hurry! Make them hurry! We can’t stand this any longer!” And the other
three all cried things, words and shouts mingled indistinguishably,
a babel of sound at the water’s edge, incapable of carrying, in that
wind, more than a boat’s length. Bill and Ronny waved their arms, waved
Bill’s coat, waved torn strips of canvas, and shouted as if a tension
had given way.
Presently the breaking white from the boat’s bow and the occasional
glimpse of bow itself were gone. There were only the jagged lift of the
wave tops and the foaming white of crests.
When Ronny really believed that the boat had gone, that he could not
see it any more, that it had really failed to see them, or had ignored
them, he stopped waving and let himself drop down to the fuselage. Bill
dropped beside him and they stood looking down at the faces below them,
the wet faces with the incredulous eyes raised to theirs. Ronny cleared
his throat before he shook his head and said, “It went.”
“You mean it went?” His father’s voice was suddenly harsh and there
were reddish veins under the salt water on his forehead. “You didn’t
wave hard enough! You didn’t try to shout! The hounds--to leave
us--the dirty dogs! I’ll have them arrested for it. I’ll make them
suffer for it, the dirty skunks, the lou----”
Gloria stopped him with a hand on his shoulder. Mrs. Kinney had gasped
once or twice and her eyes had rolled in her plump white face, but
Colonel Kinney had both arms around her.
“Hush, Momma, hush,” he said. “Never mind. That means we’ll see others.
The next one will come nearer.”
There was then nothing to do but keep on waiting and keep on hanging
on. There was no way of knowing what time it was, except that the
blazing sun had moved slightly westward down from the zenith. The
waves rolled as high, but it almost seemed as if the six had adjusted
to their rolling, so that they did it automatically, knowing how high
the highest would come. But the ferocity of the sun was an increasing
agony. Ronny felt the sting of it under his wet shirt, along his tanned
shoulders, and knew how much the others must feel it on the tenderer
skin of their faces and shoulders. Colonel Kinney’s bald spot glowed an
angry crimson. He had lost his helmet long since. And Ronny tore a big
piece from his wet shirt and made Colonel Kinney tie it over his head
like a hood.
All Gloria’s make-up had washed off and her cheeks were red with
sunburn and her nose already blistered. Mrs. Kinney’s pale face was
bright rose colour, and both women’s lips were swollen and blistered
from the salt water and the sun. Ronny tore other pieces from his shirt
to tie over their faces, and the sun was instantly angry on the bared
places on his neck and back.
It was a relief to dive into the water after a dropped cushion or to
swim around a bit, after their various positions on the fuselage, and
yet Bill was right when he warned him, in a low voice, not to tire
himself. Ronny contented himself by hanging over the cockpit edge with
one hand and letting his body float on the lift and drop of the waves.
The sense of high adventure was burning steadily in him; the sense that
here at last he was encountering an experience which he could remember
all his life.
The waves that came racing at them from the southeast, with their
curious impersonal violence, surprised him with their endlessness. It
was amazing that there could be so many of them, hurrying and shoving
forward, in their leaping up and down. As the blazing sun crept slowly
down the long afternoon slope, so that it shone redly in their smarting
eyelids, the light changed upon the waves, whitening their leaping
tops, intensifying the dark sapphire of their hollows, shadowed in the
trough with glossy black. It might have been a gloriously exhilarating
sea to sail a boat over. But sunk almost to the chin as they were
here, there was little gaiety in it. Deep blue could be bleak, Ronny
was learning slowly, and flashes of white sinister, just as the plane
that had been so powerful and assured, taking off from water only that
morning, floated here so incongruously; alien wreckage that just was
able to support itself and their clutched and uncomfortable lives.
The silences were longer between the choppy snatches of talk. Gloria
did no more singing. Ronny remembered, as if she had been some other
woman, how she had looked that morning, waiting on the pier. That
gay brilliant figure had practically no point of resemblance to this
sodden one with the drenched, salt-matted hair, the pale swollen lips,
the brilliant green silk only dank clinging fabric on the arms and
shoulders, the nose and eyelids reddened. Her consciousness of charm,
too, had gone--that powerful vibration.
