Persis Lambert’s uncle demanded of her--but it is a question whether her
excited rattling of the stateroom door and her single cry did more than
start Persis Lambert on a dallying path towards waking. It was, in any
case, the hurrying feet on the deck above and the shouting of stewards
in the corridor that made her sit up in her berth and decide to dress as
quickly as ever she could. Not once throughout the whole experience did
she set eyes on Mrs. Lambert or Mrs. Lambert’s maid.
By the time Persis Lambert got on deck, all the other women and children
in the cabin had been thrust into the boats that were now dotting the
moon-lit sea at sparse and helpless intervals. Those of the
under-officers and crew who were left on board were coping as best they
could with a swirling, shrieking crowd of third-class passengers--men,
chiefly. The officers in command had done their best to sift out women
and children from the malodorous throng that beset the narrow exits from
the steerage. Stewards had been sent down to search for any left behind;
but several of the stewards had gone overboard on their own account with
life-belts, swimming for the boats as they pulled off. The ship was
sinking in a heavy, businesslike fashion by the stern--the captain on
her bridge like a statue. He had lost his head, and the first mate was
virtually in charge. The only thing that stuck, out of some twenty lucky
years at sea, was the conviction that he must go down with his ship. His
silence was extraordinary; he posed there for death; and Persis Lambert
herself, crawling and climbing up the companion-way to the outer air,
saw the last gesticulations of appeal made to him by his second
officer--who, even as she found support in a brass rail, and clung,
trying to arrange her mazed thoughts, flung up his arms with a
despairing oath and slid aft into the babel. He did not see her clinging
to her rail.
Persis Lambert had put on a life-belt before leaving her stateroom, but
she felt it impossible now to test its value. She was in that condition
where the mind seems at once omniscient and useless. She perceived the
alternatives before her, with no power to act in any way--a paralysis
not so much of the motor nerves as of the will itself. She stood there,
cramped and waiting, in a great lucid dream of indecision. To be sure,
neither of the alternatives was tempting--to try her luck with the
screaming mongrels aft, or to climb to the deck rail and leap into the
glittering black waste of sea. If it came to that, why not face the
stern of the boat and wait until the ocean took her? She could not swim;
it was folly for a non-swimming female to betake herself to the biggest
ocean in the world before she had to. The only thing she felt like doing
was climbing up on the bridge and standing beside the captain, at
parade. That, too, was foolish. Yet she would move as soon as she was
sure of not doing something silly.
All this, instead of being told as a sequence, should be placed before
you, if that were possible, in one synthetic glimpse. These thoughts
co-existed in her mind: it was a pigeon-holed instant, clear to
perception as a small, slightly complicated picture. Her past life,
contrary to precedent (for she was virtually drowning), did not, in any
detail, occur to her.
Long before the thing could have been put into words, a man stood before
her. He had somehow, between moonshine and crazy lantern-ray, made her
out, clutching her rail close to the companion-way whence she had
emerged.
“Come along.” There was nothing excited in his tone. He was as stolid as
the _Owara_ at her business of sinking, as the captain at his business
of going down with the ship.
Persis Lambert scarcely recognized the man at her side, though she knew
his name--Angier. She had seen him on deck and in the dining-saloon, but
they had never spoken. Mrs. Lambert--now tossing in one of those distant
cockle-shells--had given her niece little or no time for new
acquaintances.
“Where to?”
Angier took her arm in his to steady her. “Anywhere out of this.”
“What was it?”
“Reef, I guess. Stove in in the wrong place. Oh, _quick_!” He pulled her
towards the side of the ship. “Not much time. There’ll be an explosion
any second, probably.”
“But where? I can’t swim. Do you want me to jump overboard?”
“You’ll have to. No chance of those boats.” He jerked a shoulder aft.
“It’s hell down there. Discipline all gone to pot. Not room for
everybody. Pity about the captain.” He turned for an instant and lifted
his cap bridgeward with his free arm.
“Can you get into that?” Angier pointed over the side to a small boat.
“It’s not such a jump as it would have been an hour ago.”
“Yes. But what’s the use? It must leak--or something--or they wouldn’t
have left it.”
The man paused an instant and looked at her. “I’m not making you. I
don’t know a thing about the blamed tub. But my guess is that after the
very first, in the rush for the bigger ones, they forgot this. They got
it ready, you see. I don’t insist. If you _want_ to chance it down
there.... But you must do something--quick.”
