BEHIND THE BARRIER
Gwen was unconscious as I lifted her, and a bruise showed red and
staring on her white temple. I laid her gently against the bulwark and
made a dash for the saloon. Lady Delahay lay in a dead faint at the
stair-foot, slipping there, I supposed, after her unceremonious bundling
through the door. I snatched the whiskey from the sideboard, laid the
good lady on the sofa and raced on deck again. Gerry was on his feet,
and the rest gathered themselves out of the tangle one by one.
Lessaution was the first to break silence.
“Behold,” he said triumphantly, “that we are on the top,” and he spread
abroad his little arms like a glorified cock a-crow, revelling in the
achievement of his hopes, and utterly ignoring the desperate result.
I shoved him impatiently on one side to get back to Gwen again. She was
leaning white-faced and motionless against the bulwark, and my heart
gave a queer thump when I saw how still she lay. I put my arm around
her, and ever so gently tilted a few drops of spirit between her lips. A
sigh and a gasp broke from her, and the color began to pass back into
her cheeks. She opened her eyes, and looked at me dreamily. A satisfied
little smile edged her mouth, and she settled back against my shoulder
with a murmur of content, nestling into the encirclement of my arm as
happily as if I was Denvarre’s self.
A blow fell upon my back, and I found Gerry standing over me.
“Give it me,” said he shortly, and I handed over the flask. He dashed
across to Vi again and began to dose her energetically, not desisting
till she coughed desperately and motioned him away with a weak gesture
of her hand. The whiskey began to circulate among the others rapidly.
“What’s happened?” said Gwen’s low voice from my shoulder, and she
opened her eyes again wearily. “Ah, I remember—the wave—and the rocks
and—and all that.” Her voice died away indistinctly as her eyes closed.
“It’s all right,” I whispered into the little ear that shone so rosy
pink against the dark sodden cloth of my smoking suit, “we’re all here.
Nothing’s amiss with anybody.”
Her hand fluttered out to me, and caught and felt my arm as if to
satisfy herself that one at least was there with whole body.
“Mother and Vi?” she questioned.
“Right as the mail,” quoth I cheerfully, “and Denvarre too,” I added
circumspectly, though I don’t know why she should have been shy to ask
for him.
“Ah, Lord Denvarre, and Mr. Garlicke, and the Professor, and Mr. Carver,
and everybody?”
“Everybody,” I agreed, “though we haven’t exactly called names yet.
Nothing but bruises, as far as I can tell.”
“I’m—I’m keeping you from doing things,” she said suddenly, scrambling
to her feet, “and I ought to look after mother.” She tottered as she
leaned against me, and I—well, of course I had to hold her up. Then I
heard Denvarre’s deep voice at my elbow.
“Can I be of any use?” he asked, with extraordinary politeness, and I
got a look between the eyes which told me I was taking more than mere
courtesy demanded.
She smiled sweetly at him, took his arm, and began to step uncertainly
toward the saloon. Then she stopped suddenly and turned toward me again.
“Thank you,” she said, looking over her shoulder, and went on. But I
never heard the words said quite like that, I think, for I could have
kissed her feet for them, as well as have cursed her for a heartless
coquette.
As they disappeared I began to look up the others. Rafferty and Waller
were blinking like owls, and slapping themselves, inquiringly. They had
been tumbled off the bridge like shot pheasants, and had been flung down
upon us as we spluttered and squirmed among the splinters. What with the
fall and hitting hard wood they were pretty considerably knocked out of
time. Lessaution was gesticulating wildly, asserting that he had
swallowed salt-water by the hectolitre. Forgetting to close his
astonished mouth when the wave struck us, he had engulfed it to the full
extent of his capacity, and he condemned it as the most poisonously cold
draught that had ever been forced upon him. But even this had failed to
subdue his jubilation at having attained to the heights of his desire.
