THE FIFTH DAY.
In this way the boat drifted on until the dawn broke, when the wind
fell.
Johnson lifted his head and looked about him; and first for the ship
that had passed them in the night--but she was nowhere visible; then
at Holdsworth, whose delirium had yielded to sleep, and who slumbered
with his feet on the thwart, his back arched like a bow, and his head
between his knees; then at the widow, who drooped against the boat’s
side, her arm over the gunwale, and her hand in the water.
The boy was wide awake, reclining in the bottom of the boat, with his
head against his mother’s dress. His eyes looked large and glassy,
his lips white, and his skin dusky-hued. When he met Johnson’s gaze,
he smiled as though he would coax him to give him what he wanted, and
tried to speak, but his lips rather formed than delivered the word
“water.” The man stared at him with the insensibility of despair in
his eyes: and the boy, thinking that he had not heard him, and that he
would get what he desired, if he could but articulate his wish, tried
to stand up, meaning to draw close to the man’s ear; but his legs sank
under him, and so he remained at the bottom of the boat smiling wanly
and pointing to his throat, as though such dumb-show must needs soften
Johnson’s heart, and obtain some water for him.
Holdsworth awoke with a start and tried to speak; but the roof of his
mouth was dry, and his tongue felt rusty like a cat’s; moreover, his
throat burned, and the sounds he uttered scathed and lacerated him.
The boy, seeing him awake, turned to him as a friend who would
relieve him: and moaned his distress. The spectacle of his agony, and
his own sufferings, maddened Holdsworth. All along he had dreaded
the temptation of the rum, the fiery quality of which, whilst it
momentarily allayed, would, he was sure, aggravate tenfold the craving
for water. But suffering mastered him now. He seized the pannikin and
pouring out some of the liquor, put it to the boy’s dry lips. He drank
greedily, but the ardent spirit checked his breath, and he struggled
wildly, beating the air with his little hands.
But meanwhile Holdsworth had also drunk, and handed the remainder of
the draught to Johnson, his throat softened, and his tongue capable now
of articulation. Johnson drew a deep breath, and exclaimed:
“Thank God for that, master. I should have taken it before had I
thought it good for me.”
Holdsworth gave the boy a biscuit, which he grabbed at, and thrust
large pieces into his mouth, as though seeking to extinguish the fire
that the rum had kindled.
When the pain of the burning spirit had passed, he said, “Give mamma
some. When you were asleep, Mr. Holdsworth, I heard her calling for
water.”
Holdsworth, thinking that she slept, would not arouse her; but noticing
that her arm hung awkwardly over the boat’s side, and left the
half-closed fingers trailing in the water, he raised it gently to place
her hand on her lap. In doing this, he observed a lifelessness in her
arm such as sleep could not induce. He peered into her face, and cried
out quickly:
“O my God!”
Then bade Johnson move, that he might get beside her, and reverently
lifted her head.
There was no need to glance twice at her face to know what had
happened, although the heart-broken expression in it would almost
suggest that she slept, and was dreaming a painful dream. Her eyes were
half-closed, her under-jaw had dropped, yet she looked even in her
death a sweet, long-suffering woman.
“Give her something to drink,” pleaded the little boy, passionately,
imagining from her silence, and the expression on her face, that she
was suffering as he had and could not speak.
“She don’t want it--she’s dead!” answered Johnson.
Holdsworth half turned, but checked the exclamation that rose to his
lips, feeling that the bitter truth must be made known to the child
sooner or later.
The boy did not understand the answer; he crawled upon his mother’s
knee, with the pannikin in his hand, which he held out whilst he said:
“Wake up, mamma! Open your eyes! Mr. Holdsworth will give you something
to drink.”
Holdsworth removed the child, and seated him near the mast, and bade
him stop there. He then returned, and lifting the poor woman from her
seat, placed her gently in the bottom of the boat, throwing her dress
over her face to hide the anguish in it, and blot out the mockery of
the daylight.
The boy began to cry, and asked Mr. Holdsworth to wake his mamma up.
Neither of the men could answer him.
