
south-west, rose furiously, and once again I was compelled to set
the sea-anchor.
Day broke and found me wan-eyed and the ocean lashed white, the
boat pitching, almost on end, to its drag. We were in imminent
danger of being swamped by the whitecaps. As it was, spray and
spume came aboard in such quantities that I bailed without
cessation. The blankets were soaking. Everything was wet except
Maud, and she, in oilskins, rubber boots, and sou'wester, was dry,
all but her face and hands and a stray wisp of hair. She relieved
me at the bailing-hole from time to time, and bravely she threw out
the water and faced the storm. All things are relative. It was no
more than a stiff blow, but to us, fighting for life in our frail
craft, it was indeed a storm.
Cold and cheerless, the wind beating on our faces, the white seas
roaring by, we struggled through the day. Night came, but neither
of us slept. Day came, and still the wind beat on our faces and
the white seas roared past. By the second night Maud was falling
asleep from exhaustion. I covered her with oilskins and a
tarpaulin. She was comparatively dry, but she was numb with the
cold. I feared greatly that she might die in the night; but day
broke, cold and cheerless, with the same clouded sky and beating
wind and roaring seas.
I had had no sleep for forty-eight hours. I was wet and chilled to
the marrow, till I felt more dead than alive. My body was stiff
from exertion as well as from cold, and my aching muscles gave me
the severest torture whenever I used them, and I used them
continually. And all the time we were being driven off into the
north-east, directly away from Japan and toward bleak Bering Sea.
And still we lived, and the boat lived, and the wind blew unabated.
In fact, toward nightfall of the third day it increased a trifle
and something more. The boat's bow plunged under a crest, and we
came through quarter-full of water. I bailed like a madman. The
liability of shipping another such sea was enormously increased by
the water that weighed the boat down and robbed it of its buoyancy.
And another such sea meant the end. When I had the boat empty
again I was forced to take away the tarpaulin which covered Maud,
in order that I might lash it down across the bow. It was well I
did, for it covered the boat fully a third of the way aft, and
three times, in the next several hours, it flung off the bulk of
the down-rushing water when the bow shoved under the seas.
Maud's condition was pitiable. She sat crouched in the bottom of
the boat, her lips blue, her face grey and plainly showing the pain
she suffered. But ever her eyes looked bravely at me, and ever her
lips uttered brave words.
The worst of the storm must have blown that night, though little I
noticed it. I had succumbed and slept where I sat in the stern-
sheets. The morning of the fourth day found the wind diminished to
a gentle whisper, the sea dying down and the sun shining upon us.
Oh, the blessed sun! How we bathed our poor bodies in its
delicious warmth, reviving like bugs and crawling things after a
storm. We smiled again, said amusing things, and waxed optimistic
over our situation. Yet it was, if anything, worse than ever. We
were farther from Japan than the night we left the Ghost. Nor
could I more than roughly guess our latitude and longitude. At a
calculation of a two-mile drift per hour, during the seventy and
odd hours of the storm, we had been driven at least one hundred and
fifty miles to the north-east. But was such calculated drift
correct? For all I knew, it might have been four miles per hour
instead of two. In which case we were another hundred and fifty
miles to the bad.
Where we were I did not know, though there was quite a likelihood
that we were in the vicinity of the Ghost. There were seals about
us, and I was prepared to sight a sealing-schooner at any time. We
did sight one, in the afternoon, when the north-west breeze had
sprung up freshly once more. But the strange schooner lost itself
on the sky-line and we alone occupied the circle of the sea.
Came days of fog, when even Maud's spirit drooped and there were no
merry words upon her lips; days of calm, when we floated on the
lonely immensity of sea, oppressed by its greatness and yet
marvelling at the miracle of tiny life, for we still lived and
struggled to live; days of sleet and wind and snow-squalls, when
nothing could keep us warm; or days of drizzling rain, when we
filled our water-breakers from the drip of the wet sail.
And ever I loved Maud with an increasing love. She was so many-
sided, so many-mooded - "protean-mooded" I called her. But I
called her this, and other and dearer things, in my thoughts only.
Though the declaration of my love urged and trembled on my tongue a
thousand times, I knew that it was no time for such a declaration.
If for no other reason, it was no time, when one was protecting and
trying to save a woman, to ask that woman for her love. Delicate
as was the situation, not alone in this but in other ways, I
flattered myself that I was able to deal delicately with it; and
also I flattered myself that by look or sign I gave no
advertisement of the love I felt for her. We were like good
comrades, and we grew better comrades as the days went by.
One thing about her which surprised me was her lack of timidity and
fear. The terrible sea, the frail boat, the storms, the suffering,
the strangeness and isolation of the situation, - all that should
have frightened a robust woman, - seemed to make no impression upon
her who had known life only in its most sheltered and consummately
artificial aspects, and who was herself all fire and dew and mist,
sublimated spirit, all that was soft and tender and clinging in
woman. And yet I am wrong. She WAS timid and afraid, but she
possessed courage. The flesh and the qualms of the flesh she was
heir to, but the flesh bore heavily only on the flesh. And she was
spirit, first and always spirit, etherealized essence of life, calm
as her calm eyes, and sure of permanence in the changing order of
the universe.