Persis Lambert looked aft. She saw men, brown and white, struggling in a
confused mass. It was like a pit of snakes. She heard a pistol-shot or
two, and indescribable cries--inarticulate, indecent. Then she turned
back to Angier. “Shall I jump?”
“I’ll go first, thanks. Then jump at--for--me, as far as the moon will
let you.” He felt his pockets quickly, then buttoned his coat. “Wait a
second!” he called, and actually disappeared across the deck. Before
she could wonder very hard, he had returned with a shapeless bundle that
looked like a heap of blankets. “No good to the _Owara_,” he muttered,
as he flung them into the rocking boat overside. Then he jumped. There
was silence for an instant, but presently in the moonlight, Miss Lambert
saw him holding up his arms.
“For God’s sake, fall as straight and as limp as you can.”
The deck was uncannily near the water. Miss Lambert heard his scarcely
raised voice without difficulty. She brought him to his knees as she
fell into his arms, but they soon righted themselves. After stooping for
an instant, groping on the bottom of the boat, he stood up with a quick
motion of his whole body.
“It doesn’t leak, I think. They just forgot. Lord, what a rotten bunch!”
Angier loosed the falls, then unshipped the oars and bent to them.
“Can’t stop to make you comfortable now. We must get out of this party.
Just look and see if there is water in that keg, please. Yes? I know
there’s food. I saw the tins.”
“Are you going to try to follow the other boats?”
“Might as well try to follow a firefly. I’m going to get us out of
this--er--place, if I can. I am sure you’re like me--you’d rather die in
the open.”
He rowed steadily away from the _Owara_, out to sea--a phrase that ill
suggests their infinitesimal progress. Still, one wave shoved them idly
on to another, and in a few moments they were perceptibly farther away
from the sinking _Owara_. The cries grew less horrid to the ear; they
sounded more like a queer, shrill snarling across the water. At last,
louder than the death-throes behind them, sounded in Persis Lambert’s
ear the cracking of the man’s muscles as he rowed.
“We’re the only people, I believe, on this side of the ship,” she
ventured, finally. She had not moved from her uncomfortable position on
the big bundle Angier had thrown into the boat.
“You bet we are.” That was all his reply.
“But why?”
Angier pulled for five minutes before replying. “Can you get one of
those extra oars?” he asked, finally.
The girl reached for one and pulled it towards her. “Well? Do you want
me to row, too?”
“Hardly. Though you’ll probably have to learn to steer. But if any
damned Lascar comes swimming along and trying to catch hold, chop him
over the arm with it. I told you I wanted to get out of the party. And I
don’t make for a reef if I think there is one there. We may tie up on
one before morning, but at least I’m not trying to run us on the shore.
Don’t forget about the Lascar.” And his muscles cracked again.
Miss Lambert laid down the oar. “I don’t think I could do that, thanks.
There’s plenty of room, and if there weren’t, I wouldn’t try to keep any
one out.”
“No, I dare say you wouldn’t. But I prefer to die decently. So I’ll
trouble you to leave that oar where I can get at it myself without
disengaging one of these. Better make yourself as comfortable as you
can--though I don’t advise you to lie down.... Ah!”
The explosion had come. Both mechanically ducked their heads, then
lifted them. The crazy lights of the _Owara_ were quenched by the sea.
They could see, by the moon’s glimmer, the quick final rush of her
settling. The captain’s interminable wait on the bridge, they knew, was
over. But by common instinct they did not speak of the catastrophe.
Angier was rowing hard, and the girl tried to limber her cramped limbs
and get herself into a more competent condition and posture. Carefully,
deftly, she arranged the things that lay pell-mell in the bottom of the
boat, selected her seat, and composed herself.
While the moon lasted, the excitement of the situation kept Persis
Lambert’s mind strictly at home in the foreshortened world of the little
boat. She peered about her, taking stock of her physical context. There
were blankets--she had wrapped herself in one of them--a water-keg, tins
that must hold food. There were also a few irregularly shaped objects
here and there which she could not identify in the faint light.
They talked very little after the moon had set. Angier stopped rowing
now and then for a moment, letting his body relax. Once, he pulled a
flask from his pocket, removed the silver cup and passed it to her,
asking her to fill it from the water-keg. He offered her whisky, but she
refused it. Excited, warmly wrapped, as yet she felt no chill. The stars
paled gradually, seeming to sink deeper into a lightening sky--as if
they were withdrawing, backwards, out of the presence of earth and sea.