Shortly after this, the wind veered round to the north, and came on to
blow in quick, fretful puffs. The sky grew cloudy, and indications were
not wanting of the approach of a gale. Holdsworth took the helm, whilst
Johnson lowered the sail and close-reefed it, and the quick jump of the
sea, coupled with the small space of sail shown, making it impossible
for them to head for the east, without driving bodily to leeward, they
slackened out the sheet and let the boat run, keeping the wind about
two points on her port quarter.
A squall of rain came up and wetted them. They turned their mouths in
the direction whence it came, and gaped to receive the delicious drops;
but it blew against their faces and slantwise along the sea, and was
soon over. It left a little pool on one of the thwarts, and Holdsworth
told the boy to put his lips to it. He did so, and lapped the moisture
like a dog; whilst Holdsworth and Johnson removed the handkerchiefs
from their necks which the rain had damped, and sucked them.
The wind increased, the sea became heavy, and the heavens overcast
with a vast extent of lead-coloured cloud that stretched from horizon
to horizon. At noon, when the boat was on the summit of a wave,
Johnson caught sight of a vessel on their lee quarter. The boat
plunged downwards, and the vessel was lost to view; but, on mounting
again, they beheld the vessel, under double-reefed top-sails, standing
westwards right across their stern. She was not above a mile and a half
away, but she might as well have been a thousand, for the boat could no
more have made for her in that sea than she could have sailed in the
wind’s eye. There was a faint chance that the people on board of her
might catch sight of the shawl that streamed like a black flag from
the mast-head; and, each time the boat sank into a hollow, the poor
men waited with wild and dreadful eagerness for her to rise, that they
might observe whether the vessel had seen and was following them. But
she did not alter her course, and in ten minutes’ time vanished in the
haze.
Neither of the men spoke: Johnson, by the expression on his face,
appeared to have resigned himself to despair, and all Holdsworth’s
thoughts were concentrated in keeping the boat clear of the seas which
boiled around her. He was very weak; so much so that there were moments
when, a sea catching the boat under the stern, he had scarcely the
power to keep the yoke square and prevent the rudder from being jammed
athwart-ships upon its pintles by the pressure of the water; which, had
it happened, would have swept the boat broadside on and filled her.
Added to this, the torment of thirst was again upon him. He kept the
end of his handkerchief in his mouth, literally chewing it to pulp, and
constantly directing thirsty glances at the clouds, and praying for
another shower of rain.
His own suffering made him perceive that the rum would be a curse
to them whilst it lasted, inducing them to drink it, and presently
maddening them with fresh accesses of thirst. The boy was suffering
again, and was crawling upon his hands and knees over the thwarts in
search of some rain moisture; and presently Holdsworth saw him put
his tongue against the mast and lick it. Johnson hung, with an air of
despairful recklessness, over the boat’s side, dashing the water in
his face, and letting the foam fly up his arm and soak his breast.
The boat presently made a plunge downwards--a long, wild, sweeping
fall; the roaring of the waves sounded overhead; the sail flapped, and
there was a pause of breathless calm that lasted some moments.
Holdsworth looked behind him and shrieked out: “Seize the boy, and
throw yourself down!”
The man extended his hands, and, grappling the child, rolled backwards,
under a thwart.
It came--a huge, green, unbroken sea, arching its emerald top on a
level with the yard of the sail, and following the boat with a spring
like a tiger’s. Holdsworth stretched himself out, his feet hard against
the aftermost thwart, his back squared, his elbows out, his hands
grasping the yoke-lines with a death grip.
Up went the boat--stem up--yet up! as though she must be flung clean
over on end; then came the rush and roar of water--it fell with a
weight of lead on Holdsworth’s back, and beat, with a ponderous single
blow, the breath out of him, but could not root him from his seat; it
broke into a vast surface of foam, divided, and swept forward, hissing,
spluttering, bubbling, raging; met at an angle at the boat’s bows and
half filled her! Down she swooped into another hollow, and half the
water ran out over her bows, the remainder, as she rose, came rushing
aft and filled the stern-sheets; and up and down, up and down, it
washed.
But the boat still lived, and Holdsworth was her master.
“Bear a hand aft here and bale her out!” he shouted.
