The Sea-Wolf
off the lashings, I hoisted first on the forward tackle, then on the aft,
till the boat cleared the rail, when I lowered away, one tackle and then
the other, for a couple of feet, till it hung snugly, above the water,
against the schooner’s side. I made certain that it contained the proper
equipment of oars, rowlocks, and sail. Water was a consideration, and I
robbed every boat aboard of its breaker. As there were nine boats all
told, it meant that we should have plenty of water, and ballast as well,
though there was the chance that the boat would be overloaded, what of
the generous supply of other things I was taking.
While Maud was passing me the provisions and I was storing them in the
boat, a sailor came on deck from the forecastle. He stood by the weather
rail for a time (we were lowering over the lee rail), and then sauntered
slowly amidships, where he again paused and stood facing the wind, with
his back toward us. I could hear my heart beating as I crouched low in
the boat. Maud had sunk down upon the deck and was, I knew, lying
motionless, her body in the shadow of the bulwark. But the man never
turned, and, after stretching his arms above his head and yawning
audibly, he retraced his steps to the forecastle scuttle and disappeared.
A few minutes sufficed to finish the loading, and I lowered the boat into
the water. As I helped Maud over the rail and felt her form close to
mine, it was all I could do to keep from crying out, “I love you! I love
you!” Truly Humphrey Van Weyden was at last in love, I thought, as her
fingers clung to mine while I lowered her down to the boat. I held on to
the rail with one hand and supported her weight with the other, and I was
proud at the moment of the feat. It was a strength I had not possessed a
few months before, on the day I said good-bye to Charley Furuseth and
started for San Francisco on the ill-fated _Martinez_.
As the boat ascended on a sea, her feet touched and I released her hands.
I cast off the tackles and leaped after her. I had never rowed in my
life, but I put out the oars and at the expense of much effort got the
boat clear of the _Ghost_. Then I experimented with the sail. I had
seen the boat-steerers and hunters set their spritsails many times, yet
this was my first attempt. What took them possibly two minutes took me
twenty, but in the end I succeeded in setting and trimming it, and with
the steering-oar in my hands hauled on the wind.
“There lies Japan,” I remarked, “straight before us.”
“Humphrey Van Weyden,” she said, “you are a brave man.”
“Nay,” I answered, “it is you who are a brave woman.”
We turned our heads, swayed by a common impulse to see the last of the
_Ghost_. Her low hull lifted and rolled to windward on a sea; her canvas
loomed darkly in the night; her lashed wheel creaked as the rudder
kicked; then sight and sound of her faded away, and we were alone on the
dark sea.
CHAPTER XXVII
Day broke, grey and chill. The boat was close-hauled on a fresh breeze
and the compass indicated that we were just making the course which would
bring us to Japan. Though stoutly mittened, my fingers were cold, and
they pained from the grip on the steering-oar. My feet were stinging
from the bite of the frost, and I hoped fervently that the sun would
shine.
Before me, in the bottom of the boat, lay Maud. She, at least, was warm,
for under her and over her were thick blankets. The top one I had drawn
over her face to shelter it from the night, so I could see nothing but
the vague shape of her, and her light-brown hair, escaped from the
covering and jewelled with moisture from the air.
Long I looked at her, dwelling upon that one visible bit of her as only a
man would who deemed it the most precious thing in the world. So
insistent was my gaze that at last she stirred under the blankets, the
top fold was thrown back and she smiled out on me, her eyes yet heavy
with sleep.
“Good-morning, Mr. Van Weyden,” she said. “Have you sighted land yet?”
“No,” I answered, “but we are approaching it at a rate of six miles an
hour.”
She made a _moue_ of disappointment.
“But that is equivalent to one hundred and forty-four miles in
twenty-four hours,” I added reassuringly.
Her face brightened. “And how far have we to go?”
“Siberia lies off there,” I said, pointing to the west. “But to the
south-west, some six hundred miles, is Japan. If this wind should hold,
we’ll make it in five days.”
“And if it storms? The boat could not live?”
She had a way of looking one in the eyes and demanding the truth, and
thus she looked at me as she asked the question.
“It would have to storm very hard,” I temporized.
“And if it storms very hard?”
I nodded my head. “But we may be picked up any moment by a
sealing-schooner. They are plentifully distributed over this part of the
ocean.”
“Why, you are chilled through!” she cried. “Look! You are shivering.
Don’t deny it; you are. And here I have been lying warm as toast.”
“I don’t see that it would help matters if you, too, sat up and were
chilled,” I laughed.
“It will, though, when I learn to steer, which I certainly shall.”
She sat up and began making her simple toilet. She shook down her hair,
and it fell about her in a brown cloud, hiding her face and shoulders.
