A Victor of Salamis
almost too panic-stricken to aid in flinging the cargo overboard. Several
were raving.
“Hearken, Poseidon of Calauria,” howled a Peiræus merchant against the
screeching blasts, “save from this peril and I vow thee and thy temple two
mixing bowls of purest gold!”
“A great vow,” suggested a calmer comrade. “All your fortune can hardly
pay it.”
“Hush,” spoke the other, in undertone, “don’t let the god overhear me; let
me get safe to Mother Earth and Poseidon has not one obol. His power is
only over the sea.”
A creaking from the mainmast told that it might fall at any moment.
Passengers and crew redoubled their shouts to Poseidon and to Zeus of
Ægina. A fat passenger staggered from his cabin, a huge money-bag bound to
his belt,—as if gold were the safest spar to cling to in that boiling
deep. Others, less frantic, gave commissions one to another, in case one
perished and another escaped.
“You alone have no messages, pray no prayers, show no fear!” spoke a
grave, elderly man to Glaucon, as both clutched the swaying bulwark.
“And wherefore?” came the bitter answer; “what is left me to fear? I
desire no life hereafter. There can be no consciousness without sad
memory.”
“You are very young to speak thus.”
“But not too young to have suffered.”
A wave dashed one of the steering rudders out of the grip of the sailor
guiding it. The rush of water swept him overboard. The _Solon_ lurched.
The wind smote the straining mainsail, and the shivered mainmast tore from
its stays and socket. Above the bawling of wind and water sounded the
crash. The ship, with only a small sail upon the poop, blew about into the
trough of the sea. A mountain of green water thundered over the prow,
bearing away men and wreckage. The “governor,” Brasidas’s mate, flung away
the last steering tiller.
“The _Solon_ is dying, men,” he trumpeted through his hands. “To the boat!
Save who can!”
The pinnace set in the waist was cleared away by frantic hands and axes.
Ominous rumblings from the hold told how the undergirding could not keep
back the water. The pinnace was dragged to the ship’s lee and launched in
the comparative calm of the _Solon’s_ broadside. Pitifully small was the
boat for five and twenty. The sailors, desperate and selfish, leaped in
first, and watched with jealous eyes the struggles of the passengers to
follow. The noisy merchant slipped in the leap, and they heard him scream
once as the wave swallowed him. Brasidas stood in the bow of the pinnace,
clutching a sword to cut the last rope. The boat filled to the gunwales.
The spray dashed into her. The sailors bailed with their caps. Another
passenger leaped across, whereat the men yelled and drew their dirks.
“Three are left. Room for one more. The rest must swim!”
Glaucon stood on the poop. Was life still such a precious thing to some
that they must clutch for it so desperately? He had even a painful
amusement in watching the others. Of himself he thought little save to
hope that under the boiling sea was rest and no return of memory. Then
Brasidas called him.
“Quick! The others are Barbarians and you a Hellene. Your chance—leap!”
He did not stir. The “others”—two strangers in Oriental dress—were
striving to enter the pinnace. The seamen thrust their dirks out to force
them back.
“Full enough!” bawled the “governor.” “That fellow on the poop is mad. Cut
the rope, or we are caught in the swirl.”
The elder Barbarian lifted his companion as if to fling him into the boat,
but Brasidas’s sword cut the one cable. The wave flung the _Solon_ and the
pinnace asunder. With stolid resignation the Orientals retreated to the
poop. The people in the pinnace rowed desperately to keep her out of the
deadly trough of the billows, but Glaucon stood erect on the drifting
wreck and his voice rang through the tumult of the sea.
“Tell them in Athens, and tell Hermione my wife, that Glaucon the
Alcmæonid went down into the deep declaring his innocence and denouncing
the vengeance of Athena on whosoever foully destroyed him!—”
Brasidas waved his sword in last farewell. Glaucon turned back to the
wreck. The _Solon_ had settled lower. Every wave washed across the waist.
Nothing seemed to meet his gaze save the leaden sky, the leaden green
water, the foam of the bounding storm-crests. He told himself the gods
were good. Drowning was more merciful death than hemlock. Pelagos, the
untainted sea, was a softer grave than the Barathrum. The memory of the
fearful hour at Colonus, the vision of the face of Hermione, of all things
else that he would fain forget—all these would pass. For what came after
he cared nothing.
So for some moments he stood, clinging upon the poop, awaiting the end.
But the end came slowly. The _Solon_ was a stoutly timbered ship. Much of
her lading had been cast overboard, but more remained and gave buoyancy to
the wreckage. And as the Athenian awaited, almost impatiently, the final
disaster, something called his eye away from the heaving sky-line. Human
life was still about him. Wedged in a refuge, betwixt two capstans, the
Orientals were sitting, awaiting doom like himself. But wonder of
wonders,—he had not relaxed his hold on life too much to marvel,—the
younger Barbarian was beyond all doubt a woman. She sat in her companion’s
lap, lifting her white face to his, and Glaucon knew she was of wondrous
beauty. They were talking together in some Eastern speech. Their arms were
closely twined. It was plain they were passing the last love messages
before entering the great mystery together. Of Glaucon they took no heed.
And he at first was almost angered that strangers should intrude upon this
last hour of life. But as he looked, as he saw the beauty of the woman,
the sheen of her golden hair, the interchange of love by touch and
word,—there came across his own spirit a most unlooked-for change.