Garlicke, who had been stunned and over-dosed with neat whiskey, was
coughing like a sick sheep, and the sympathetic Janson was slapping him
on the back. Poor Eccles was being slowly extracted from below the
bowsprit with a broken collar-bone, but was bearing lip against his
affliction with a Scotch impassiveness and a fat spirit-flask. He, it
appeared, was the only item in the list of casualties.
He and his underlings crept back to the stoke-hole and reported it three
feet deep in water, but the fires not wholly drowned. The shaft was
still workable, and by a little stirring of the clinker they gave us
enough steam to stay our vague circlings on our lake. We backed, as we
drifted shoreward, and swung the lead. We found twenty fathoms. So there
in the centre of that new-formed sea-pond we anchored, amidst an arid
expanse of rockbound desolation, and left discussion of our unpleasant
situation for drier circumstances. All hands slipped below to find such
changes of raiment as had been left unsoaked, and to rectify if possible
some of the more desperate confusion of saloon and cabin. And thus ended
that wondrous half-hour of terror and upheaval.
The dawn was breaking when we reassembled on deck to look round us. Over
the cliff-top behind us we could still see the island volcano belching
smoke and steam, but it was half the height it had stood the night
before. The lake on which we floated was about a mile long and
half-a-mile broad. It was bounded on the landward side by huge basaltic
crags that shot up ragged and desolate against a steel-blue sky.
To the right a rocky plain spread flat and unbroken for a mile or so,
terminating in uneven, boulder-strewn slopes. These were gashed and
riven in all directions by the clefts that ran black and shadowy into
the depths of the hill. To the left was a giant mountain, and down its
flanks crept river-like a stupendous glacier, our lake lapping its blue
crevasses at the nearer end. The water completely hid any moraine there
might have been before the irruption of the whelming wave. Between us
and the tops of the sea-cliffs was a narrow strand of rock, covered with
the silt of the retreating waters. Among the litter the bodies of one or
two sea-lions and seals were visible, their fur shining wet and glossy
in the light of the rising sun. On the shore beneath the far cliff a
whale was stranded, thwacking his huge tail resoundingly upon the
boulders as he vainly tried to thrust himself back into his native
element. Around us on every side great masses of sea-fowl swung and
wreathed themselves in white circles, filling the air with their cries
and their droppings, pouncing ever and again on the dead fish and
garbage that covered the surface, fighting and howking clamorously at
each other for the spoil.
It did not need a critical examination to show that we were in a trap.
The wave had borne us over the cliffs a hundred feet at least above
tide-level, and now they stood implacable between us and any chance of
an escape seaward. Here we were in a six hundred ton ship afloat in less
than six hundred acres of water. It was not an exhilarating prospect.
Naturally I turned to Waller in this seeming _impasse_. Of all the good
men who walk this uncertain earth of ours, I know none who inspire
confidence to the same extent as do those who go down to the sea in
ships. Their profession demands that they should briskly and at uneven
intervals extract themselves—or, more often others—from the tightest of
tight places. They fight the outrageous tactics of the wind and sea with
happy confidence. They defeat these eternal adversaries with no sort of
pride in their victories, but with painstaking completeness. And when
occasionally to them comes the overthrow, they meet it with a cheer. To
us of the land-lubbing profession they are, in their supreme
cocksureness, as little gods.
“Well, my lord,” said the captain succinctly, “it’s evident that before
this southern summer’s over we must send word to the Falklands. The ice
will close down on us in March. We can’t move the ship. We must send a
boat. It is a question of finding a place to launch it. As far as one’s
eye goes there’s nothing but a precipice for miles. We could perhaps
arrange pulleys to let the cutter down, but it would be difficult. It
would be easier to take her a few miles on rollers. I submit that the
crying necessity at the present moment is an outlet to the sea.”
“Well, then, of course we must find one,” said I cheerily, “and to find
one we must get ashore. Let’s have the launch out as soon as possible,”
and I walked away to announce his views to the others.