Johnson let go the half-drowned child, and struggled over the thwarts,
blowing and shaking his soaked hair like rope-yarns off his face, his
clothes streaming with water; flopped down, found the cocoa-nut shell,
and baled with fury.
The child crouched in the bows, too terrified to cry.
The boat flashed along, skimming the frothing heads of the waves; she
had outlived an exceptionally heavy sea, and seemed to feel her triumph
as she flew.
But, oh! the ghastly burden that she bore! the dead and dripping woman,
off whose face the water had washed the covering, and left it naked
to the daylight; the gaunt bearded spectre baling out the boat on his
knees, his wet clothes clinging to his frame like a skin of silk, and
disclosing the piteous attenuation of the body; the steersman with wild
and lustrous eyes sunk deep in livid sockets, the yoke-lines writhed
around his lean brown hands, his lips pale and cracked, and his long
neglected hair hanging like a wet mat over his forehead and down his
back; and the shivering little figure in the bows, his hands squeezed
together in an attitude of prayer, and his small face glimmering with
unearthly ghastliness upon the gray background of the boat’s interior.
Some flying-fish leaped out of the sea close to the boat, and buried
their silver arrow-like shapes in a wave some distance ahead. Then
the sun broke through a rent in the broad sombre cloud, and made the
pelting ocean joyous with a snatch of cheerful light. But the strong
wind lasted all the afternoon, and when it lulled just before sunset,
Holdsworth was so exhausted, that in rising to give his seat to
Johnson, he reeled and sank in a heap close beside the corpse at the
bottom of the boat, and lay motionless and insensible. Johnson made
no effort to restore him. Indeed, he thought he was dead. His own
brain whirled; his tongue seemed to fill his mouth; there crept over
him such a stupor as had visited Holdsworth; he let the yoke-lines go,
and fixing his eyes on the sea, prepared to meet the death which his
sensations led him to believe was at hand.
The boat, tossed like a cork on the troubled water, broached to; but
happily the wind was momentarily dying away; her head came round to the
seas and she rode with as much safety as if Holdsworth were at the helm.
For a whole hour the interior of the boat presented the same scene;
the men motionless as the dead body, the boy squatting in the bows
with nothing seemingly alive about him but his eyes, which winked
as he rolled them seawards, where the sun shone on the water. Then
Holdsworth began to groan and stir; whereupon Johnson fixed his dull
eyes upon him, and watched him without any curiosity, without any
sympathy, without any interest--indeed, scarcely, I might say, with
human intelligence.
The boy, seeing Holdsworth move, came creeping aft and remained on his
knees, first looking at the man awaking to consciousness, and then at
his mother, whose motionlessness and drowned aspect, and face made
unfamiliar to him by its total want of expression, terrified him.
Holdsworth raised his head and looked about him in bewilderment.
“Where have I been? What has happened?” he cried.
He fixed his eyes on the dead woman, his glance reverted to the boy,
and then consciousness fully awoke. He rose wearily to his feet,
and sank with a heavy sigh near Johnson, at whom he looked, scarcely
knowing whether the man slept or was dead.
The boy begged for water.
“Water!” exclaimed Holdsworth in a choking voice; “there is none.”
But there was biscuit, and he turned to the locker to give him one,
thinking that the food might relieve the child’s thirst. He stretched
out his arm to lift the seat of the locker and found the locker filled
with salt water. With a cry of despair he dragged out a bag streaming
with wet, and thrusting his hand into it found its contents soaked into
pulp. The other bag was in the same condition; and to make matters
worse, of the three bottles of rum that had been in the locker, one
only was left; the other two were cracked and empty.
It was easy to understand how this had happened. A sea breaking over
the boat’s stern could not have filled the locker; the water which
the boat had shipped over her bows had come rushing aft when the boat
mounted the next wave, and filling the stern-sheets, raised the seat
that formed the lid of the locker, and poured over the biscuit, at the
same time forcing the bottles against each other and breaking them.
“Do you see what has happened?” exclaimed Holdsworth, grasping
Johnson’s arm. The man looked over his shoulder, shook his head, and
muttered, “We’re doomed to die. There’s no hope, master.”
