about it. After twenty-four or forty-eight hours you won’t be thinkin’
so much about it. ’Twill be more mechanical-like then with you--brain
kind of hazy-like from lookin’ at nothing but the level sea over the
gunnel and your arms never stoppin’. Do you sit on the for’ard thwart,
but take it easy--’tis a long drag, boy--a hundred and fifty mile to
Newf’undland.”
And so they set out. ’Twas a long, easy, regular stroke that Martin
dropped into; just such a stroke as a man might adopt who looked for a
moderately long drag to his vessel--ten or fifteen miles, say.
But this was a hundred and fifty miles. Yes, and more, with allowances
to be made for the set of wind and tide and the natural perversity of
the dory itself. Whoever has rowed a dory knows that nothing will swerve
more easily off its course--that is, if you don’t know how. Martin Carr
knew how, but the young fellow with him did not; and it was Martin
Carr’s business to make such allowances as would offset the uneven
rowing of the lad.
They rowed on. To the boy the silences were appalling. For an hour at a
time nothing would be said. Martin, with the instinct of an old trawler,
was husbanding every ounce of energy; the boy was numb, overwhelmed. A
hundred and fifty miles! The thought of it! He did not shrink from the
thought of death, but a hundred and fifty miles of this work! He began
to figure it out. Say they drove the dory ten feet a stroke. That was
more than five hundred strokes to a mile--one hundred and fifty times
five hundred--how much? How slow he was to figure now--but, yes, that
was 75,000 strokes. Good Lord! one, two, three--why, it would take
twenty-four hours just to count 75,000, without rowing at all. But to
row--to reach out with the arms and haul those two heavy blades through
a heavy sea--one--two--three--and every other stroke ineffective,
certainly for him, if not for the strong-backed Martin Carr, because of
the unevenness of the sea. Why, it would take a week, night and day.
He began to figure it up another way. Suppose they made two miles an
hour. That was forty-eight miles a day--three days in all. But allowing
for cross-tides and cross-winds, the constant heading of the dory
straight again--say four days. Four days! And nothing to eat and nothing
to drink during those four days of work and toil. And that meant that
they must never vary from their course. Naturally they would vary. Say
six days and six nights. But no man can row night and day for six days
and nights without food and drink. Not even Martin, wonderful man that
he was, could do it. Say they rested one-third of the time--eight hours
a day. Ashore, men who did practically nothing slept eight hours a day.
That surely would not be too much rest after rowing a heavy dory in a
heavy sea.
Already, though he had been rowing hardly more than two hours, he was
tired, with wrists hot and heavy, and his forearms cramping. And Martin
himself must feel it after a day or two. Much as he had heard of these
iron men, these deep-sea trawlers, they could not last it out forever.
And God! suppose they were heading out across the Atlantic--and could
even Martin say they were not, with no sun or stars to guide him? Would
it be slow starvation? And why was it, now he thought of it, he wasn’t
famished? Twenty-eight hours already without food! Ah, was that why
Martin buckled his own belt about his stomach--buckled it tight and made
him drink the last of the water? Surely, if nothing else came, that
would come--the slow starvation.
Or would it be just madness? How unreal it all was!
One--two--three--four--the chafing of the oars came to him as if from
some other dory in the distance. So certain was he that the noise was
not made by himself and Martin that he stopped and listened.
“What’s it, lad?”
“Isn’t there another dory somewhere near, Martin?”
“Maybe--there’s no tellin’, it’s so thick,” answered Martin aloud, but
to himself, “Already,” and shook his head sorrowfully.
The lad, after a moment or two of listening, came to see how he had
misled himself.
He resumed his examination of Martin’s back--the regular bend and heave
he noticed. He could not see the face, but he knew the calm set of eyes
and jaw. What a man! But even Martin would have to go, too, and when
they would be found, even Martin, the iron man, would be stiff and cold
also, as others had been found before him. But so few were found! And
why weren’t they found! Capsized and drowned. That was it--or was it
that they went crazy and jumped overboard? He pictured that--the sudden
dropping of the everlasting oars, the last wild cry, the dive over the
gunnel. He wondered would it be that way with himself.
He looked about, his first long look, and noted the sea. He certainly
never had imagined the sea as it was now--not nearly so rough as on the
day before--almost smooth, in fact, as if beaten down with the weight
of snow which lay upon it like--like what? He had seen that often, of
course--the new-fallen snow on land. But nothing like this--the cold
gray waste hidden until all was white. What was it like now, that white
covering? Oh, yes--why had he not thought of it before?--like the white
sheet they sometimes drew over dead people.
