XI

Knutsen’s brain was entirely clear and sure as he gave his orders on the

deck. His hand was steady as iron. His failure to master himself had

brought disaster, but he knew how to master a ship at a time like this.

From the instant the _Charon_ had struck the reef, he was the power upon

that storm-swept deck, and whatever hope McNab had lay in him.

In the lantern light, blasted by the wind and in the midst of the

surging waves, the scene had little semblance to reality. It was a mad

dream from first to last, never to be clearly remembered by the

survivors: a queer, confused jumble of vivid images that could never be

straightened out. The head-light still threw its glare into the

sleet-filled night. The biting, chill wind swept over the deck and into

the darkness. The ship settled down like a leaden weight.

Almost at once the four passengers were on deck, waiting to take their

meager chance in the lifeboats. The stress, the raging elements, those

angry seas that ever leaped higher and nearer, as if coveting their

mortal lives, most of all the terror such as had never previously

touched them, affected no two of them alike. Of the three women, Bess

alone moved forward, out of the shelter of the cabin, to be of what aid

she could. Her drawn, white face was oddly childlike in the lantern

light. Mrs. Hardenworth had been stricken and silenced by the nearing

visage of death; Lenore, almost unconscious with terror, made

strangling, sobbing sounds that the wind carried away. And in this

moment of infinite travail Ned Cornet felt his manhood stirring within

him.

Perhaps it was merely instinct. It is true that men of the most

abandoned kind often show startling courage and nobility in a crisis.

The reason is simply that the innate virtue of the race, a light and a

glory that were implanted in the soul when the body was made in the

image of its Maker, comes to the surface and supersedes the base

impulses of degeneracy. There is no uneven distribution of that virtue:

it is as much a part of man as his hands or his skull; and the

difference between one man and another lies only in the degree in which

it is developed and made manifest and put in control over the daily

life. Perhaps the strength that rose in Ned was merely the assertion of

an inner manhood, wholly stripped of the traits that made him the

individual he was,—nothing that would endure, nothing that portended a

change and growth of character. But at least the best and strongest side

of him was in the ascendency to-night. The danger left him cool rather

than cost him his self-control. The seeming imminence of death steadied

him and nerved him.

Bess saw him under the lantern light, and he was not the man who had

cursed her at the door of her room. For the moment all things were

forgotten except this. Likely the thing he had spoken would come true,

now. Perhaps he would get his wish. For one interminable instant in

which her heart halted in her breast—as in death—sea and wind and

storm ceased to matter.

Ned came up, and Knutsen’s cold gaze leaped over his face. “Help me

here,” he commanded. “McNab, you help Forest and Julius launch the

larger boat.”

There was not much launching to do. Waves were already bursting over the

deck. Knutsen turned once more.

“We want four people in each boat,” he directed sharply. “Cornet, you

and I and Miss Hardenworth in this one. The other girl will have to get

in here too. The other boat’s slightly larger—Mrs. Hardenworth, get in

with McNab, Forest, and Julius.”

Bess shook herself with difficulty from her revery. This was no time for

personal issues, to hearken to the voices of her inmost heart when the

captain was shouting through the storm. The only issues remaining now

were those of deliverance or disaster, life or death. Even now the white

hands of the waves were stretching toward her. Yet this terrible reality

did not hold her as it should. Instead, her thoughts still centered upon

Ned: the danger was always Ned’s instead of her own; it was Ned’s life

that was suspended by a thread above the abyss. It was hard to remember

herself: the instinct of self-preservation was not even now in the

ascendency.

There is a blasting and primitive terror in any great convulsion of the

elements. These are man’s one reality, the eternal constant in which he

plights his faith in a world of bewildering change: the air of heaven,

the sky of stars, the unutterable expanse of sea. His spirit can not

endure to see them in tumult, broken forth from the restraint of law.

Such sights recall from the germ-plasm those first almighty terrors that

were the title page of conscious life; and they disrupt quickly the

mastery that mind, in a thousand-thousand years, has gained over

instinct. Yet for herself Bess was carried out from and beyond the

terror of the storm. She had almost forgotten it: it seemed already part

of the natural system in which she moved. She was scarcely aware that

the captain had shouted to make himself heard; that she must needs shout

to answer him: it was as if this were her natural tone of voice, and she

was no more conscious of raising it above the bellow of the storm than

are certain fisherfolk, habitants of wave-swept coasts, when they call

one to another while working about their nets.

