SAUVE QUI PEUT
Land was indeed ahead, and in the most appalling shape known to
seafaring man: at the last moment, the haze had lifted on a line of
jagged cliffs, already parallel with the foreyard, albeit by the muffled
thud of the breakers, not quite so near as it looked.
The _North Foreland_ was blessed with a commander who was at his best in
an emergency. Little Coles had turned in when he should have stayed on
deck, and was no more prepared for shipwreck than if such disasters were
unknown; but he rose to the occasion like a lark. His sharp voice
cracked like a whip from the break of the poop, and all hands, piped
from the forecastle, the petty officers' quarters, and the midshipmen's
berth, came running as though the words drew blood.
The spanker was set, with the mizzen and maintopmast staysail, and the
helm put down to bring her round; but there was no racing of the cliffs
to port. She stumbled a little in her stride; the fresh sails flapped;
but there was no getting her on the other tack, though the upper mizzen
topsail was pressed into the job.
The skipper waited a minute with compressed lips and fiery eye; then a
crackle of musketry from his weatherbeaten throat, and both anchors were
let go.
The port anchor had fifty fathoms of cable, the starboard anchor sixty
fathoms of chain; in anticipation of their holding, the sails were
clewed up, and a man sent into the chains with the lead, for she was
drifting inshore every moment. But the lead danced on smooth rock, where
the anchors trailed as readily as over ice; the captain had them both up
again, but that took longer than letting them go, and meanwhile half the
hands were aloft shaking out sail once more.
Coles was showing his resource at every point, and by this time had his
ship actually head to wind; in another minute she might have stood away
upon the port tack. But at this juncture time was wasted in an attempt
to sheet home the topsails, which failing, the buntlines of the mainsail
were let go, the port main tack got on board, and the sheet hauled aft.
The men were still upon the rope when the _North Foreland_ struck and
spilt them like the winners in a tug-of-war.
It was the horrible striking of an iron ship: a terrific crash under the
mizzen-chains, and there she quivered like a rat in a terrier's teeth.
And the devilish seas that had run with her, hunted with her, how they
fell on her now, and swept and trampled her from the moment she was
down!
The scene on deck, if it wanted the infinite horror of pitch darkness,
was only a degree less dreadful in a pearly dawn that left no doubt
about the situation. Every hatchway spouted crude humanity, shouting,
shoving, screaming, scolding, covering a chattering nakedness as it
gained the deck, and there struck silent at a glance. For nothing was
hid, nothing extenuated, for a single moment, to a single eye. There was
no learning the worst by humane degrees. It was patent at once to the
wildest and the calmest gaze. The sanguine soul was no more help to the
stunned community than the born pessimist; there was no chance for the
imagination either way.
They could see, every one of them, the towering cliffs--blind sides of
houses without an inch of pavement--the rollers running up to them
unbroken, for the better sport of leaping sky-high at the impact. They
could see her settling, see her bumping, see the top-hamper falling
about the deck. There was enough to feel and to hear. The eyes might
have been spared a little. Some shut them more than once, as when an
upper spar came down like an arrow, transfixing a sailor with incredible
neatness, and actually sticking upright through man and deck; but few
escaped the sight of blood, and none the dying scream. A worse sight was
in store. A steward with the stock of life-belts from the lazaretto
touched the captain's arm. And, checked in some hoarse tirade, the
valiant Coles stood first aghast and then abject in the sight of
passengers and crew--beaten man and broken reed.
The better part of valour was the only part he lacked. Not a boat in
davits; the whole fleet docked, inboard, on skids! And exactly six
life-belts to go round a ship's company of over a hundred souls!
The second mate was clearing away the port life-boat with five of the
hands, one blaspheming, another in tears, more than one vowing with
reason that they would all be drowned, and the young officer himself in
a consuming agony of his own. At the break of the poop, almost all this
time, stood a slender figure in a pink wrapper, between a bearded man in
spectacles and a man with bushy whiskers in incongruous silk and
tassels. Dent wondered why he did not lend a hand; no, on second
thoughts he knew, and cursed the fellow in his heart. He did not mean to
leave her side. He meant to have the rescuing of her. Trust a Devenish
to play his own game! Denis was too busy to look twice at the trio, but
he seemed to see them all the time, and the vision galled him to
insensate effort.
"Take your time, take your time," cried the chief officer, all red
hook-nose and ginger moustache, an oilskin bonnet fastened under his
chin. "The old man's done his part. He'll go down in her. The rest hangs
on you and me."