Came days of storm, days and nights of storm, when the ocean
menaced us with its roaring whiteness, and the wind smote our
struggling boat with a Titan's buffets. And ever we were flung
off, farther and farther, to the north-east. It was in such a
storm, and the worst that we had experienced, that I cast a weary
glance to leeward, not in quest of anything, but more from the
weariness of facing the elemental strife, and in mute appeal,
almost, to the wrathful powers to cease and let us be. What I saw
I could not at first believe. Days and nights of sleeplessness and
anxiety had doubtless turned my head. I looked back at Maud, to
identify myself, as it were, in time and space. The sight of her
dear wet cheeks, her flying hair, and her brave brown eyes
convinced me that my vision was still healthy. Again I turned my
face to leeward, and again I saw the jutting promontory, black and
high and naked, the raging surf that broke about its base and beat
its front high up with spouting fountains, the black and forbidden
coast-line running toward the south-east and fringed with a
tremendous scarf of white.
"Maud," I said. "Maud."
She turned her head and beheld the sight.
"It cannot be Alaska!" she cried.
"Alas, no," I answered, and asked, "Can you swim?"
She shook her head.
"Neither can I," I said. "So we must get ashore without swimming,
in some opening between the rocks through which we can drive the
boat and clamber out. But we must be quick, most quick - and
sure."
I spoke with a confidence she knew I did not feel, for she looked
at me with that unfaltering gaze of hers and said:
"I have not thanked you yet for all you have done for me but - "
She hesitated, as if in doubt how best to word her gratitude.
"Well?" I said, brutally, for I was not quite pleased with her
thanking me.
"You might help me," she smiled.
"To acknowledge your obligations before you die? Not at all. We
are not going to die. We shall land on that island, and we shall
be snug and sheltered before the day is done."
I spoke stoutly, but I did not believe a word. Nor was I prompted
to lie through fear. I felt no fear, though I was sure of death in
that boiling surge amongst the rocks which was rapidly growing
nearer. It was impossible to hoist sail and claw off that shore.
The wind would instantly capsize the boat; the seas would swamp it
the moment it fell into the trough; and, besides, the sail, lashed
to the spare oars, dragged in the sea ahead of us.
As I say, I was not afraid to meet my own death, there, a few
hundred yards to leeward; but I was appalled at the thought that
Maud must die. My cursed imagination saw her beaten and mangled
against the rocks, and it was too terrible. I strove to compel
myself to think we would make the landing safely, and so I spoke,
not what I believed, but what I preferred to believe.
I recoiled before contemplation of that frightful death, and for a
moment I entertained the wild idea of seizing Maud in my arms and
leaping overboard. Then I resolved to wait, and at the last
moment, when we entered on the final stretch, to take her in my
arms and proclaim my love, and, with her in my embrace, to make the
desperate struggle and die.
Instinctively we drew closer together in the bottom of the boat. I
felt her mittened hand come out to mine. And thus, without speech,
we waited the end. We were not far off the line the wind made with
the western edge of the promontory, and I watched in the hope that
some set of the current or send of the sea would drift us past
before we reached the surf.
"We shall go clear," I said, with a confidence which I knew
deceived neither of us.
"By God, we WILL go clear!" I cried, five minutes later.
The oath left my lips in my excitement - the first, I do believe,
in my life, unless "trouble it," an expletive of my youth, be
accounted an oath.
"I beg your pardon," I said.
"You have convinced me of your sincerity," she said, with a faint
smile. "I do know, now, that we shall go clear."
I had seen a distant headland past the extreme edge of the
promontory, and as we looked we could see grow the intervening
coastline of what was evidently a deep cove. At the same time
there broke upon our ears a continuous and mighty bellowing. It
partook of the magnitude and volume of distant thunder, and it came
to us directly from leeward, rising above the crash of the surf and
travelling directly in the teeth of the storm. As we passed the
point the whole cove burst upon our view, a half-moon of white
sandy beach upon which broke a huge surf, and which was covered
with myriads of seals. It was from them that the great bellowing
went up.
"A rookery!" I cried. "Now are we indeed saved. There must be men
and cruisers to protect them from the seal-hunters. Possibly there
is a station ashore."
But as I studied the surf which beat upon the beach, I said, "Still
bad, but not so bad. And now, if the gods be truly kind, we shall
drift by that next headland and come upon a perfectly sheltered
beach, where we may land without wetting our feet."
And the gods were kind. The first and second headlands were
directly in line with the south-west wind; but once around the
second, - and we went perilously near, - we picked up the third
headland, still in line with the wind and with the other two. But
the cove that intervened! It penetrated deep into the land, and
the tide, setting in, drifted us under the shelter of the point.
Here the sea was calm, save for a heavy but smooth ground-swell,
and I took in the sea-anchor and began to row. From the point the
shore curved away, more and more to the south and west, until at
last it disclosed a cove within the cove, a little land-locked
harbour, the water level as a pond, broken only by tiny ripples
where vagrant breaths and wisps of the storm hurtled down from over
the frowning wall of rock that backed the beach a hundred feet
inshore.
Here were no seals whatever. The boat's stern touched the hard
shingle. I sprang out, extending my hand to Maud. The next moment
she was beside me. As my fingers released hers, she clutched for
my arm hastily. At the same moment I swayed, as about to fall to
the sand. This was the startling effect of the cessation of
motion. We had been so long upon the moving, rocking sea that the
stable land was a shock to us. We expected the beach to lift up
this way and that, and the rocky walls to swing back and forth like
the sides of a ship; and when we braced ourselves, automatically,
for these various expected movements, their non-occurrence quite
overcame our equilibrium.
"I really must sit down," Maud said, with a nervous laugh and a
dizzy gesture, and forthwith she sat down on the sand.
I attended to making the boat secure and joined her. Thus we
landed on Endeavour Island, as we came to it, land-sick from long
custom of the sea. _