The tropic dawn was coming upon them. Around was the constant complex
noise of the ocean, running through a watery gamut, from the distant
boom to the swishing of the waves round the boat itself.
On the _Owara_, Persis Lambert had seen little or nothing of her
companion; but she remembered him as tall and dark, and given to
inhabiting the smoking-room. Occasionally, since they had crossed the
equator, she had seen him walking the deck at a tremendous pace. She had
never seen him talking to any one, though of course she had not known
how he might spend his time in the smoking-room. Mrs. Lambert had made
friends with no one, and her niece had, perforce, followed her example.
But she was sure that she had never seen Angier in any of the groups who
chattered away the tedious leagues. She felt she must settle a few
things before the day was upon them. So strange a day it was bound to
be!
“How did it happen you weren’t with the first boats?” she asked.
“How did it happen _you_ weren’t?” He stopped rowing for a moment.
“I must have slept through a good deal. My aunt’s maid waked me, but I
didn’t realize until I heard the confusion.... I was pretty slow in
dressing, I fancy. And I was trying to decide what to do when you came
and told me. I’m very grateful to you.”
“Um--yes. I dare say I’m grateful to you. I hadn’t made up my mind,
either. You’re sure your aunt got off on one of the first boats?”
“I think she must have. They wouldn’t overlook her. Let’s not talk about
it. Every one loses his wits at such a time. Think of the poor captain.”
“I’ve no time to waste thinking of anything. Do you realize what we’re
in for?”
“No, I don’t.” Persis Lambert answered in a matter-of-fact way. “I’m no
heroine, by the way. I’m never seasick, but that’s all you can say for
me. I hope I shan’t fail you or be a nuisance, but I can’t imagine that
I shall be any good.”
“Humph! Well, I’m no Swiss Family Robinson myself. I’m fairly strong in
the arms, legs, and back, but I am not what you call a resourceful
person. I’ve never had any experience of this kind. So if we do strike
land, you needn’t expect any of the comforts of camp life. I haven’t
even a pistol, if worse should come to worst. What did you manage to
save?”
“I’ve got some money, which is of no use--and a flask--and my warmest
clothes on--and, I think, a toothbrush in my pocket, and a cake of soap.
I didn’t see any sense in weighting myself down.”
“I did better than you, then. At least, I hope there’s some loot worth
having in that blanket you have your feet on. I stepped into the
smoking-room for a moment, you remember. Matches, anyhow. Ah, there’s
the sun. Suppose we eat. It might give us courage to look around. We
must be in a mess of islands about here, you know; and there’s a great
choice in islands, in these parts--especially when you haven’t a
pistol.... I hope you won’t let me get on your nerves,” he added,
suddenly. “It’s a queer hole to be in, and you must be sensible. If you
played the fool, I’d chuck you overboard.”
“I don’t think you would.” Miss Lambert’s head was bent over a
biscuit-tin. “You chucked me _on_ board, you remember.”
“Oh, it was no place to die--that disreputable old tub with all her
virtue oozing out of her.”
“You seem to be very fastidious about your place of dying.”
“Well!”--he jerked his head back and faced the sun--“you can’t say it
isn’t decent here. You didn’t want to go down strangling with a lot of
dirty Chinks biting you in the back, did you? When I’m through
breakfast, I’ll look over that loot. I hope I was inspired last night in
the smoking-room. I pawed about like lightning for ten seconds. By the
way, what is your name? Mine is Angier.”
“Persis Lambert. I should like a drink of water, please. Thank you. And
what are we going to do about the sun?”
“Rig up something if we can. And, for heaven’s sake, go slow on the
water. I’ve got a map in my pocket, but it’s rather small. The boat’s
not much bigger, and you’ll kindly remember that we may be dead before
night. If a storm came up like the one two days ago, you certainly would
be. You can’t swim, remember.”
“Why should I go slow on the water then?”
“Because we have a fighting chance.”
“Even if I can’t swim?”
“Oh, I’d keep you up as long as I could, if you didn’t clutch me.”
“You said you’d throw me overboard if necessary.” Persis Lambert raised
her hand. “Kindly understand me. I’m not asking for anything. Only it
would be much more convenient if you would explain to me briefly what I
can expect from you. What sort of man are you, anyhow? I don’t care, one
way or the other. I simply should like to know. Are you going to leave
me to shift for myself, or are you going to be conventional?”
