The Sea-Wolf
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 forbidding 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.
CHAPTER XXIX
“Fool!” I cried aloud in my vexation.
I had unloaded the boat and carried its contents high up on the beach,
where I had set about making a camp. There was driftwood, though not
much, on the beach, and the sight of a coffee tin I had taken from the
_Ghost’s_ larder had given me the idea of a fire.
“Blithering idiot!” I was continuing.
But Maud said, “Tut, tut,” in gentle reproval, and then asked why I was a
blithering idiot.
“No matches,” I groaned. “Not a match did I bring. And now we shall
have no hot coffee, soup, tea, or anything!”
“Wasn’t it—er—Crusoe who rubbed sticks together?” she drawled.
“But I have read the personal narratives of a score of shipwrecked men
who tried, and tried in vain,” I answered. “I remember Winters, a
newspaper fellow with an Alaskan and Siberian reputation. Met him at the
Bibelot once, and he was telling us how he attempted to make a fire with
a couple of sticks. It was most amusing. He told it inimitably, but it
was the story of a failure. I remember his conclusion, his black eyes
flashing as he said, ‘Gentlemen, the South Sea Islander may do it, the
Malay may do it, but take my word it’s beyond the white man.’”
“Oh, well, we’ve managed so far without it,” she said cheerfully. “And
there’s no reason why we cannot still manage without it.”
“But think of the coffee!” I cried. “It’s good coffee, too, I know. I
took it from Larsen’s private stores. And look at that good wood.”
I confess, I wanted the coffee badly; and I learned, not long afterward,
that the berry was likewise a little weakness of Maud’s. Besides, we had
been so long on a cold diet that we were numb inside as well as out.
Anything warm would have been most gratifying. But I complained no more
and set about making a tent of the sail for Maud.
I had looked upon it as a simple task, what of the oars, mast, boom, and
sprit, to say nothing of plenty of lines. But as I was without
experience, and as every detail was an experiment and every successful
detail an invention, the day was well gone before her shelter was an
accomplished fact. And then, that night, it rained, and she was flooded
out and driven back into the boat.
The next morning I dug a shallow ditch around the tent, and, an hour
later, a sudden gust of wind, whipping over the rocky wall behind us,
picked up the tent and smashed it down on the sand thirty yards away.
Maud laughed at my crestfallen expression, and I said, “As soon as the
wind abates I intend going in the boat to explore the island. There must
be a station somewhere, and men. And ships must visit the station. Some
Government must protect all these seals. But I wish to have you
comfortable before I start.”
“I should like to go with you,” was all she said.
“It would be better if you remained. You have had enough of hardship.
It is a miracle that you have survived. And it won’t be comfortable in
the boat rowing and sailing in this rainy weather. What you need is
rest, and I should like you to remain and get it.”
Something suspiciously akin to moistness dimmed her beautiful eyes before
she dropped them and partly turned away her head.