We awoke to find ourselves still a mere speck upon the ocean. We felt
even smaller than before.
Over us was the burnished copper sky of the tropics. The heavy, leaden
sea lapped the sides of the raft. All about us was a litter of corn
beef cans and lager beer bottles. Our sufferings in the ensuing days
were indescribable. We beat and thumped at the cans with our fists.
Even at the risk of spoiling the tins for ever we hammered them
fiercely against the raft. We stamped on them, bit at them and swore at
them. We pulled and clawed at the bottles with our hands, and chipped
and knocked them against the cans, regardless even of breaking the
glass and ruining the bottles.
It was futile.
Then day after day we sat in moody silence, gnawed with hunger, with
nothing to read, nothing to smoke, and practically nothing to talk
about.
On the tenth day the Captain broke silence.
“Get ready the lots, Blowhard,” he said. “It’s got to come to that.”
“Yes,” I answered drearily, “we’re getting thinner every day.”
Then, with the awful prospect of cannibalism before us, we drew lots.
I prepared the lots and held them to the Captain. He drew the longer
one.
“Which does that mean,” he asked, trembling between hope and despair.
“Do I win?”
“No, Bilge,” I said sadly, “you lose.”
But I mustn’t dwell on the days that followed—the long quiet days of
lazy dreaming on the raft, during which I slowly built up my strength,
which had been shattered by privation. They were days, dear reader, of
deep and quiet peace, and yet I cannot recall them without shedding a
tear for the brave man who made them what they were.
It was on the fifth day after that I was awakened from a sound sleep by
the bumping of the raft against the shore. I had eaten perhaps
overheartily, and had not observed the vicinity of land.
Before me was an island, the circular shape of which, with its low,
sandy shore, recalled at once its identity.
“The treasure island,” I cried, “at last I am rewarded for all my
heroism.”
In a fever of haste I rushed to the centre of the island. What was the
sight that confronted me? A great hollow scooped in the sand, an empty
dress-suit case lying beside it, and on a ship’s plank driven deep into
the sand, the legend, “_Saucy Sally_, October, 1867.” So! the
miscreants had made good the vessel, headed it for the island of whose
existence they must have learned from the chart we so carelessly left
upon the cabin table, and had plundered poor Bilge and me of our
well-earned treasure!
Sick with the sense of human ingratitude I sank upon the sand.
The island became my home.
There I eked out a miserable existence, feeding on sand and gravel and
dressing myself in cactus plants. Years passed. Eating sand and mud
slowly undermined my robust constitution. I fell ill. I died. I buried
myself.
Would that others who write sea stories would do as much.
IX.
Caroline’s Christmas:
or, The Inexplicable Infant
It was Xmas—Xmas with its mantle of white snow, scintillating from a
thousand diamond points, Xmas with its good cheer, its peace on
earth—Xmas with its feasting and merriment, Xmas with its—well, anyway,
it was Xmas.
Or no, that’s a slight slip; it wasn’t exactly Xmas, it was Xmas Eve,
Xmas Eve with its mantle of white snow lying beneath the calm
moonlight—and, in fact, with practically the above list of accompanying
circumstances with a few obvious emendations.
Yes, it was Xmas Eve.
And more than that!
Listen to _where_ it was Xmas.
It was Xmas Eve on the Old Homestead. Reader, do you know, by sight,
the Old Homestead? In the pauses of your work at your city desk, where
you have grown rich and avaricious, does it never rise before your
mind’s eye, the quiet old homestead that knew you as a boy before your
greed of gold tore you away from it? The Old Homestead that stands
beside the road just on the rise of the hill, with its dark spruce
trees wrapped in snow, the snug barns and the straw stacks behind it;
while from its windows there streams a shaft of light from a coal-oil
lamp, about as thick as a slate pencil that you can see four miles
away, from the other side of the cedar swamp in the hollow. Don’t talk
to me of your modern searchlights and your incandescent arcs, beside
that gleam of light from the coal-oil lamp in the farmhouse window. It
will shine clear to the heart across thirty years of distance. Do you
not turn, I say, sometimes, reader, from the roar and hustle of the
city with its ill-gotten wealth and its godless creed of mammon, to
think of the quiet homestead under the brow of the hill? You don’t!
Well, you skunk!
It was Xmas Eve.
The light shone from the windows of the homestead farm. The light of
the log fire rose and flickered and mingled its red glare on the
windows with the calm yellow of the lamplight.
John Enderby and his wife sat in the kitchen room of the farmstead. Do
you know it, reader, the room called the kitchen?—with the open fire on
its old brick hearth, and the cook stove in the corner. It is the room
of the farm where people cook and eat and live. It is the living-room.
