The dorsal fin of a shark rippled momentarily on the surface and dipped
beneath it. A third man appeared. He accepted the proffered water and
washed himself. His roving eye saw the shark as it rose for the second
time. He dried on a towel. The off-shore breeze stirred his dark hair.
There was a growth of equally dark beard on his tanned jaw and cheek.
Steely muscles bulged under his shirt. His forearm, when he picked up
the pail, was corded like cable. A smell of coffee issued from the
galley, and the smoke of the cook's fire was wafted on deck for a
pungent moment. Two bells sounded. The music went out over the water in
clear, humming waves.
The man who had come first from the forecastle leaned his buttocks
against the rail. One end of it had been unhooked to permit the
discharge of mail. The rail ran, the man fell back, clawing, and then,
thinking suddenly of the sharks, he screamed. The third man looked. He
saw his fellow-seaman go overboard. He jumped from where he stood,
clearing the scuppers and falling through the air before the victim of
the slack rail had landed in the water. The two splashes were almost
simultaneous. A boatswain, hearing the cry, hastened to the scene. He
saw one man lifted clear of the water by the other, who was treading
water furiously. He shouted for a rope. He saw the curve and dip of a
fin. The first man seized the rope and climbed and was pulled up. The
second, his rescuer, dived under water as if aware of something there
that required his attention. The men above him could not know that he
had felt the rake of teeth across his leg--powerful teeth, which
nevertheless did not penetrate his skin. As he dived into the green
depths, he saw a body lunge toward him, turn, yawn a white-fringed
mouth. He snatched the lower jaw in one hand, and the upper in the
other. He exerted his strength. The mouth gaped wider, a tail twelve
feet behind it lashed, the thing died with fingers like steel claws
tearing at its brain. It floated belly up. The man rose, took the rope,
climbed aboard. Other sharks assaulted the dead one.
The dripping sailor clasped his saviour's hand. "God Almighty, man, you
saved my life. Jesus!"
"That's four," Hugo Danner said abstractedly, and then he smiled. "It's
all right. Forget it. I've had a lot of experience with sharks." He had
never seen one before in his life. He walked aft, where the men grouped
around him.
"How'd you do it?"
"It's a trick I can't explain very well," Hugo said. "You use their rush
to break their jaws. It takes a good deal of muscle."
"Anyway--guy--thanks."
"Sure."
A whistle blew. The ships were lining up in the order of their arrival
for admission to the Panama Canal. Gatun loomed in the feeble sun of
dawn. The anchor chain rumbled. The _Katrina_ edged forward at half
speed.
The sea. Blue, green, restless, ghost-ridden, driven in empty quarters
by devils riding the wind, secretive, mysterious, making a last
gigantic, primeval stand against the conquest of man, hemming and
isolating the world, beautiful, horrible, dead god of ten thousand
voices, universal incubator, universal grave.
The _Katrina_ came to the islands in the South Pacific. Islands that
issued from the water like green wreaths and seemed to float on it. The
small boats were put out and sections of the cargo were sent to rickety
wharves where white men and brown islanders took charge of it and
carried it away into the fringe of the lush vegetation. Hugo, looking at
those islands, was moved to smile. The place where broken men hid from
civilization, where the derelicts of the world gathered to drown their
shame in a verdant paradise that had no particular position in the white
man's scheme of the earth.
At one of the smaller islands an accident to the engine forced the
_Katrina_ to linger for two weeks. It was during those two weeks, in a
rather extraordinary manner, that Hugo Danner laid the first foundation
of the fortune that he accumulated in his later life. One day, idling
away a leave on shore in the shade of a mighty tree, he saw the
outriggers of the natives file away for the oyster beds, and, out of
pure curiosity, he followed them. For a whole day he watched the men
plunge under the surface in search of pearls. The next day he came back
and dove with one of them.
On the bizarre floor of the ocean, among the colossal fronds of its
flora, the two men swam. They were invaders from the brilliance above
the surface, shooting like fish, horizontally, through the murk and
shadow, and the denizens of that world resented their coming. Great fish
shot past them with malevolent eyes, and the vises of giant clams shut
swiftly in attempts to trap their moving limbs. Hugo was entranced. He
watched the other man as he found the oyster bed and commenced to fill
his basket with frantic haste. When his lungs stung and he could bear
the agony no longer, he turned and forged toward the upper air. Then
they went down again.
Hugo's blood, designed to take more oxygen from the air, and his greater
density fitted him naturally for the work. The pressure did not make him
suffer and the few moments granted to the divers beneath the forbidding
element stretched to a longer time for him.
On the second day of diving he went alone. His amateur attempt had been
surprisingly fruitful. Standing erect in the immense solitude, he
searched the hills and valleys. At length, finding a promising cluster
of shellfish, he began to examine them one by one, pulling them loose,
feeling in their pulpy interior for the precious jewels. He occupied
himself determinedly while the _Katrina_ was waiting in Apia, and at the
end of the stay he had collected more than sixty pearls of great value
and two hundred of moderate worth.
It was, he thought, typical of himself. He had decided to make a fortune
of some sort after the first bitter rage over his debacle at Webster had
abated in his heart. He realized that without wealth his position in
the world would be more difficult and more futile than his fates had
decreed. Poverty, at least, he was not forced to bear. He could wrest
fortune from nature by his might. That he had begun that task by diving
for pearls fitted into his scheme. It was such a method as no other man
would have considered and its achievement robbed no one while it
enriched him.
When the _Katrina_ turned her prow westward again, Hugo worked with his
shipmates in a mood that had undergone considerable change. There was no
more despair in him, little of the taciturnity that had marked his
earliest days at sea, none of the hatred of mankind. He had buried that
slowly and carefully in a dull year of work ashore and a month of toil
on the heaving deck of the ship. For six months he had kept himself
alive in a manner that he could scarcely remember. Driving a truck.
Working on a farm. Digging in a road. His mind a bitter blank, his
valiant dreams all dead.
One day he had saved a man's life. The reaction to that was small, but
it was definite. The strength that could slay was also a strength that
could succour. He had repeated the act some time later. He felt it was a
kind of atonement. After that, he sought deliberately to go where he
might be of assistance. In the city, again, in September, when a fire
engine clanged and whooped through the streets, he followed and carried
a woman from a blazing roof as if by a miracle. Then the seaman. He had
counted four rescues by that time. Perhaps his self-condemnation for the
boy who had fallen on the field at Webster could be stifled eventually.
Human life seemed very precious to Hugo then.
He sold his pearls when the ship touched at large cities--a handful here
and a dozen there, bargaining carefully and forwarding the profit to a
bank in New York. He might have continued that voyage, which was a
voyage commenced half in new recognition of his old wish to see and know
the world and half in the quest of forgetfulness; but a slip and shifts
in the history of the world put an abrupt end to it. When the _Katrina_
rounded the Bec d'Aiglon and steamed into the blue and cocoa harbour of
Marseilles, Hugo heard that war had been declared by Germany, Austria,
France, Russia, England....