We breakfasted before we set out, while they were setting the boat
afloat and getting up steam in her tiny boiler. The ladies had not yet
reappeared, so we were all able to voice our emotions and hazard our
opinions without fear of making them uneasy. Lessaution as usual led the
conversational _mêlée_.
His knowledge of seismic effects and huge waves produced thereby seemed
intimate. He demonstrated that it was an honor to have been associated
in this astounding upheaval, whence few had formerly returned alive. He
cited instances from Portugal to Polynesia of similar disasters, giving
gruesome categories of the demolished. He went into details that turned
us from our food. It was only by the show of a universal unbelief in his
theories, and a consequent rise of his sentiments to higher planes of
passion, that we finally found quiet. He departed on deck furious with
our want of intelligence, which he designated as of the most hog-like.
We found him all agog for adventure, though still contemptuous, when we
rejoined him.
The little oil dinghy was snapping and fussing away by this time, and
Gerry, Denvarre, and I tumbled into her with the Frenchman, and were set
ashore in five minutes. First of all we ran up the slope between us and
the cliff to look seawards.
But for the steam-cloud that hung heavily over the ruined islands six
miles away, and for the floating bodies of a few seals and smaller
whales, there was no sign of the upheaval of the night before. The sea
was lapping sleepily against the ice-smoothed rocks below, gurgling in
the crannies, and the sun glittered on a still and radiant surface.
A northwest wind was just beginning to touch the glassy surface, and the
floe was swinging back almost imperceptibly toward the cliffs, returning
from the distance to which it had been carried by the out-suck. Terns
and kittywakes were dipping backward and forward with shrill cries,
hovering and quarrelling over the lumps of dead fish and other remnants
of the turmoil. Here and there a sea-lion rose out of the depths to roll
and play with soft splashings in the sunshine, or to stop and stare up
the cliffs at us with stupid, innocent eyes.
The atmosphere was keen and clear as a winter’s day in the Engadine, and
we could follow the circling unbroken line of cliffs to the far horizon.
There was an exhilarating nip in the air, though the sunlight that
poured back from rock and sea made it quiver hazily. It was a glorious
day, and would have been an uplifting one if things had not gone so
perversely and entirely wrong. For instead of enjoying this heavenly
sunshine on the yacht’s deck in lazy contentment, we had to tramp weary
miles in search of what might be unattainable.
There was no sort of doubt but that we were in a serious fix. The
continuous and implacable wall of rock stretched, for all we could tell,
to the world’s end. There was no escape for us except by sea, and we had
no proper means of launching out into the deep. We were as surely held,
perched up as we were on these desolate summits, as if we had been
behind the bars and bolts of a prison.
We walked about four miles along that remorseless line of crags. Never a
break did we find, never a vestige of a shallow at its foot. Look where
we would was green water unplumbable, and not so much as the suspicion
of any shoal that could give us launching room for a boat.
We returned silent and depressed, the full significance of our plight
just working into our minds. Even Lessaution, though he really concerned
himself little about a departure, which he would have willingly deferred
a month at least, was affected by the general dejection, and gave up
attempting to instruct us further on our surroundings. Gerry and I added
this new weight to our desperation phlegmatically, feeling that the cup
of our misery had been full before, and might, for all we cared, run
over unstayed. The four of us had much the effect of hounds slinking
home out of covert, having been left therein during the run of the
season.
We slouched down the shores of our little lake, and somehow the ship
seemed to have come nearer since we started. How or why Waller had
considered it necessary to move her, I could not conceive. Nor could we
find the great boulder by which we had landed, though we felt sure that
we had followed the same direction to it from the cliff-top.
We waved listlessly with our handkerchiefs for the launch to be sent to
us, waiting at the water’s edge therewhile. Denvarre was still grubbing
about among the rocks farther up the stones. Suddenly he gave a yell.