Ronny looked at her now only with pity and concern for the pale woman,
silent, with closed eyes and miserably clutching hands where the great
emerald still flashed incongruously in the wet. Mrs. Kinney managed
somehow to look more like herself, with her plump short figure in the
soaked yellow silk clutched by her husband’s arm, with a piece of
Ronny’s shirt tied over her head and forehead. There was in all the
faces, it seemed to him, a growing look of withdrawal, of remoteness,
as if each one were drifting away from their relations with others to
the silent place where ultimately human life exists alone. When one
spoke, it was with a forced utterance. A smile took more strength than
it had and was more automatic. All their attention was centring, more
and more, on the sheer act of endurance.
The sun, just above the western horizon, burned and flared upon their
faces, under their blinking eyelids, and the blue waves changed slowly
to a cold green against a vast rosecoloured afterglow that held no
loveliness for them. In half an hour it would be night, and there was
no boat.
Ronny was thinking lingeringly of juicy beefsteak and baked potatoes
and a steaming cup of coffee, or fried onions, or even just an orange.
Anything to relieve this withering, abominable taste of salt in the
mouth. It seemed to him he must have swallowed quarts of salt water
already, and his tongue and the lining of his mouth were blistered with
it. The feeling of too much salt water swallowed was cold and uneasy
also in his stomach.
Bill came floundering beside him. “Look here, buddy, le’s you and me
try to turn this bus around, so the plane’ll be away from the wind.
Maybe she’ll ride better that way for the night.”
Suddenly Ronny saw the night--the night. “Sure,” he said to Bill,
grateful for activity. But something about his heart was cold.
It was harder to swim than it had been. There was no longer refreshment
in the swash of water over his body. The wind skimmed stinging hatfuls
of spray over a wave top into their faces. When they reached the rudder
they clung to it and breathed a trifle hard, planning their concerted
effort. Presently they let go and began pushing, thrashing tremendously
with their legs, breathing or gasping when they could. The huge thing
was unwieldy and hard to start and, once started, the wind often caught
and forced it back on top of them. Ronny’s legs began to feel the
strain of it and there was a pain in his labouring lungs. Floundering
and struggling side by side there, Ronny found that he and Bill
were staring grimly into each other’s eyes, as if the very abstract
intentness of the look, in such moments as their faces were clear of
water, was some sort of permanence. And at the moment when they got the
thing half about and the wind took it from the new angle, whirling it
as they wanted it to go, Ronny caught a twisted grin on Bill’s face, a
grin and gasp of triumph that reached to him as a glorious thing. It
was tremendous. It was unconquerable, he felt, grinning back as best he
could as they both hung and panted on the turned plane. He felt warm
all over, as if with a great achievement.
By the time they were ranged beside the others again, along the
fuselage, the anxious pale faces turned to them, the bodies
floundering and awash, the colour had gone from the watery world. There
was only a brief green streak of twilight where the sun had gone. To
the east the waves were black against the tremendous looming purple of
the night. Stars were quivering in the enormous rondure of the sky that
overhead took on a strange metallic blue and cast upon them a faint
luminance that was less than light and only a little less than dark.
By it they could see their own dark shapes, the black parallels of
the wings. On the black water the white crests flashed and lengthened
and disappeared, ghostly in the dark. The waves snarled now as they
leaped toward them. The hissing spray stung like thrown pebbles as it
struck their blistered, puffy faces. There was a little relief in the
darkness, for the sun no longer burned into their eyeballs, but in its
place the phantoms of the black lonely water started about them and the
blood went thin.
“I suppose now”--Mrs. Kinney’s voice came suddenly and a little shrill,
from the shadow she had become--“now that it’s dark, nobody can see to
pick us up, even if a boat did come?”
No one spoke. It was what everyone had been thinking, Ronny was sure.
But it had not been spoken before in so many words.
Then Bill said simply, “It’s not likely, Mrs. Kinney. But in the
morning it will be different. They’ll have heard from Bimini, and the
boats will be out sure. We’ve been drifting a bit or they would have
found us sooner.”
No one spoke again. They set themselves somehow to endure the night.
