The Sea-Wolf
delight as I crawled into the bed she had made with her hands. The calm
and control which were so much a part of her seemed to have been
communicated to the blankets, so that I was aware of a soft dreaminess
and content, and of an oval face and brown eyes framed in a fisherman’s
cap and tossing against a background now of grey cloud, now of grey sea,
and then I was aware that I had been asleep.
I looked at my watch. It was one o’clock. I had slept seven hours! And
she had been steering seven hours! When I took the steering-oar I had
first to unbend her cramped fingers. Her modicum of strength had been
exhausted, and she was unable even to move from her position. I was
compelled to let go the sheet while I helped her to the nest of blankets
and chafed her hands and arms.
“I am so tired,” she said, with a quick intake of the breath and a sigh,
drooping her head wearily.
But she straightened it the next moment. “Now don’t scold, don’t you
dare scold,” she cried with mock defiance.
“I hope my face does not appear angry,” I answered seriously; “for I
assure you I am not in the least angry.”
“N-no,” she considered. “It looks only reproachful.”
“Then it is an honest face, for it looks what I feel. You were not fair
to yourself, nor to me. How can I ever trust you again?”
She looked penitent. “I’ll be good,” she said, as a naughty child might
say it. “I promise—”
“To obey as a sailor would obey his captain?”
“Yes,” she answered. “It was stupid of me, I know.”
“Then you must promise something else,” I ventured.
“Readily.”
“That you will not say, ‘Please, please,’ too often; for when you do you
are sure to override my authority.”
She laughed with amused appreciation. She, too, had noticed the power of
the repeated “please.”
“It is a good word—” I began.
“But I must not overwork it,” she broke in.
But she laughed weakly, and her head drooped again. I left the oar long
enough to tuck the blankets about her feet and to pull a single fold
across her face. Alas! she was not strong. I looked with misgiving
toward the south-west and thought of the six hundred miles of hardship
before us—ay, if it were no worse than hardship. On this sea a storm
might blow up at any moment and destroy us. And yet I was unafraid. I
was without confidence in the future, extremely doubtful, and yet I felt
no underlying fear. It must come right, it must come right, I repeated
to myself, over and over again.
The wind freshened in the afternoon, raising a stiffer sea and trying the
boat and me severely. But the supply of food and the nine breakers of
water enabled the boat to stand up to the sea and wind, and I held on as
long as I dared. Then I removed the sprit, tightly hauling down the peak
of the sail, and we raced along under what sailors call a leg-of-mutton.
Late in the afternoon I sighted a steamer’s smoke on the horizon to
leeward, and I knew it either for a Russian cruiser, or, more likely, the
_Macedonia_ still seeking the _Ghost_. The sun had not shone all day,
and it had been bitter cold. As night drew on, the clouds darkened and
the wind freshened, so that when Maud and I ate supper it was with our
mittens on and with me still steering and eating morsels between puffs.
By the time it was dark, wind and sea had become too strong for the boat,
and I reluctantly took in the sail and set about making a drag or
sea-anchor. I had learned of the device from the talk of the hunters,
and it was a simple thing to manufacture. Furling the sail and lashing
it securely about the mast, boom, sprit, and two pairs of spare oars, I
threw it overboard. A line connected it with the bow, and as it floated
low in the water, practically unexposed to the wind, it drifted less
rapidly than the boat. In consequence it held the boat bow on to the sea
and wind—the safest position in which to escape being swamped when the
sea is breaking into whitecaps.
“And now?” Maud asked cheerfully, when the task was accomplished and I
pulled on my mittens.
“And now we are no longer travelling toward Japan,” I answered. “Our
drift is to the south-east, or south-south-east, at the rate of at least
two miles an hour.”
“That will be only twenty-four miles,” she urged, “if the wind remains
high all night.”
“Yes, and only one hundred and forty miles if it continues for three days
and nights.”
“But it won’t continue,” she said with easy confidence. “It will turn
around and blow fair.”
“The sea is the great faithless one.”
“But the wind!” she retorted. “I have heard you grow eloquent over the
brave trade-wind.”
“I wish I had thought to bring Wolf Larsen’s chronometer and sextant,” I
said, still gloomily. “Sailing one direction, drifting another
direction, to say nothing of the set of the current in some third
direction, makes a resultant which dead reckoning can never calculate.
Before long we won’t know where we are by five hundred miles.”
Then I begged her pardon and promised I should not be disheartened any
more. At her solicitation I let her take the watch till midnight,—it was
then nine o’clock, but I wrapped her in blankets and put an oilskin about
her before I lay down. I slept only cat-naps. The boat was leaping and
pounding as it fell over the crests, I could hear the seas rushing past,
and spray was continually being thrown aboard. And still, it was not a
bad night, I mused—nothing to the nights I had been through on the
_Ghost_; nothing, perhaps, to the nights we should go through in this
cockle-shell. Its planking was three-quarters of an inch thick. Between
us and the bottom of the sea was less than an inch of wood.
And yet, I aver it, and I aver it again, I was unafraid. The death which
Wolf Larsen and even Thomas Mugridge had made me fear, I no longer
feared. The coming of Maud Brewster into my life seemed to have
transformed me. After all, I thought, it is better and finer to love
than to be loved, if it makes something in life so worth while that one
is not loath to die for it. I forget my own life in the love of another
life; and yet, such is the paradox, I never wanted so much to live as
right now when I place the least value upon my own life. I never had so
much reason for living, was my concluding thought; and after that, until
I dozed, I contented myself with trying to pierce the darkness to where I
knew Maud crouched low in the stern-sheets, watchful of the foaming sea
and ready to call me on an instant’s notice.
CHAPTER XXVIII
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