“Martin!” he called out then.
“Aye?”
“Isn’t it awful?”
“’Tis--in a way. ’Tis solemn, boy. Here we are hid away--a vessel could
be fifty feet away and we not see her. She could be twenty feet away and
she not see us--we’re that white. But there’s a consolation--the thicker
it comes the sooner it’ll stop.”
“Then this should stop soon.”
It did stop finally; after what Martin judged to be ten or twelve hours.
It melted from the sea, then thinned above, and the sky shone through.
Not a broad sweep at first, but patches here and there. It was later
before the clear dome and the familiar stars shone out.
“There’s the Great Dipper, boy--see it? It must be three o’clock in the
mornin’ by the placin’ of it.”
“Three in the morning--and we rowing since three o’clock yesterday
afternoon!”
“Aye, boy. And there’s the North Star and those other little stars I
don’t know the names of. We’ll keep the North Star one good point off
the starb’d bow, boy, and on that course till mornin’, and then we’ll go
by the sun.”
The morning came, and the boy noted that six inches of snow covered the
inside of the dory everywhere--gunnels, strakes, and thwarts, except
where they had been sitting, and the bottom of the dory, except where
their champing boots and the heat from within them had beaten it into a
slush; and that the snow was dazzling white under the morning sun. But
above all he felt the cold.
“The wind must have shifted, Martin, it’s so much colder.”
“Aye, boy. ’Tis no’west now.”
“A cold wind--the coldest of all, isn’t it, Martin?”
“Aye, boy, but one great comfort with it--’tis mostly a clear wind, a
no’wester. Should any vessel be about now they’ll soon see us. But rest
a while, boy. Go aft and lie in the stern--you’ll be trimmin’ ship
better there--every little tells in a long haul; or stamp up and down
and slap your arms, or take the bailer and shovel out the snow.”
Having cleared the dory of snow, the boy strove vainly to overcome his
inclination to lie down. But he did lie down at last. His legs were so
numb that he hadn’t the strength to go aft, he said, and so Martin took
him in his arms and set him in the stern. “And don’t rest too long
there, boy. There’s such a thing as freezing to death in a no’wester. A
cold wind, lad, is a no’wester.”
The boy lay there till Martin bade him rise and stamp about. But he
could not keep up the stamping for long. “I’m so tired, Martin, and
hungry--oh, so hungry!” He sucked at a bit of snow-crust.
“Aye, boy. One older and tougher than you might say it. And don’t eat
too much of that stuff, and try, boy, try a while again to keep movin’
your arms and legs.”
He tried, but could not. So Martin bade him lie down again. And the boy
lay down and began to drowse, at which Martin shook his head. But what
could he do? He had to keep rowing himself. Oh, yes--he took off his own
cardigan jacket and forced the boy into it. The boy, only half awake,
protested--a feeble protest--as Martin, with a soft “Hush, lad,
hush--weren’t me and your father dory-mates for many the long year
together?” buttoned it about him.
“My, Martin, but that’s warming!”
“Aye, boy, that it is. Many a cold winter’s day it’s helped to warm me.”
To remove his cardigan jacket, which was under his oil-coat, Martin had
to expose himself to the biting no’wester, and so cold and searching was
it that he took many minutes to button his oil-jacket again. To overcome
the numbness--“Or soon I wouldn’t be able to hold an oar at all,” he
muttered--he beat his hands against the gunnels, noticing the while that
he not only knocked off the last little films of frozen snow-crust, but
also, though this rather curiously than sympathetically, that the ends
of his fingers bled under the impact of the blows. “Man, but ’tis cold,
when it comes to that!” and bent over the boy to fix the jacket more
securely around his neck. “Forty-eight hours now without food or
drink--’tis hard on you, lad--hard on you.”
Back to his rowing, and no cessation till he heard the lad muttering in
his sleep. “What’s it now?” said Martin, and bent toward him.
“-- But to be floating around in the water or lying somewhere on bottom
for the fish to eat up--” murmured the sleeping boy.
“Lad, lad, but you’re right--’tis hard.”