Through the noise of the wind humming and shrieking in the wires and
of the waves hissing and slapping against the wood, Ronny could hear
few sounds which would indicate that human life was here, clinging
perilously to what was almost wreckage. His arm ached dully and
continuously as he held it tight over the edge of the cockpit, and his
bumped and floating body smarted in places where the skin had been
rubbed off. Yet he was growing queerly drowsy. His eyelids drooped and
a hazy swimming took the place of thought within his head. He must even
have dozed once or twice, for a sharp pain in his elbow roused him or a
slap of choking water in the face, and he recognized miserably again,
what, for a second of blur, he had forgotten--the lost floundering in
the dark, the misery in him and in the figures about him.
Once or twice he heard Colonel Kinney speaking gently to his wife and
her sharp whimper, as if she, too, had wakened abruptly from a wretched
doze, perhaps one in which she had dreamed of warmth and safety and
being dry, to the reality of the roaring and sinister dark. Once he
heard Gloria swearing to herself, as if unable to stand it any longer,
and then stopping abruptly, knowing that it did no good.
The stars were gold and silver overhead in the vast dark vault, and it
seemed to Ronny that their tangled and glittering patterns were dragged
slowly across up there, like a remote panorama for how many human eyes
below them, raised in agony and mute endurance. Only decoration, after
all. He must have dozed again, hanging by the other elbow, cheek almost
in the water, for presently he started out of oblivion with a hand on
his shoulder.
It was Bill, his voice low and humble.
“Look here, buddy,” he said slowly and with difficulty, “we’ll have to
look out. They’ve begun to slip off. Mrs. Cargill’s wire keeps coming
unfastened and your father went down once. Coming up with him I hit
my head a bit. Would you stick around and watch them while I catch my
breath?”
“Hurt bad, Bill?” Ronny whispered anxiously. “Here, hang on to this
edge. Hook your elbow over. Take your time, old man. I’ll be on the
job.”
He swam slowly down the side, catching here and there at a foot.
“Don’t mind. It’s me,” he said hastily. He counted the dark heads and
shoulders out of the ghostly foam. One, Colonel Kinney; two, Mrs.
Kinney; three, Gloria; four, his fa---- that head disappeared even as
he looked. Instantly he dived, groping downward in the strangling,
rushing depths. There was only water in his frantic reaching fingers.
Then he felt hair, a shoulder, caught at a thrashing arm. They came to
the surface together, staring into each other’s shadowy faces, gasping.
“Dad,” Ronny whispered in agony, “did the wire come off? You must have
let go. For heaven’s sake, be careful. You can’t tell when----”
For a moment longer the bulk of Andrew Burgess hung and shook a little
in the dimness. “Thanks--old boy,” he said then. “Guess I wasn’t
holding on tight enough. Yet hanging on--hanging on’s--not much worth
while.”
“Hush, Dad. Don’t.” Ronny whispered. “They’ll hear you. Think how we’ll
talk about this when we get back. Just think of the experience of it.”
His father said nothing. Ronny hung and watched the stars and tried not
to think of those boiling black depths he had encountered, or of the
queer tone in his father’s voice, or of hot, yellow scrambled eggs. The
wind played three distinct wailing notes among the wires, high when the
plane was tossed higher on a crest, low and humming in the hollows. The
jerk and ache along his arms helped to keep him alert now. He hoped
that Bill would be all right. Then Mrs. Kinney cried out, either in a
doze or waking from it, and Ronny ached with pity for her, because she
sounded like a frightened child trying hard to be good. Ronny could
hear the patient fatherly drone of Colonel Kinney’s voice, trying to
console her. His own father changed his position restlessly, and then
Gloria, in one of those restless moments which passed among them all
like a long shudder. The night crawled on.
There was no way of knowing what time it was and yet it might not be
more than ten o’clock, Ronny thought. People ashore were just leaving
hotels to go out for the evening, or dressing gaily for a dance. How
strange it was--they here; those other people over there, hundreds
of them, thousands of them, laughing and well fed and happy, walking
around on pavements under bright lights. He could see them vividly,
hear the murmur of their voices, the scuffing of their feet on
sidewalks; and yet they could not think of the six here, even imagine
them, or their helpless plight in the black devouring ocean, unless
there were headlines in a morning paper. How queer things were.
And the stars far overhead moved slightly and slowly on their steady
courses, and the black water lifted and lashed and fell, lifted
and fell, lifted and fell, and the wind hummed its three notes
interminably. Ronny’s head swam a little with a creeping weariness. His
body was clammy inside and out, and it was extraordinary how his arms
could ache.