What was to be done? Holdsworth thought that if the biscuits could be
dried in the sun they might be fit to eat, and endeavoured to spread
some of them along the thwart; but the stuff squeezed up in his hand
like thick paste. He tasted a little and found it no better than salt,
and he flung the bag down with a groan that seemed to express the
extinction of his last faint hope.
But there was a bottle of rum left. He prised out the cork with the
blade of his knife, and gave a spoonful to the boy diluted with two or
three drops of sea water. He then set the pannikin to Johnson’s lips,
who sucked the hard metal rim as a baby might. Finally moistening his
own throat with a small quantity of the liquor, he carefully corked the
bottle and stowed it away.
No! To say that hope had entirely abandoned him would not be true.
Whilst the heart continues to pulsate hope will still be found to live,
however faintly, in its throbs, though each moment be heavy with pain,
and nothing seem sure but anguish and death.
The wind had died away, but the boat rose and sank to the long and
heavy swell that billowed the gleaming surface of the sea to the
horizon. Far away in the south was an expanse of gray cloud with
slanting lines radiating to the sea from it, and a bright square of
rainbow embedded in its shadow. It was travelling eastwards, and
the rain would not touch the boat. Elsewhere the sky was a bright
blue, with here and there clouds of glorious whiteness and majestic
bulk--mountains with shining defiles and a splendour of sunshine in
their skirts--hanging their swelling forms over the sea. The sun was
hot, but then, ever since they had been in the boat, they had been
steering more or less south, and, taking the parallels in which the
ship had foundered as a starting-point, every degree the boat made
southwards would furnish an appreciable change of temperature.
The rum had worked beneficially in Johnson, who now began to stretch
his body and look about him.
“Another calm, master,” he said, in a voice to which the dryness of his
throat imparted a harsh unnatural tone. “I thought I was dead and gone
just now. God help us! I don’t think none of us three’ll live to talk
of this here time!”
“We must put that poor body overboard,” said Holdsworth. “It isn’t fit
that her child should see her like that. Will you take him for’ard and
stand between him and me, so that he can’t see what I’m doing, and talk
to him a bit? I almost wish they had both died together. The sight of
his sufferings makes mine more than I can bear.”
He stifled a sob, and Johnson getting up languidly and holding on to
the gunwale of the boat with one hand, took the boy by the arm and led
him into the bows.
Holdsworth slackened off the halliards to lower the sail and screen
the after part of the boat from the boy’s sight. He then, with what
strength he had, and as quickly as he could, raised the dead body and
let it slip over the stern, muttering a simple prayer as he did so, that
God would let her meet her child in heaven, where they would never more
be parted; and then turned his back upon the water and hid his face in
his hands.
At the end of five minutes he stole a glance astern--the body had
disappeared.
“Four,” he muttered, “and three more to go! O God, what work--what work
this has been!”
His thoughts went to Dolly. If he died, what would become of her? Not
for many days yet, even supposing the other boats should make their
way to land or be rescued by a passing ship, would the news of the
“Meteor’s” loss reach her; and he thought of her praying night and
morning for him, straining her fond eyes into the dim future, where
the coming summer was, with all its flowers and its sunshine; where
the happy day was that should bring him to her. If the news of the
shipwreck ever reached her, how would her gentle spirit support the
blow! But worse would it be if she remained ignorant of her loss;
because in that case she would live on in hope for months and months,
wakening every morning with the idea that--To-day he may come! to-day
he may come! until hope sickened and despair should bring cruel
assurance of eternal separation--the more unendurable because she
should not know _why_ he did not come--whether he were living or
dead--whether he were true or false to her!
Oh for the power of giving peace to that manly unoffending heart!
We shed tears, and well we may, God knows, over the privations of
shipwrecked men, over the hunger and thirst and the mortal bodily
agonies of poor souls doomed to die a lingering and shocking death
in open boats, storm-tossed, or baking in breathless calms under the
burning eye of the sun; but do we think of that deeper misery of
theirs--that poignant mental torture compared to which the sufferings
of the flesh are as naught--the thoughts of those they shall see no
more--of wives, and sisters, and mothers, and little children, many of
whom may perchance never hear the story of their fate, and can have
no tear for the famine and the thirst that wasted the flesh off their
skins and submitted them to greater torture than the heart can bear to
think of?