“-- If it was no more than a Christian burial--”
“Christian burial, lad? Make your mind easy, but if I live, and you die,
’tis Christian burial you’ll get, boy. But ’tis both of us together’ll
go, I’m thinkin’ now.” He shook the lad. “Wake--wake now,
Eddie-boy--wake, boy, wake, and try and row again a bit. ’Tis cruel I
am--aye, the hard heart of me--aye, boy. But now you must row, and maybe
you’ll warm up a while yet. Lay there, and in two hours more ’tis stiff
as the oar itself you’ll be.”
And so the boy crept to his seat and resumed rowing, though his oars no
more than slid over the surface of the sea. The lad thought he was
helping--he saw the oars pass from forward to aft and back again--but it
was only the dory slipping away under the ceaseless drive of Martin’s
irresistible strength.
Throughout all that cold winter’s day they rowed. And night came, and
once more the boy sought the stern and lay there; and as he lay, Martin
took off his oil-jacket and buttoned it about the lad’s body. “There,
now, a cardigan jacket and two oilskins. You ought to keep warm now. And
now, Martin Carr”--he was back to his seat again--“’tis harder than ever
you’ll have to row or yourself freeze to an icicle.”
All through that long night Martin called to the lad. Until well into
the night, as he considered it, he could catch the responses. But
gradually Eddie’s voice became duller, and toward morning Martin got no
answer at all. “Asleep, the poor boy!” muttered Martin, himself by then
not too wide awake.
The stars dulled away, the dawn broke gray, and then the first long rays
of the winter sun glinted the white of the crested seas. The weary man
in the waist of the dory roused himself. He found himself still rowing,
but that his mind had slept he felt certain. He looked about
him--astern, ahead, to either side. No sail--nor smoke. He took note of
the dory. Iced to a depth of six inches it was, and with every fresh
slap of the sea more ice was adding. “A mile away now and we’d look like
a lump of ice to any passing vessel,” he thought aloud.
The no’wester whistled over the ridged seas. A no’west wind and
white-tipped seas that broke over them--could man invent anything more
freezing? And all night long it had been so.
“Eddie,” called Martin, “Eddie-boy!” Again, “Oh, Eddie-lad-- Eddie-boy,
shake yourself now, dear.” But no answer coming from the boy, Martin
more closely regarded the figure in the stern. The rising rays of the
sun were tinting the stiffened yellow oilskins, but the low-drawn
sou’wester allowed Martin no glimpse of the features. The hands were
encased in the heavy woollen mitts, which Martin now noted were coated
with ice. Still, ice was no great matter. How he wished his own
oilskins--what was left of them--were iced up, too. Ice kept out the
biting wind.
Gradually it came into his brain, even though the yet insufficient light
revealed nothing of the boy’s face, that all was not quite natural. Once
more a call, but no answer, not even the old familiar shifting of the
legs. “Is it asleep you are, boy, and have you been asleep all night?
Lad, lad, but if you’ve been asleep--” and bent over and lifted the
sou’wester.
The face was calm--calm as a waxen mask in a window. But the eyes--wide
open! Quickly he drew off the boy’s mitts and felt of the hands within.
The ice on the gunnels of the dory was not colder. Martin’s brain did
not grasp it, what with his body being so numb, but his heart crowded
itself inside him.
He dropped back to his seat and resumed the oars. But only for a few
strokes. He stood up, and with the bailer began to pound the ice off the
dory. “She’ll sink else,” he said--“she’ll sink else, lad, and we’ll
never get you ashore.” He broke the bailer trying to pound the ice off.
He took the handle of an oar then--one of Eddie’s oars he noted dully,
one of the oars which he had lightened by cutting down, to fit the boy’s
feebler arms.
The ice cleared away, he went back to his rowing. But again only a few
strokes, when it seemed to sweep over him what it meant--the frozen body
of the poor boy-- Jack Teevens’s boy. He rubbed an iced mitt across his
eyes. “God, what a death for you, child! What a death! And such a
beautiful boy! If ’twas a tough old knotted trawler like me-- And me that
was to watch out for him! Yet to watch I meant, lad, but ’twas a long
night--and a cold. And not overwarm myself was I, and I’m misdoubting,
too, I slept to the oars. O God, ’tis cruel--cruel!” and dropped his
head on his hands.
He tried to think it out; but he had such horrible thoughts that he knew
that course would never do. He lifted his body from his seat and tried
to stand up. He could not, the first time, or the second, but the third
he held his feet. The dory was again sagging under the weight of ice;
from stem to stern, gunnels, thwarts, planks inside and out, were nearly
a foot thick with it. The painter coiled in the bow was big around as a
barrel. Across the body of the dead boy it was beginning to pack solid.