The only other room beside the bedroom is the small room in front,
chill-cold in winter, with an organ in it for playing “Rock of Ages”
on, when company came. But this room is only used for music and
funerals. The real room of the old farm is the kitchen. Does it not
rise up before you, reader? It doesn’t? Well, you darn fool!
At any rate there sat old John Enderby beside the plain deal table, his
head bowed upon his hands, his grizzled face with its unshorn stubble
stricken down with the lines of devastating trouble. From time to time
he rose and cast a fresh stick of tamarack into the fire with a savage
thud that sent a shower of sparks up the chimney. Across the fireplace
sat his wife Anna on a straight-backed chair, looking into the fire
with the mute resignation of her sex.
What was wrong with them anyway? Ah, reader, can you ask? Do you know
or remember so little of the life of the old homestead? When I have
said that it is the Old Homestead and Xmas Eve, and that the farmer is
in great trouble and throwing tamarack at the fire, surely you ought to
guess!
The Old Homestead was mortgaged! Ten years ago, reckless with debt,
crazed with remorse, mad with despair and persecuted with rheumatism,
John Enderby had mortgaged his farmstead for twenty-four dollars and
thirty cents.
To-night the mortgage fell due, to-night at midnight, Xmas night. Such
is the way in which mortgages of this kind are always drawn. Yes, sir,
it was drawn with such diabolical skill that on this night of all
nights the mortgage would be foreclosed. At midnight the men would come
with hammer and nails and foreclose it, nail it up tight.
So the afflicted couple sat.
Anna, with the patient resignation of her sex, sat silent or at times
endeavoured to read. She had taken down from the little wall-shelf
Bunyan’s _Holy Living and Holy Dying_. She tried to read it. She could
not. Then she had taken Dante’s _Inferno_. She could not read it. Then
she had selected Kant’s _Critique of Pure Reason_. But she could not
read it either. Lastly, she had taken the Farmer’s Almanac for 1911.
The books lay littered about her as she sat in patient despair.
John Enderby showed all the passion of an uncontrolled nature. At times
he would reach out for the crock of buttermilk that stood beside him
and drained a draught of the maddening liquid, till his brain glowed
like the coals of the tamarack fire before him.
“John,” pleaded Anna, “leave alone the buttermilk. It only maddens you.
No good ever came of that.”
“Aye, lass,” said the farmer, with a bitter laugh, as he buried his
head again in the crock, “what care I if it maddens me.”
“Ah, John, you’d better be employed in reading the Good Book than in
your wild courses. Here take it, father, and read it”—and she handed to
him the well-worn black volume from the shelf. Enderby paused a moment
and held the volume in his hand. He and his wife had known nothing of
religious teaching in the public schools of their day, but the
first-class non-sectarian education that the farmer had received had
stood him in good stead.
“Take the book,” she said. “Read, John, in this hour of affliction; it
brings comfort.”
The farmer took from her hand the well-worn copy of Euclid’s
_Elements_, and laying aside his hat with reverence, he read aloud:
“The angles at the base of an isoceles triangle are equal, and
whosoever shall produce the sides, lo, the same also shall be equal
each unto each.”
The farmer put the book aside.
“It’s no use, Anna. I can’t read the good words to-night.”
He rose, staggered to the crock of buttermilk, and before his wife
could stay his hand, drained it to the last drop.
Then he sank heavily to his chair.
“Let them foreclose it, if they will,” he said; “I am past caring.”
The woman looked sadly into the fire.
Ah, if only her son Henry had been here. Henry, who had left them three
years agone, and whose bright letters still brought from time to time
the gleam of hope to the stricken farmhouse.
Henry was in Sing Sing. His letters brought news to his mother of his
steady success; first in the baseball nine of the prison, a favourite
with his wardens and the chaplain, the best bridge player of the
corridor. Henry was pushing his way to the front with the old-time
spirit of the Enderbys.
His mother had hoped that he might have been with her at Xmas, but
Henry had written that it was practically impossible for him to leave
Sing Sing. He could not see his way out. The authorities were arranging
a dance and sleighing party for the Xmas celebration. He had some hope,
he said, of slipping away unnoticed, but his doing so might excite
attention.
Of the trouble at home Anna had told her son nothing.
No, Henry could not come. There was no help there. And William, the
other son, ten years older than Henry. Alas, William had gone forth
from the homestead to fight his way in the great city! “Mother,” he had
said, “when I make a million dollars I’ll come home. Till then
good-bye,” and he had gone.
How Anna’s heart had beat for him. Would he make that million dollars?
Would she ever live to see it? And as the years passed she and John had
often sat in the evenings picturing William at home again, bringing
with him a million dollars, or picturing the million dollars sent by
express with love. But the years had passed. William came not. He did
not come. The great city had swallowed him up as it has many another
lad from the old homestead.