Angier laughed--a strange, impotent sound in that waste of sunny waters.
“You can bet I’m going to be conventional. That is, I’ll play the game
if you will. If you’re a good girl, I’ll be a good boy--if only because
being chivalrous at a time like this, edging along towards the tropic of
Capricorn, is so ridiculous. I’ll let you have the last mouthful, just
because it would be so sensible not to.”
“You don’t mean that.”
“Well, just to prove that I am a free man. I’m not going to chuck a
helpless thing like the moral law, just because a big brute like the
Pacific Ocean comes along and tells me to. I let it pretty much alone
when I’m at home, but damned if it isn’t worth wasting time on in a
place like this, just as a spectacle. Don’t you worry. It’ll probably be
a shark or a native that does for you. It won’t be I--unless you take
to acting in a way no man could stand. There’s such a thing as being too
conventional, you know.” He looked her squarely in the eyes.
“I’ll be as sensible as I can. But I’m a free woman, too.”
“Not if you can’t swim.”
“Oh, if you think you can swim across the Pacific, I don’t wonder you
boast about being free.” Then, for the first time since the accident, a
drawing-room manner returned to her. She spoke very sweetly. “But let’s
not quarrel. What are we going to do about sleeping? You must be
absolutely exhausted. Couldn’t I do something with the oars while you
took a nap?”
“You might decorate them if you’ve got a box of colors about you.
Thanks, I’m not sleepy. But you’re quite right. You’d better curl up for
a while. I’ll try to rig up something with an oar and one of the
blankets. I’ll wake you when I want you. You don’t look very strong, by
the way.”
“I’m not, but I’m perfectly well. I’m at my normal weight. It isn’t
much. But--” She looked around.
“I’ll be sleeping, myself, later. Then you can comb your hair.”
Miss Lambert curled herself up obediently and uncomfortably under the
improvised tent. She fell asleep sooner than she had hoped, and the man,
taking up the oars, with a pocket compass before him on the water-keg,
rowed steadily on. The first boats had gone north, making, he suspected,
for a port. The other lot, what with bad discipline and savage endeavors
defeating themselves, must have gone down, taken by the sharks or that
mid-sea level which buoys up the drowned. Many of them had probably been
killed outright by huge splinters of the exploding _Owara_. No relic,
no fragment, since the dawn, had drifted their way. He kept his course,
as well as he could, due south. “A great get-away,” he murmured to
himself. He did not once look at the girl.
When, a few hours later, Persis Lambert crawled out of her improvised
tepee, her sleep-soaked eyes saw, thanks to the glare of the sun on
multiplied leagues of water, only the vague litter of objects about her.
Her eyes clung to the blessedly dark surfaces of little things--a
blanket, the handle of an old hatchet, her own skirt. Then they traveled
to Angier’s figure at the bow. By lifting and lowering her eyelids in
quick rhythm, to shake the sleep out, she managed finally to focus her
gaze, to discount to some extent the rude blaze of the ocean. Angier had
not spoken to her, and she now saw why. Oblivious of Persis Lambert, his
back half turned to her, he was looking steadily out to sea through a
small pair of binoculars. Perfectly motionless, he seemed to be studying
some fixed point in the distance. He must have heard the stir of her
waking and moving forward in the boat, but he paid no more attention to
her than if she had been the ship’s cat stretching itself. She did not
know to what point of the compass his gaze was directed--all directions
were alike to her, with the sun overhead. She limbered her cramped limbs
as best she could in that tiny rocking space, smoothed her hair, and
wiped her face with her handkerchief. Finally she turned to parallel
with her own eyes the path of his long, steady gaze through the glass.
Then she exclaimed, for land, no less, was what she saw. She was
incapable of judging distances, but the peculiar outline of palms was
distinguishable to her, lifted above a tiny colorless strip that must be
shore. At the girl’s exclamation, Angier turned and put the glass down
carefully.
“These aren’t much good--tourist things--but you can see for yourself
what I’m looking at.” He did not offer her the glass; and she did not
ask for it.
“How far away?”
“I don’t know. Distances are deceptive, of course. But you will notice
that there is a favoring wind, and a current too, I’m pretty sure. I
don’t know that I like the current; but I can’t say that I like being
boiled alive, either. We shall get there soon enough, I think. You
didn’t sleep more than an hour or two. I think I’ll turn in myself,
after you’ve got some notion of steering. No point in using up muscle to
keep out of this wind-and-current combination. There _must_ be a
current, you know--” He knotted his brows, as if in displeasure.
