CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN.
DAY BROKE, GRAY AND CHILL. The boat was close-hauled on a fresh
breeze, and the compass indicated that it was making just the course
that would bring it 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 jeweled 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 southwest, some six hundred miles, is Japan. If this wind should
hold, we'll make it in five days.'
'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 no 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 were 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 hairpins!'
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 cover completely 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
stenciled brows, and its large brown eyes, clear-seeing and calm,
gloriously calm.
Just then a puff, slightly stronger than usual, struck us. 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 forever. 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 dinnertime,' 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 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 gray cloud, now of gray 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 '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 said.
Then 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 southwest and thought of the six hundred miles of
hardship before us- aye, 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 traveling toward Japan,' I answered.
'Our drift is to the southeast, or south-southeast, 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 shall not know where we are by five
hundred miles.'
Then I begged her pardon and promised I would 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 catnaps. 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 forgot my own life in the love of
another life; and yet, such is the paradox, I never wanted so much
to live as right then when I placed 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
instant's notice.Previous chapter:Next chapter THE SEA-WOLF, by Jack London. CHAPTER TWO. CHAPTER THREE. CHAPTER FOUR. CHAPTER FIVE. CHAPTER SIX. CHAPTER SEVEN. CHAPTER EIGHT. CHAPTER NINE. CHAPTER TEN. CHAPTER ELEVEN. CHAPTER TWELVE. CHAPTER THIRTEEN. CHAPTER FOURTEEN. CHAPTER FIFTEEN. CHAPTER SIXTEEN. CHAPTER SEVENTEEN. CHAPTER EIGHTEEN. CHAPTER NINETEEN. CHAPTER TWENTY. CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE. CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO. CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE. CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR. CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE. CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX. CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN. CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT. CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE. CHAPTER THIRTY. CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE. CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO. CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE. CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR. CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE. CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX. CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN. CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT. CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE. Book list. |
(Friday, 29 March, 2024.)