Then Gloria’s wire went loose and she slipped down with a choked
gasp and her head went under, and Ronny dived for her--dived with
desperation, so that he crashed full into her down there in the strong
surge, and came up with her weight caught in his arms. She coughed and
tried to swim a little and spluttered and tried to conceal from him
that she was crying in sheer wet misery. Then he could not find her
piece of wire. It must have gone down, too. He put one arm around her
and held her tightly while she recovered herself. Their wet bodies
close together warmed each other feebly, and he was grateful for it.
Her shivering stopped slowly and she put out a hand to a strut and held
on, so that he was relieved of her weight. He took off what was left of
his shirt and tied it around her and around the strut but warned her
hoarsely not to trust it too much, torn and sodden as it was.
Then he dozed a little, locking his grip and jerking it tight again
before it quite relaxed. It seemed to him that a second of real sleep,
half a second of sleep, would be an oblivion so delicious that it would
make up for everything. It was always just ahead--just ahead--and
then salt water smacked in his face and he was wide awake again and
his father’s head had disappeared, and he had to dive twice before he
brought him safely back again and held him while he recovered from the
longer immersion.
A fear that was not like any fear he had known yet clutched coldly at
his heart. Was it really a possibility--could it be possible!--that he
might lose someone down there? Was death really so near to any one of
them in this casual adventure?
The stars slid a little; the waters hissed; the wind screamed. Time was
an interminable agony, welding impossible moment to impossible moment
that crawled, crawled, crawled. Gloria slipped in again, and then his
father, and then Colonel Kinney, losing his wire, and Ronny dived again
and again. He had lost track of the number of times. He was not even
sure which one it was he hauled heavily to the surface, clinging to him
and coughing weakly. Now his right leg was getting cramped. The pain
shot up the stiffened muscle, needlelike and searing. Suppose it caught
him down there next, when he most needed all the strength he had? He
was ashamed to rouse Bill, but he had to, and he heard his own voice,
husky and humble, as Bill’s had been.
Bill roused instantly and took charge. Ronny hooked his arm over the
cockpit edge, and the doze that moved upon him was delightful. Yet it
seemed only a moment when Bill was calling him again, exhausted, and
the stars were altered and it was hours later.
As Ronny moved out to be among the others, and Bill hung gasping, he
counted them carefully, to make sure they were all there. His hands
lingered on a shoulder, and he saw that it was his father. After a
moment his father’s voice came to him wearily. “Still--hanging--on,”
he said. “Don’t go doing--too much now. We--depend on--you and Bill--a
lot.”
The night went like that, passing so slowly, with such a minute
succession of incidents, of wretchedness, that it seemed impossible
that it could ever end or change above a half-drowned world.
So that when Ronny, floundering on a wave top, with one arm holding up
Gloria, happened to see in the east a streak of pale colour, he stared
at it for a long time with puzzled, bloodshot eyes, wondering dully
what it could be. The glow widened, the sky and sea around it turned
pale gray. A streak of burning gold swelled into that. And Ronny cried
out suddenly, in his surprise, “Look; it’s morning!”
The tender light fell on faces sodden and strained almost beyond
recognition. But even as the light grew white and radiant over the
crested wave tops and the strange emerald of the waters, animation came
into the faces and they were once more his father and Gloria and Mrs.
Kinney and the colonel and Bill.
As if light were the supreme necessity, the supreme miracle, they
sought it. It was hope; it was food; it was safety; it was life. A
faint burst of animation, exclamation, broken words, feeble, husky
laughter passed among them like a renewed pledge. They were once more
capable of watching the sea to the west, where any moment now a boat
might come. Yet no boat came. The flash of spray was only the edge of
a higher wave. The drone was only the wind in the wires. Bill, lifting
himself up with greater difficulty now, peered out above them over an
empty sea.
Presently the reassuring warmth of the sun had changed to the agonizing
glare of yesterday. Their faces were a raw crimson against which the
wave edges were knife cuts. Their salt-crusted lips were swollen and
cracked. Their eyes were bloodshot and inflamed. Ronny and Bill managed
to find rags enough about them to make masks to tie over the faces of
the four. Ronny and Bill dared not mask themselves. They had to be on
the alert now, both of them. For now that the flash of hope was over
and the sun glared nearer and nearer to noon, the others slipped down
more easily into the blue depths. It was easier to find them there now,
that was all.