Martin gouged the gob-stick from out of the frozen bottom and began to
break the ice off. He could hardly hold it with one hand, and so put
both to it.
A good part of the ice knocked loose and thrown over, he reapplied
himself to the oars. It was plain enough to him now. “However else it
comes, ’tis for you, Martin Carr, to stand to your rowin’--to stand to
it till you can push your arms out no more from your shoulders, till
your fingers will cling no longer to the handles, till--till you’re cold
and stiff, no less, Martin Carr, than the poor boy there before you. If
that comes, well and good, you’ve done your best. ’Tis to shore you must
reach, or be picked up, or die to your oars. And mind it always, Martin
Carr-- Christian burial for Jack Teevens’s boy.”
So he rowed on. All that day and all that long night he rowed--all
through a snow-storm that enveloped him like ever-rolling white clouds,
and through which only his fisherman’s instinct kept him to his course.
“‘Twill be east-no’the-east this wind--if I know wind at all, and ’tis
no’the by west you’re to head, Martin. Two points for’ard of the port
beam you’ll keep that wind, and there you are, Martin, for the nearest
point of Newf’undland--if ever you get there. But, oh, ’tis mortal cold
and mortal tirin’,” he muttered, and yet rowed on, regarding his arms
not as his own, but as a mechanism directed by some inner force and
instinct that he did not recognize as part of himself.
Four full days and nights, and for the first time Martin Carr almost
admitted himself beaten. His fingers, he observed, were stiffening more
frequently; the rapping against the hard gunnel no longer brought the
blood. Certainly they would freeze up soon. And if they froze he would
be unable to row. They might freeze stiff and straight, like Eddie’s
there. And if so? He groaned--he would be unable to grasp the oars. But
hold--he would fix that. If freeze his fingers must, he would see that
they froze so as to be of some use to a man. And conscientiously he
curled them around the handles of the oars. Stubborn they were at first,
but he forced them into position and held them motionless till they were
securely frozen to the handles of the oars.
And so, the oars secured beyond accident or future weakness, Martin Carr
resumed his solemn way to the shore. How far to the shore then? He did
not know--maybe forty, maybe fifty, maybe sixty, maybe one hundred
miles. For all he knew he might have been rowing zigzag all over the
ocean, running S’s, as sometimes green hands steered a vessel over the
wide sea.
However, row he did, gray winter skies and grim slate-colored seas about
him. Lonesome? Aye, it was lonesome. In thirty years of fishing Martin
Carr had never known so lonesome a time. Consider it--no sail, no smoke,
no gull even to come screaming astern, and the boy’s frozen body ever
facing him in the stern.
Only the slap of chopping seas under the dory’s low gunnels--that and
the tumble of green-gray seas--interminable seas, curling like serpents,
rolling always toward one and spitting foam as they rolled. Always
that--that and the frozen body in the stern, and the thoughts that
_would_ come to him. Such thoughts!
Sometimes Martin Carr thought he would move the body to the bow, where
he might not have it forever before his eyes. But again he wasn’t quite
sure that he would not see it just as clearly even if behind him; and
somehow he was not quite sure that he did want it moved, even if he
could do it now, which he doubted, his own fingers frozen as they were
to the oars. Or his hands once removed, he was not sure he could reshape
them to the handles of the oars again. So perhaps it was just as well,
and he faced the dead boy anew.
For two days and two nights more, with his dead dory-mate’s face ever
staring at him from the stern--for six frosty days and six freezing
winter nights in all--through that northern wind, and sea, and snow, and
hail, Martin Carr rowed the dory. And made land at last. It did not look
much--an iron-bound shore, where the sheer rock rose straight as the
wall of a church and against which the high seas beat furiously. He
could not land there--he had to hunt a harbor. He made out one at
last--an inlet, with signs of people near by. His eyes were no more than
pin-points in his head, but he could make out the five or six low huts
set up on the rocks, and for them he headed. The way was caked in ice,
and that made hard work of it for a man who had come so far without food
or drink to force his way through. Using the oars as poles, he might
with less labor have beaten a channel through, but his fingers, frozen
to the oars, were not yet to be unsealed. He could do only one thing,
and that was row. And so he rowed, ever rowed, making a channel by
forcing the bow of the dory over the ice till of its own weight it broke
through and went on.