“Why do you mind the current so?”
Angier grinned. “I’m no navigator, please remember. Nobody ever taught
me what to do with a current in a coral area! But you can wake me up
before we get anywhere near.”
“May I see the map?”
“Sure! But I am afraid it was made only for European consumption. There
must be several hundred islands in the immediate neighborhood”--he waved
his arm impartially in a circular sweep round the horizon. “I do know
about where the _Owara_ went down. I looked at the ship’s chart last
evening. But it doesn’t help us much, does it? Now let me show you what
to do back here.”
Persis Lambert took her instructions in steering as intelligently as she
could. They were, for that matter, haltingly given. Angier had to
confess, with grim laughter, that he knew very little about the
business. “I’ve had a lot of things happen to me, but they’ve never been
in boats. Perhaps it’s a pity we didn’t ship a Lascar while we were
about it. But what would have been the good of a Lascar without a pistol
to shoot him with? Wake me up any minute you want me. I don’t think
there’s much you can do, as a matter of fact, except try to keep her
from slewing entirely out of her course. And if it _is_ wind-and-current
combination, she couldn’t do that if she tried. _Au revoir!_”
He stuck his head out of the tepee after he had burrowed his way in.
“You didn’t bring a pistol, did you?”
“Of course not. I never had a pistol in my life.”
“All right, all right. Only it is just as well to be sure.”
“Did you think I would shoot you?”
A deal of pent-up sarcasm went into her tone. There was no reply. Persis
Lambert looked about for the binoculars, but they had gone, slung over
Angier’s shoulder, into the tepee. She sat for a long time clutching the
steering-rope as he had directed, gazing at the line of palms on the
horizon. It was a great relief to be alone. Occasionally she closed her
eyes for a moment to shut out the glare that stabbed like a million
arrows; but whenever she opened them again, she stared always at that
fixed point as if there were no other fact abroad upon the sea.
It was late afternoon when Angier and Persis Lambert landed on their
island. Angier confessed that he had feared a hundred easy ways of
destruction, but in point of fact the low, sandy coast seemed positively
to welcome them. A tiny recess in the shore-line embraced their little
boat, harbor-fashion--though the _Owara_ would have filled its curving
arms to overflowing. Angier had trained his glass on the land many times
before landing, but at last he slung it back over his shoulder, and
eventually they heard the soft crunch of sand under the keel as they
beached the boat--the first land-noise either had heard for many a day.
They seemed to have stepped out of a moving nightmare of great waters, a
vast, aqueous vision, into a firm, terrestrial reality. Persis Lambert
hummed to herself as she carried things from the boat to the shade of a
palm-grove.
“Stop that, will you, please?” The man’s harassed voice sounded close
behind her.
“Why? I hated the boat.”
“You don’t yet know whether we have this bit of hell to ourselves or
not. And as soon as I can decide what to do with you, I’ve got to find
out.”
She stopped where she was, with her load. “And leave me?”
“Someone’s got to stay with the stores. They aren’t much, but they may
be all we’ll have for some time.”
“Do you really think”--it was her sweet tone, brought back into use for
the occasion--“that I should be very effective if any one did turn up
who wanted them?”
Angier laughed shortly. “Right you are. You wouldn’t--unless it were an
animal.”
“There are very few animals”--she turned again toward the
palm-grove--“that wouldn’t soon be in possession, for all me. My
relations with our dumb brothers don’t extend beyond dogs--small ones,
with collars.”
He looked at her curiously. “I should think you would like to get rid of
me for a little while.”
“I’d love to.” Her tone was still very sweet. “But I prefer you to a
quadruped. And until I’m better acquainted with the natives, I think I
prefer you to them. Of course, they may turn out very nice. In that
case, we’ll see.”
Angier shrugged his shoulders. “All right. Only, if you can spare me for
five minutes, I’ll go into that next bunch of palms and look through the
glass. There’ll be a lagoon, or I miss my guess. Keep down by the boat,
please, and, if you want me, shout. I shall be close by.” In his
promised five minutes, he returned. “It’s a smallish place, after all.
There is a lagoon. We’d better walk around it, I fancy. It would be
something of a relief to know that we are the sole inhabitants, though
what we shall live on--Oh, well, hang it! no use borrowing trouble.”