It must have been afternoon when Colonel Kinney, slipping down almost
without a splash, eluded Ronny’s grasp. Beneath the surface the big
body was only a whirling shadow which Ronny caught lightly once and
lost. When Ronny’s lungs seemed bursting he shot to the surface
empty-handed, with despairing eyes for Bill’s anxious look. One full
breath and he was down again, fighting down amidst the strong heave and
swirl of the waters, and Bill was with him. Twice they clutched each
other fiercely. There was no other shape.
Gasping dreadfully the two hung together on the fuselage, staring into
each other’s eyes. There was nothing to be said. Ronny was thankful for
the mask over Mrs. Kinney’s eyes. She need not know yet. She was like
a dead thing, hanging there, half held by the wire about her, with one
hand locked about a strut. She clung as if by no volition of her own,
but only the gripping tenacity of the life within her, straining to
go on. The sun beat down upon them. The wind screamed steadily in the
wires. The eternal water roared and hissed. No one had said anything
for hours and hours.
It was late afternoon. “Ron,” whispered his father feebly through his
mask, “where’s the colonel?”
“Gone,” said Ronny after a moment. “I--lost him.”
His father tore off his mask suddenly. Beneath it the contorted swollen
features were almost unrecognizable. “He’s lucky,” his father rasped.
“Why not? Why not?”
“Hush, Dad,” Ronny said patiently, “they’ll hear you. There’ll be a
boat before long. There must be.”
Andrew Burgess said nothing more. Ronny stared at the haggard, bitter
face where the stiff gray hairs bristled about the chin. It smote
through his numbed brain suddenly that his father--his splendid
father--was an old, old man.
The sunset flared hideously down upon them. Another night came slowly
from the west. And Gloria, tearing off her mask, leaned back abruptly
in the rag that held her, and tore free. Her lips strained back from
her gaunt face in a queer tense smile and she threw both hands over
her head and went down suddenly, before Ronny could guess what she had
intended. And below there was only the swirl and the silvery bubbles of
his own and Bill’s frantic search.
When they came back again it was almost night, and Ronny was shaken by
a paroxysm of grief which he had not even strength enough to express in
sobs. He remembered vaguely how beautiful she had been on that morning,
ages ago, when he was a boy, before the flight began.
In that night his father disappeared. It was a night such as Ronny had
never dreamed possible. He and Bill were left alone in all the lost
world, hanging mute and feeble on each side of the faintly warm figure
of Mrs. Kinney. Her wire still held. With the mask off, under the
stars, her face was not so ravaged as the others. From time to time she
moaned a little and they took turns in chafing gently her clammy hands
and feet. She was something infinitely precious that they had left to
care for, in the whirling chaos in their minds, in the roaring black
about them and the high black over them, punctuated with the glittering
smear of stars.
When the sun at last broke up the permanence of that night they blinked
their salt-incrusted eyes at each other unbelievably, to see the sun,
to see that they were still there--three nameless, shapeless beings,
under the incredible light.
Ronny turned his head presently to see a boat come surging toward them
with a great fan of spray at the bow--a boat with men in it, with
young, dry, smooth faces looking anxiously at them, and waving. Ronny
watched it come with no emotion whatsoever. He had always known that it
would come. But now that hardly mattered.
When hands clutched and hauled him up, he fought them until he saw they
had clutched also Bill and Mrs. Kinney. He felt himself in a dry boat,
with something to drink burning in his throat. But he felt nothing.
There was nothing to feel. Until they told him, gently, that Mrs.
Kinney had been dead for very many hours. Then he cried with terrible
retching sobs, vaguely ashamed that Bill should see him so.
“DONE GOT OVER”
BY ALMA AND PAUL ELLERBE
From _Collier’s_
Woodie Simmons walked past the house three times before he found
courage to open the gate. He was trying to decide what he was going
to say. His mind switched; no sooner had he chosen sentences than he
forgot them and thought of others. He went up the walk at last because
he was afraid that if he delayed longer he wouldn’t be able to think of
any at all.