Dear, damp brown hair! I wanted to kiss it, to ripple it through my
fingers, to bury my face in it. I gazed entranced, till the boat ran
into the wind and the flapping sail warned me I was not attending to my
duties. Idealist and romanticist that I was and always had been in spite
of my analytical nature, yet I had failed till now in grasping much of
the physical characteristics of love. The love of man and woman, I had
always held, was a sublimated something related to spirit, a spiritual
bond that linked and drew their souls together. The bonds of the flesh
had little part in my cosmos of love. But I was learning the sweet
lesson for myself that the soul transmuted itself, expressed itself,
through the flesh; that the sight and sense and touch of the loved one’s
hair was as much breath and voice and essence of the spirit as the light
that shone from the eyes and the thoughts that fell from the lips. After
all, pure spirit was unknowable, a thing to be sensed and divined only;
nor could it express itself in terms of itself. Jehovah was
anthropomorphic because he could address himself to the Jews only in
terms of their understanding; so he was conceived as in their own image,
as a cloud, a pillar of fire, a tangible, physical something which the
mind of the Israelites could grasp.
And so I gazed upon Maud’s light-brown hair, and loved it, and learned
more of love than all the poets and singers had taught me with all their
songs and sonnets. She flung it back with a sudden adroit movement, and
her face emerged, smiling.
“Why don’t women wear their hair down always?” I asked. “It is so much
more beautiful.”
“If it didn’t tangle so dreadfully,” she laughed. “There! I’ve lost one
of my precious hair-pins!”
I neglected the boat and had the sail spilling the wind again and again,
such was my delight in following her every movement as she searched
through the blankets for the pin. I was surprised, and joyfully, that
she was so much the woman, and the display of each trait and mannerism
that was characteristically feminine gave me keener joy. For I had been
elevating her too highly in my concepts of her, removing her too far from
the plane of the human, and too far from me. I had been making of her a
creature goddess-like and unapproachable. So I hailed with delight the
little traits that proclaimed her only woman after all, such as the toss
of the head which flung back the cloud of hair, and the search for the
pin. She was woman, my kind, on my plane, and the delightful intimacy of
kind, of man and woman, was possible, as well as the reverence and awe in
which I knew I should always hold her.
She found the pin with an adorable little cry, and I turned my attention
more fully to my steering. I proceeded to experiment, lashing and
wedging the steering-oar until the boat held on fairly well by the wind
without my assistance. Occasionally it came up too close, or fell off
too freely; but it always recovered itself and in the main behaved
satisfactorily.
“And now we shall have breakfast,” I said. “But first you must be more
warmly clad.”
I got out a heavy shirt, new from the slop-chest and made from blanket
goods. I knew the kind, so thick and so close of texture that it could
resist the rain and not be soaked through after hours of wetting. When
she had slipped this on over her head, I exchanged the boy’s cap she wore
for a man’s cap, large enough to cover her hair, and, when the flap was
turned down, to completely cover her neck and ears. The effect was
charming. Her face was of the sort that cannot but look well under all
circumstances. Nothing could destroy its exquisite oval, its well-nigh
classic lines, its delicately stencilled brows, its large brown eyes,
clear-seeing and calm, gloriously calm.
A puff, slightly stronger than usual, struck us just then. The boat was
caught as it obliquely crossed the crest of a wave. It went over
suddenly, burying its gunwale level with the sea and shipping a bucketful
or so of water. I was opening a can of tongue at the moment, and I
sprang to the sheet and cast it off just in time. The sail flapped and
fluttered, and the boat paid off. A few minutes of regulating sufficed
to put it on its course again, when I returned to the preparation of
breakfast.
“It does very well, it seems, though I am not versed in things nautical,”
she said, nodding her head with grave approval at my steering
contrivance.
“But it will serve only when we are sailing by the wind,” I explained.
“When running more freely, with the wind astern abeam, or on the quarter,
it will be necessary for me to steer.”
“I must say I don’t understand your technicalities,” she said, “but I do
your conclusion, and I don’t like it. You cannot steer night and day and
for ever. So I shall expect, after breakfast, to receive my first
lesson. And then you shall lie down and sleep. We’ll stand watches just
as they do on ships.”
“I don’t see how I am to teach you,” I made protest. “I am just learning
for myself. You little thought when you trusted yourself to me that I
had had no experience whatever with small boats. This is the first time
I have ever been in one.”
“Then we’ll learn together, sir. And since you’ve had a night’s start
you shall teach me what you have learned. And now, breakfast. My! this
air does give one an appetite!”
“No coffee,” I said regretfully, passing her buttered sea-biscuits and a
slice of canned tongue. “And there will be no tea, no soups, nothing
hot, till we have made land somewhere, somehow.”
After the simple breakfast, capped with a cup of cold water, Maud took
her lesson in steering. In teaching her I learned quite a deal myself,
though I was applying the knowledge already acquired by sailing the
_Ghost_ and by watching the boat-steerers sail the small boats. She was
an apt pupil, and soon learned to keep the course, to luff in the puffs
and to cast off the sheet in an emergency.
Having grown tired, apparently, of the task, she relinquished the oar to
me. I had folded up the blankets, but she now proceeded to spread them
out on the bottom. When all was arranged snugly, she said:
“Now, sir, to bed. And you shall sleep until luncheon. Till
dinner-time,” she corrected, remembering the arrangement on the _Ghost_.
What could I do? She insisted, and said, “Please, please,” whereupon I
turned the oar over to her and obeyed. I experienced a positive sensuous