In that laborious fashion he advanced. Hours in that little bay alone,
but at length he reached the shore. He made sure it was the shore by a
long examination before he relinquished the oars. To free himself of the
oars, he had to knock the ends of them one over the other--had to do
that to loosen the ice from about his hands so that he could slip his
fingers free. They came away as he had frozen them, shaped in
cylindrical form to the handles. Taking note of how smoothly they came
away, he reflected that he might with safety have slid them off before
this--if for no more than to break the ice off his unshaven chin or to
wipe the hail from his eyes, or to set back on Eddie’s head the
sou’wester which had blown off in the night. But a man sees many things
when it is past the time.
However, that wasn’t getting on. There was Eddie yet to be taken care
of. Christian burial he had asked for, and Christian burial he should
have. He crawled out of the dory, and reached over the gunnel with one
leg till the toe of his boot touched the ice on solid land. Finding it
firm, he drew his other leg after the first.
He pushed away from the dory. One step, and down he went to hands and
knees, and could not get up, try as he would. He almost cried--perhaps
if he had been stronger he would have cried. He, Martin Carr, whose
strength used to be the boast of every crew that ever he sailed with,
here he was, weak as a young child.
But he must get on. If he couldn’t walk, he could creep. And so creep he
did, on hands and knees, a hundred yards, perhaps, to the door of the
nearest hut.
They opened to his knock, a bearded man and behind him a stout woman,
with a brood of fat children peering out curiously. Seeing how it must
be with him, they lifted him up, set him down on a chair, and told him
that in a minute or two the hot tea would be ready for him; or if he
would wait but ten minutes, they would run over to the store and get
him a glass of brandy--good brandy from Saint Pierre.
“I want no tea and I want no brandy,” said Martin Carr, “and yet thanks
to ye the same. I’ve a dory-mate below, and he’s waitin’ burial. Help me
with him, help me get him ashore, for I’m weak to cryin’ ’most, and
after that prayers and a burial and Martin Carr will never forget ye
both.”
Back to the dory they went with him, the man that Martin Carr had
knocked up and two of his neighbors. Under Martin’s directions they
essayed to lift the body from the dory, one being within the dory and
two ashore. They had the body among them, suspended between the dory and
shore, but it was an awkward weight, and the feet of one slipping,
through the ice and out of sight went the body.
“He’s gone!” they shouted, and stared at the hole in the ice.
“Christ in heaven!” Martin crawled to the hole, and with no further word
dropped through and after the body. They saw him disappear and shivered.
Next they saw the body handed up by a pair of frozen hands. It was just
deep enough there for Martin’s head, as he stood on bottom, to all but
show clear. They took the body from him, seeing only the half-submerged
head, the upstretched arms, and at the end of them the frozen, hooked
fingers trying to balance the frozen body.
Martin followed the body, was helped up the beach, and there lay prone.
It was some time before he could move, and his first clear speech was an
apology. “I’m fair worked out,” he said. “I’ve come a long way--days and
nights--days and nights-- I don’t know how many; but it seems like years
of rowin’ I’ve had and nothin’ to eat--nor drink. Don’t mind if I
refused your drink a while ago-- I’ll take it now that Eddie’s safe, and
thank ye kindly for the same.”
They buried Eddie--dug his grave through the many feet of snow, lowered
him into the warm, brown earth, and had the good father say prayers over
him. Martin was there--stayed to the last shovelful and sent his own
prayer with it.
Not till that was done did he hunt for a doctor. The doctor threw up his
hands when he saw the sight, but without delay went to work. To save the
arms and legs the entire ten fingers and toes would have to come off.
The doctor told him that. “Go ahead,” said Martin.
Bandaged up and rested, the doctor asked him his story. And he told
it--simply, with emphasis only on the fate of the poor lad, Jack
Teevens’s boy.
“But when he was gone beyond all hope, when he was actually dead,”
insisted the doctor, “why didn’t you take your cardigan jacket off him,
and your oil-jacket, and put them back on yourself? He was dead, and
much as you cared for him he would be no worse off. And you--with your
constitution--you might have saved yourself from freezing up. Why didn’t
you?”
“Take the clothes off the poor dead boy?” protested Martin. “Take them
back after I’d put them on him? Twist and toss about his poor body after
he was cold in death? I couldn’t-- I couldn’t.”
“God help you,” exclaimed the doctor--“you’re ruined for life!”
“Aye,” assented Martin, “ruined I am.”
“You take it calmly enough. Do you realize what it means, man? You, who
were such a magnificent man when you were whole and sound, do you know
what it means?”