Holdsworth had believed that the sufferings of the boy would engross
all his thoughts in himself, and that though he might miss he would not
cry for his mother. But he was deceived; for, no sooner had the little
fellow discovered that she was gone from her place in the bottom of the
boat, than he uttered a sharp cry, and asked Holdsworth where his mamma
was.
Holdsworth took him upon his knee, but could not answer. The child
persisted in his inquiries, looking the while suspiciously and eagerly
about him, particularly over the stern, where he had remembered seeing
the actor disappear.
“She is gone to God,” Holdsworth said at last. “My little man, you will
meet her again.”
“To God!” cried the child. “That’s where papa is!”
He looked up with startled eyes at the sky, and then sobbed
passionately, “Has she left me alone? has she left me alone?”
“No, she has left you to me. Be a good boy now, and don’t cry, and I
will take care of you, and love you dearly.”
His words smote him as the idlest mockery; but apart from his mental
sufferings, the mere effort of raising his voice pained him intensely.
He put the child down, forcing a smile which seemed no better than a
grin of pain upon his emaciated face, and then stood up to sweep the
horizon, but soon sank down again with a sound as of a clanging of
bells in his ears, and his throat constricted and burning with a dry,
feverish heat, the pain of which was exquisite.
He was now sensible that his memory was going, for in trying to think
of the child’s name he found that he could not recall it. But this,
somehow, gave him no concern, for his whole physical being was in
perfect accord with such lapses of the intellectual faculties, and the
discovery bred not the lightest movement of surprise or apprehension in
his mind.
At noon, Johnson asked for more rum, and Holdsworth measured out a
small quantity for the three of them, diluting the draught, as he had
before done, with a few drops of salt water.
The boy never moved from the seat where he had been placed by
Holdsworth; he knew not, in reality, where his mother had gone, but
there was plainly a suspicion in him that she was in the sea, and he
kept his eyes fixed on the water, as though in expectation of her
rising at the side of the boat. He shed no more tears; indeed, physical
weakness had so far conquered him, that it had rendered him incapable
of tears. The sight of his white, young, piteous face, his head moving
on his shoulders in convulsive jerks, and his helpless down-hanging
arms, was enough to make one pray to God that death might remove him
speedily, if the term of horrible misery were not to be ended at once.
The afternoon passed, and the sun went down behind a calm sea. While
the crimson flush still lived in the sky, a flock of sea birds came
from the south, and hovered awhile over the boat, as though irresolute
to quit it for their further destination. They were at too great an
elevation to enable the men to judge what birds they were; but they
emitted harsh sounds, resembling in some measure the cry of gulls,
mixed with the rough intonation of rooks. After this pause, they
pursued their flight, and soon winged themselves out of view, but not
without leaving behind them a species of desolate hope, such as would
be excited in the minds of men who had been long banished from the
sight of living things, and by whom the most trivial incident would be
interpreted as an auspicious omen.
Holdsworth and Johnson drew together and spoke of what these birds
portended. The wildest phantasies were begotten, and they sought to
encourage themselves with dreams which a listener would have shuddered
over as the babbling of delirium. Their thoughts being loosened, they
presently began to complain of hunger; and Johnson took up a piece of
the pulpy biscuit which lay on a thwart and which the sun had hardened,
and bit it, but instantly ejected it, saying that it was bitterer
than gall. Indeed, had there been more light they would have seen the
frost-like crystals of salt which had been dried into the biscuit by
the sun’s action. However, their hunger was not so fierce but that they
could endure it yet awhile.
The night came down, quite radiant with stars, with not a cloud in all
the great dome of glittering sky. The two men were now so regardless
of their fate that they entered into no arrangement as to keeping
watch, but folded their arms upon their breasts and slept or fell into
a semi-unconscious state--lethargies so sinister that it was hard to
tell whether they were not the sloping ways to death. Fitful cries
sometimes broke from them, resembling the echoes which are awakened in
the caverns of a bird-frequented cliff; but with notes of human anguish
in them that made the glory of the stars a hellish mockery.
The boy slipped from his seat and lay prone at the bottom of the boat,
unheeded by either Holdsworth or Johnson.
So passed the night.