The reason was simply that she was thinking too hard about Ned to

remember her own danger, and thus terror could not reach her. It can

never curse and blast those who have renounced self for others; and

thus, perhaps, she had blundered into that great secret of happiness

that wise men have tried to teach since the world was new. Perhaps, in

the midst of stress and travail, she had glimpsed for an instant the

very soul of life, the star that is the hope and dream of mankind.

But while she had forgotten her own danger, she was all too aware of the

promptings of her own heart. The issue went farther than Ned’s life. It

penetrated, in secret ways, the most intimate depths of her relations

with him. It was natural at such a time that she should remember Ned’s

danger to the exclusion of her own. The strangeness of that moment lay

in the fact that she also remembered his wishes and his words. She could

not forget their last scene together.

“Put Mrs. Hardenworth in your boat, so she and Lenore can be together,”

she told Captain Knutsen. “I’ll get in the other.”

The captain did not seem to hear. He continued to shout his orders. In

the work of lowering the lifeboat he had cause to lift his lantern high,

and for a moment its yellow gleam was bright upon Bess’s drawn, haggard

face. Farther off it revealed Ned, white-faced but erect in the beat of

the storm.

In one instant’s insight, a single glimpse between the storm and the

sea, he understood that she was taking him at his word. For some reason

beyond his ken—likely beyond hers, too—she had asked to be put in

McNab’s boat so that his wish he had spoken in anger at the door of her

stateroom might come true. How silly, how trivial he had been! Those

angry words had not come from his heart: only from some false,

superficial side of him that was dying in the storm. He had never

dreamed that she would take them seriously. They were the mere spume of

a child that had not yet learned to be a man.

“Get in with us,” he said shortly. “Don’t be silly—as I was.” Then,

lest she should mistake his sentiment: “Mrs. Hardenworth is twice your

weight, and this boat will be overloaded as it is.”

The girl looked at him quietly, nodding her head. If he had expected

gratitude he was disappointed, for she received the invitation as merely

an actuality of her own, immutable destiny. Indeed the wings of destiny

were sweeping her forward, her life still intertwined with his, both

pawns in the vast, inscrutable movement of events.

He helped her into the dory. Julius, who at the captain’s orders had

been rifling the cabins, threw blankets to her. Then tenderly, lending

her his strength, Ned helped Lenore over the wind-swept deck into the

bow seat of the lifeboat, nearest to the seat he would take himself.

“Buck up, my girl,” he told her, a deep, throbbing note in his voice.

“I’ll look after you.”

Already the deck was deserted. The dim light showed that the larger

dory, containing McNab, Forest, Julius, and Mrs. Hardenworth, had

already been launched. There was no sign of them now. The darkness and

the storm had already dropped between. They could not hear a shout of

directions between the three men, not a scream of fear from the

terrified woman who was their charge.

It was as if they had never been. Only the _Charon_ was left—her decks

awash and soon to dive and vanish beneath the waves—and their little

group in the dim gleam of the lantern. Knutsen and Ned took their places

at the oarlocks, Ned nearer the bow, Knutsen just behind. A great wave

seemed to catch them and hurl them away.

Could they live in this little boat on these tumultuous seas? Of course

the storm was nothing compared to the tempests weathered successfully by

larger lifeboats, but it held the utmost peril here. Any moment might

see them overwhelmed. The least of those great waves, catching them just

right, might overturn them in an instant.

Already the _Charon_ was lost in the darkness, just as the other

lifeboat had been lost an instant before. Not even Knutsen could tell in

what direction she lay. Still the waves hurried them along. The chill

wind shrieked over them, raging that they should have dared to venture

into its desolate domains.

Could they live until the morning? Wouldn’t cold and exposure make an

end to them in the long, bitter hours to come? The odds looked so

uneven, the chances so bitterly long against them. Could their little

sparks of being, the breath of life that ever was so wan and feeble, the

little, wondering moment of self-knowledge that at best seemed only the

fabric of a dream—could these prevail against the vast, unspeakable

forces of the North? Wouldn’t the spark go out in a little while, the

breath be blown away on the wings of the wind, the self-light burn down

in the gloom? At any moment their fragile boat might strike another

submerged reef. There was no light to guide them now. They were lost and

alone in an empty ocean, helpless prey to the whims of the North.

The pillars of their strength had fallen. Man’s civilization that had

been their god was suddenly shown as an empty idol, helpless to aid them

now. The light, the beauty, the strong cities they had loved had no

influence here: seemingly death itself could not make these things

farther distant, less availing. For the first time since they were born

Ned and Lenore were face to face with _life_, and also with the death

that shadows life. For the first time they knew the abject terror of

utter helplessness. There was nothing they could do. They were impotent

prey to whatever fate awaited them. Captain Knutsen, mighty of frame,

his blood surging fiercely through the avenues of his veins, and Bess,

schooled to hardship, were ever so much better off than they. They were

better disciplined, stronger in misfortune, better qualified to meet

danger and disaster. For no other reason than that—holding respect for

these northern seas—they were more warmly dressed, their chances were

better for ultimate survival.