Suddenly the white-capped billows seemed pitiless and chill. The warm joy
of life returned. Again memory surged back, but without its former pang.
He saw again the vision of Athens, of Colonus, of Eleusis-by-the-Sea. He
saw Hermione running through the throng to meet him the day he returned
from the Isthmia. He heard the sweet wind singing over the old olives
beside the cool Cephissus. Must these all pass forever? forever? Were
life, friends, love, the light of the sun, eternally lost, and nothing
left save the endless sleep in the unsunned caves of Oceanus? With one
surge the desire to live, to bear hard things, to conquer them, returned.
He dashed the water from his eyes. What he did next was more by instinct
than by reason. He staggered across the reeling deck, approached the
Barbarians, and seized the man by the arm.
“Would you live and not die? Up, then,—there is still a chance.”
The man gazed up blankly.
“We are in Mazda’s hands,” he answered in foreign accent. “It is
manifestly his will that we should pass now the Chinvat bridge. We are
helpless. Where is the pinnace?”
Glaucon dragged him roughly to his feet.
“I do not know your gods. Do not speak of their will to destroy us till
the destruction falls. Do you love this woman?”
“Save her, let me twice perish.”
“Rouse yourself, then. One hope is left!”
“What hope?”
“A raft. We can cast a spar overboard. It will float us. You look
strong,—aid me.”
The man rose and, thoroughly aroused, seconded the Athenian intelligently
and promptly. The lurches of the merchantman told how close she was to her
end. One of the seamen’s axes lay on the poop. Glaucon seized it. The
foremast was gone and the mainmast, but the small boat-mast still stood,
though its sail had blown to a thousand flapping streamers. Glaucon laid
his axe at the foot of the spar. Two fierce strokes weakened so that the
next lurch sent it crashing overboard. It swung in the mælstrom by its
stays and the halyards of the sail. Tossing to and fro like a bubble, it
was a fearful hope, but a louder rumbling from the hold warned how other
hope had fled. The Barbarian recoiled as he looked on it.
“It can never float through this storm,” Glaucon heard him crying between
the blasts, but the Athenian beckoned him onward.
“Leap!” commanded Glaucon; “spring as the mast rises on the next wave.”
“I cannot forsake her,” called back the man, pointing to the woman, who
lay with flying hair between the capstans, helpless and piteous now that
her lover was no longer near.
“I will provide for her. Leap!”
Glaucon lifted the woman in his arms. He took a manner of pride in showing
the Barbarian his skill. The man looked at him once, saw he could be
trusted, and took the leap. He landed in the water, but caught the
sail-cloth drifting from the mast, climbed beside it, and sat astride. The
Athenian sprang at the next favoring wave. His burden made the task hard,
but his stadium training never stood in better stead. The cold water
closed around him. The wave dragged down in its black abyss, but he struck
boldly upward, was beside the friendly spar, and the Barbarian aided him
to mount beside him, then cut the lashings to the _Solon_ with the dagger
that still dangled at his belt. The billows swept them away just as the
wreck reared wildly, and bow foremost plunged into the deep. They bound
the woman—she was hardly conscious now—into the little shelter formed by
the junction of the broken sail-yard and the mast. The two men sat beside
her, shielding her with their bodies from the beat of the spray. Speech
was all but impossible. They were fain to close their eyes and pray to be
delivered from the unceasing screaming of the wind, the howling of the
waters. And so for hours....
Glaucon never knew how long they thus drifted. The _Solon_ had been
smitten very early in the morning. She had foundered perhaps at noon. It
may have been shortly before sunset—though Helios never pierced the clouds
that storm-racked day—when Glaucon knew that the Barbarian was speaking to
him.
“Look!” The wind had lulled a little; the man could make himself heard.
“What is it?”
Through the masses of gray spray and driving mist Glaucon gazed when the
next long wave tossed them. A glimpse,—but the joys of Olympus seemed
given with that sight; wind-swept, wave-beaten, rock-bound, that half-seen
ridge of brown was land,—and land meant life, the life he had longed to
fling away in the morning, the life he longed to keep that night. He
shouted the discovery to his companion, who bowed his head, manifestly in
prayer.
The wind bore them rapidly. Glaucon, who knew the isles of the Ægean as
became a Hellene, was certain they drove on Astypalæa, an isle subject to
Persia, though one of the outermost Cyclades. The woman was in no state to
realize their crisis. Only a hand laid on her bosom told that her heart
still fluttered. She could not endure the surge and the suffocating spray
much longer. The two men sat in silence, but their eyes went out hungrily
toward the stretch of brown as it lifted above the wave crests. The last
moments of the desperate voyage crept by like the pangs of Tantalus.
Slowly they saw unfolding the fog-clothed mountains, a forest, scattered
bits of white they knew were stuccoed houses; but while their eyes brought
joy, their ears brought sadness. The booming of the surf upon an outlying
ledge grew ever clearer. Almost ere they knew it the drifting mast was
stayed with a shock. They saw two rocks swathed in dripping weed that
crusted with knife-like barnacles, thrust their black heads out of the
boiling water. And beyond—fifty paces away—the breakers raced up the sandy
shore where waited refuge.
The spar wedged fast in the rocks. The waves beat over it pitilessly. He
who stayed by it long had better have sunk with the _Solon_,—his would
have been an easier death. Glaucon laid his mouth to the man’s ear.