"Ye're right," Aaron agreed. "I should no have said it. But--'tis so."
Joel left him and went on deck, and his eyes were troubled.... Priss was
there, with Dick Morrell showing her some trick of the wheel, and they
were laughing together like children. Joel felt immensely older than
Priss.... Yet the difference was scarce six years.... She saw him, and
left Morrell and came running to Joel's side. "Did you sleep?" she asked.
"You needed rest, Joe."
"I rested," he told her, smiling faintly. "I'll be fine...."
V
They drifted past Pernambuco, and touched at Trinidad, and so worked
south and somewhat westward for Cape Horn. And in Joel grew, stronger and
ever, the resolve to hunt out Mark, and find him, and fetch him home....
The blood tie was strong on Joel; stronger than any memory of Mark's
derision. And--for the honor of the House of Shore, it were well to prove
the matter, if Mark were dead. It is not well for a Shore to abandon his
ship in strange seas.
He asked Aaron, two weeks after their first talk, whether they had
questioned the white men on the pearling schooner.
"Oh, aye," said Aaron cheerfully. "I sought 'em out, myself. Three of
them, they was; and ill-favored. A slinky small man, and a rat-eyed large
man, and a fat man in between; all unshaven, and filthy, and drunken as
owls. They'd seen naught of Mark Shore, they said. I'm thinking he'd let
them see but little of him. He had no tenderness for dirt."
Joel told Priss nothing of what he hoped and feared; nor did he question
Jim Finch in the matter. Finch was a good man at set tasks, but he was
too amiable, and he had no clamp upon his lips.... Joel did not wish the
word to go abroad among the men. He was glad that most of the crew were
new since last voyage; but the officers were unchanged, save that he
stood in his brother's shoes.
They left Trinidad behind them, and shouldered their way southward, the
blunt bow of the _Nathan Ross_ battering the seas. And they came to the
Straits, and worked in, and made their westing day by day, while little
Priss, wide-eyed on the deck, watched the gaunt cliffs past whose
wave-gnawed feet they stole. And so at last the Pacific opened out before
them, and they caught the winds, and worked toward Easter Island.
But their progress was slow. To men unschooled in the patience of the
whaling trade, it would have been insufferably slow. For they struck
fish; and day after day they hung idle on the waves while the trypots
boiled; and day after day they loitered on good whaling grounds, when the
boats were out thrice and four times between sun's rise and set. If Joel
was impatient, he gave no sign. If his desires would have made him hasten
on, his duty held him here, where rich catches waited for the taking; and
while there were fish to be taken, he would not leave them behind.
Priscilla hated it. She hated the grime, and the smoke, and the smell of
boiling oil; and she hated this dawdling on the open seas, with never a
glimpse of land. More than once she made Joel bear the brunt of her own
unrest; and because it is not always good for two people to be too much
together, and because she had nothing better to do, she began to pick
Joel to pieces in her thoughts, and fret at his patience and stolidity.
She wished he would grow angry, wished even that he might be angry with
her.... She wished for anything to break the long days of deadly calm.
And she watched Joel more intently than it is well for wife to watch
husband, or for husband to watch wife.
He did so many things that tried her sore. He had a fashion, when he had
finished eating, of setting his hands against the table and pushing
himself back from the board with slow and solid satisfaction. She came to
the point where she longed to scream when he did this. When they were at
table in the main cabin, she watched with such agony of trembling nerves
for that movement of his that she forgot to eat, and could not relish
what she ate.
Joel was a man, and his life was moving smoothly. His ship's casks were
filling more swiftly than he had any right to hope; his wife was at his
side; his skies were clear. He was happy, and comfortable, and well
content. Sometimes, when they were preparing for sleep, at night, in the
cabin at the stern, he would relax on the couch there. But she did not
wish for him to put his feet upon the cushions; she said that his shoes
were dirty. He offered to take off his shoes; and she shuddered....
He had a fashion of stretching and yawning comfortably as he bade her
good night; and sometimes a yawn caught him in the middle of a word, and
he talked while he yawned. She hated this. She was passing through that
hard middle ground, that purgatory between maidenhood and wifehood in the
course of which married folk find each other only human, after all. And
she had not yet come to accept this condition, and to glory in it. She
had always thought of Joel as a hero, a protector, a fine, stalwart,
able, noble man. Now she forgot that he was commander of this ship and
master of the men aboard her, and saw in him only a man who, when work
was done, liked to take his ease--and who talked through his yawns.
She gnawed at this bone of discontent, in the hours when Joel was busy with
his work. She was furiously resentful of Joel's flesh-and-bloodness.... And
Joel, because he was too busy to be introspective, continued calmly happy
and content.
The whales led them past Easter Island for a space; and then, abruptly,
they were gone. Came day on day when the men at the masthead saw no misty
spout against the wide blue of the sea, no glistening black body lying
awash among the waves. And the Nathan Ross, with all hands scrubbing
white the decks again, bent northward, working toward that maze of tiny
islands which dots the wide South Seas.
Their water was getting stale, and running somewhat low; and they needed
fresh foodstuffs. Joel planned to touch at the first land that offered.
Tubuai, that would be. He marked their progress on the chart.
On the evening before they would reach the island, when Joel and Priss
were preparing for sleep, Priss burst out furiously, like a teapot that
boils over. The storm came without warning, and--so far as Joel could
see--without provocation. She was sick, she said, of the endless wastes
of blue. She wanted to see land. To step on it. If she were not allowed
to do so very soon, she would die.
Joel, at first, was minded to tell her they would sight land in the
morning; then, with one of the blundering impulses to which husbands fall
victim at such moments, he decided to wait and surprise her. So, instead
of telling her, he chuckled as though at some secret jest, and tried to
quiet her by patting her dark head.
She fell silent at his caress; and Joel thought she was appeased. As a
matter of fact, she was hating him for having laughed at her; and her
calm was ferocious. He discovered this, too late....
He had just kissed her good night. She turned her cheek to his lips; and
he was faintly hurt at this. But he only said cheerfully: "There,
Priss.... You'll be all right in the morning...."
He yawned in mid-sentence, so that the last two or three words sounded as
though he were trying to swallow a large and hot potato while he uttered
them. Priss could stand no more of that. Positively. So she slapped his
face.
He was amazed; and he stood, looking at her helplessly, while the slapped
cheek grew red and red. Priss burst into tears, stamped her foot, called
him names she did not mean, and as a climax, darted into her own cabin,
and swung the door, and snapped the latch.
Joel did not in the least understand; and he went to his bunk at last,
profoundly troubled.
An hour after they anchored, the next day, at Tubuai, a boat came out
from shore and ran alongside, and Mark Shore swung across the rail,
aboard the _Nathan Ross_.