But what awaited them when the night was done? How slight was the chance

that, in this world of gray waters, they would ever encounter an

inhabited island. It was true that islands surrounded them on all sides,

but mostly they were but wastes of wind-swept tundra, not one in four

having human habitations. Mostly the islands were large, and such

habitations as there might be were scattered in sheltered valleys along

the shore, and it was wholly probable that the little boat could pass

and miss them entirely. They couldn’t survive many days on these wintry

waters. The meager supplies of food and the jugs of water in the

lifeboats would soon be exhausted, and who could come to their aid?

Which one of Ned’s friends, wishing him such a joyous farewell at the

docks, would ever pause in his play one moment to investigate his fate?

A joy-ride! There was a savage irony in the thought of the holiday

spirit with which he had undertaken the expedition. And the voices he

had heard out of the sea had evidently told him true when they had

foretold his own death. For all his natural optimism, the odds against

him seemed too great ever to overcome. And there was but one redeeming

thought,—a thought so dimly discerned in the secret mind of the man

that it never fully reached his conscious self; so bizarre and strange

that he could only attribute it to incipient delirium. It was simply

that he had already fortified himself, in some degree, to meet the

training camp thereafter!

The journey through the gray, mysterious seas, the nearing heart of

nature, most of all to-night’s disaster had, in some small measure,

given him added strength. It was true that his old conceit was dying in

his body. His old sense of mastery over himself and over life was shown

as a bitter delusion: rather he was revealed as the helpless prey of

forces beyond even his power to name. This self-centered man, who once

had looked on life from the seats of the scornful, felt suddenly

incompetent even to know the forces that had broken him down. Yet in

spite of all this loss, there was something gained. Instead of false

conceit he began to sense the beginnings of real self-mastery. For all

his terror, freezing his heart in his breast, he suddenly saw clear; and

he knew he had taken an upward step toward Life and Light.

There would not be quite so long a course of training for him, in the

Hereafter. He could go through and on more quickly on account of these

past days. There _was_ a way through and out—his father had told him

that—and it wasn’t so far distant as when he had first left home. With

death so close that he could see into its cavernous eyes, such was Ned’s

one consolation as the craft drifted before the wind.

The terror that was upon him lifted, just an instant, as he bent to hear

what Lenore was trying to tell him. Lenore was his love and his life,

the girl to whom he had plighted his troth, and his first obligation was

to her. He must see to her first.

“I’m cold,” she was sobbing. “I’m freezing to death. Oh, Ned, I’m

freezing to death.”

Of course it wasn’t true. Chill though the night was, the temperature

was still above freezing, and the blankets about her largely protected

her from the biting winds. She was chilled through, however, as were the

other three occupants of the craft; and the fear and the darkness were

themselves like ice in her veins. Ned’s hands were stiff, but he managed

to remove one of his own blankets and wrap it about the shoulders of the

girl. The boat lurched forward, sped by the waves and the wind.

The night hours passed over the face of the sea. The wind raged through

the sky, biting and bitter for all their warm wraps. It was abating,

now, the waves were less high; but if anything its breath was more chill

as the hour drew toward dawn. The wind-blown sleet swept into their

faces.

Both girls sought refuge in troubled sleep. Ned sat with his arms about

Lenore, giving her what warmth he could from his own body. Bess was

huddled in her seat. Could their less rugged constitutions stand many

hours of such cold and exposure? It was a losing game, already. The

North was too much for them. Life is a fragile thing at best: a few

hours more might easily spell the end.

But that hour saw the return of an ancient mystery, carrying back the

soul to those gray days when the earth was without form, and void.

Darkness had been upon the face of the waters, but once more it was

divided from the day.

Even here, seemingly at the edge of the world, the ancient miracle did

not fail. A grayness, like a mist, spread slowly; and the curtains of

darkness slowly receded. The storm was abating swiftly now; and the dawn

broke over an easily rolling sea.

Captain Knutsen, who had sat so long in one position—his gaze fastened

on one point of the horizon—that he gave the impression of being

unconscious, suddenly started and pointed his hand. His voice, pitched

to the noise of the storm, roared out into the quiet dawn.

“Land!” he shouted. “We’re coming to land!”