The chief met the responsibility with his own tap of cold profanity,
not unaccompanied by shrewd cuff and calculated kick, as he
superintended the clearing of the other life-boat. As for the skipper,
it seemed that he had recovered his mettle to meet fresh trouble further
aft; they could hear him firing oaths and threatening lead; but when
Denis looked he could not get his eyes past the two men at the break of
the poop, for at that moment they were lashing one of the six life-belts
about a forlorn little figure in pink.
The port life-boat was ready first, and the third mate busy marshaling
the women and children in a helpless, eager, hesitating, exasperating
throng; but Miss Merridew was still detained by her friends on the poop.
The gripes had been cut, and Denis himself had sent the last chock
flying with a savage kick. He and his crew of five were in the act of
hooking the tackles to the thwarts. The chief mate was shouting a timely
word of advice.
"When you get her launched, and filled, and stand away in her----"
But Denis did not hear what he was to do then, for at that instant a
green sea lifted the port life-boat clean over the side with all six
men.
Denis's next thought was that the water was warmer than he should have
supposed, and his next but one that somebody was bent on braining him;
he was hit about the head, not once but repeatedly; but as soon as he
could see he knew the reason, for a dim glimmer was all there was to
see. The boat was riding bottom upward. He had come up under her. It
was the thwart that had been belabouring him. He caught hold of it,
pulled as at a horizontal bar, came up like a cork, and easily wormed
half his person between thwart and bilge.
In this position Denis regained breath, immersed to the waist, but with
no lack of air, and a bilge-cork handy for fresh supplies, until the
real danger occurred to him. The capsized life-boat rode the rollers
like a cradle, but at any moment she might shatter herself against the
cliffs. It was hardly the work of one for Denis to dive from underneath
her at the thought. The cliffs, however, were still far enough away; of
the wreck he could see nothing for the swell; but it was now broad
daylight.
He went under the boat again, and in about five minutes she righted
herself for no apparent reason. Denis was nearly stunned in the process,
nor was the advantage otherwise unmixed. The boat had come up full, and
Denis had now to bale for his life.
So she floated upon the cliffs, until the big seas began to break, when
she instantly capsized again. This time he succeeded in scaling the
keel, only to be dislodged as his perverse ship righted herself once
more. But the tenacity of the Dents was now uppermost in Denis, if
indeed he had any other quality left, and he was back in the boat when
she eventually struck upon the cliff. The shock hurled him overboard for
the last time, yet was so much less terrific than he had anticipated,
that he sought and found the reason as he swam clear. A minute ago the
boat had been within a few fathoms of the full face of the cliffs; at
the last instant a mouth had opened, and all she had done was to cannon
off the perpendicular wall of a strait so narrow as to be practically
invisible from without.
It was comprehensible enough. The tide was setting through this tiny
channel. The derelict life-boat was not alone; packages bobbed between
the towering walls; a table came riding by on its top, three legs still
standing, as Denis trod water. And on the table he partly floated and
partly swam into a bay which stood to the channel as a flagon to its
neck.
It was semicircular in shape, surrounded by cliffs as lofty and
precipitous as those without, but mercifully provided with a sandy beach
at the upper end. The castaway breathed a hoarse thanksgiving at the
saving sight. His smarting eyes had risen involuntarily, and as they
rested on the heights, the sun lit up some heath and bracken that
overhung the edge a few feet like a table-cloth: thence downward it was
sheer for one or two hundred to the beach below. At the base a couple of
caves opened romantically upon the yellow sand, but there was no sun for
them yet, or for the dancing waves that bore Denis and his table finally
to the land.
There in an instant he was staggering and stumbling under the abnormal
weight of his dripping and exhausted body. A few yards he reeled, then
fell prone upon the warm sand, digging in his fingers to the knuckles,
thinking of no mortal but himself, thanking his God for preserving him
as though he had made the voyage alone. Indeed the long voyage on the
ship was temporarily blotted out of mind by the little one in the boat.
And he a lover! And his love as good as drowned before his eyes!--for
not a vestige of the ship had he seen since the original mishap to the
port life-boat. It was a terrible reflection to Denis for the rest of
his days--but at the time he did not think of her--did not even picture
a certain shade of pink and ask himself what it meant and must mean to
him till his dying day. He just lay and held on to the warm sand, foot
and finger, because the earth heaved under him as the sea had done for
thirteen weeks, and his vitality was very low.
Consciousness might have left him altogether; he always wanted to think
so, for then he could have forgiven himself; but he was never satisfied
on the point. He only knew it was a faint far cry that roused him in the
end. But faint as it was, and never so far away, that thin high cry
brought the half-dead man to his feet like a gunshot at the ear.
A bar of sunlight slanted through the narrow heads, and in the sun the
blue waves were tipped with gold, and across the gold and the blue a
black spar floated with some sodden and discoloured rags.
But Denis was in no doubt as to their shade.