“Why, the water’s sunk,” he bawled. “Here’s the rock we landed on. The
absurd lake’s running away.”
He was standing forty or fifty yards above us and we ran and joined him.
As we looked higher up the sloping shore, we recognized what had been
the water’s edge when we landed. There was no sort of doubt that the
new-formed lake was leaking out again rapidly, and that our ship would
very shortly be in a regular dry dock. We went on to consider that if
the yacht took ground on that flat, rocky bottom she would careen over,
and probably smash in her sides. We should be left homeless amid that
desolation—a pretty kettle of fish.
As soon as the dinghy had snorted across and taken us aboard, we sought
Waller and explained to him our discovery. Occupied with other matters
he had never noticed the shrinkage, and had the lead hove at once. It
gave six fathoms less than before, but—what was more satisfactory—showed
fourteen still remaining. We knew the sea-level could not be more than
fifty feet below us, so unless the water was draining away into some
unimaginable gulf, there would remain thirty feet or more for our good
ship to float in.
This was cheering in some ways, though it detracted in no wise from the
hopelessness of our situation from the point of view of a possible
rescue.
We resolved therefore that at earliest dawn a select expedition should
set forth to carry inquiry further into the land, taking with it arms,
food, and the necessary accoutrement for two days at least, that every
portion of the seaward face of the cliffs might be examined for the
greatest distance to which we could transport a boat. The party was to
consist of Denvarre, Gerry, one sailor—name of Parsons—and myself.
Lessaution we judged it best to leave, as we felt sure that his build
did not fit him for prolonged exercise across the boulder-strewn
confusion of this land of desolation. We felt, too, that he could amuse
himself in delving around the foreshore of the lake, where antiquities
were just as probable as further west; we said nothing to him of our
project. Garlicke preferred to stay and “protect the ladies,” as he put
it, and Waller’s business was on his ship. We four therefore spent the
afternoon in dozing, to make up for the exertions of the night, and to
prepare for the toils of the morrow. We rose for dinner, and endeavored
to pass a cheerful evening, but Gerry took his cigar on deck at an early
opportunity, unable to sustain the conflict with his natural passions
which the sight of Garlicke’s attentions to Vi provoked, and I fought
down my overmastering desire to throttle Denvarre, with a stolid
determination that made me extremely unsociable, and a most apathetic
conversationalist. So uneasily the after-dinner period passed, and we
turned in to dream of the undying fires of Erebus in collusion with the
outbursting of an uncontrolled and ever-growing Niagara.
Now behold us next morning setting forth into the unknown, with a great
waving of handkerchiefs from the good folk on deck. We crossed the
moat—as I christened it—scrambled ashore, and started along the incline
of bare rock that led toward the cliff-tops. The going after the first
half-mile was desperately rough. Great slab-like boulders, round and
smooth-faced, lay about in gigantic masses, and the clefts between them
were wide and deep. Laboriously we hopped from one to the other, getting
many a bruise and thump as we slid upon their glassy surfaces. The slope
that led up from the lake edge to the western hills was like a great
moraine. It ran to the foot of ranged rocks that buttressed the lower
shoulders of the peak. The quantities of pebbles were arranged in
irregular ridge and furrow formation, growing in size and smoothness as
we approached the cliff face. We proceeded excessively slowly;
half-an-hour’s toil took us a bare mile.
As we paused and looked round, wiping our brows, a yell came sharply
through the still air, and an extraordinary object staggered into our
vision. Round the corner of basalt which hid the ship from us emerged a
thing like a monstrous beetle. With frantic gesticulation it beckoned us
to stop. It was with some difficulty we recognized the familiar form of
Lessaution, for he had done his best to disguise it. His peaceful person
had assumed the fantastic presentment of a mediæval buccaneer. According
to his lights, I suppose, it was the strictly correct habiliment of the
explorer.
A blue cap, something like that assigned to statues of Liberty, dangled
from his poll, flopping with studied _abandon_ over his left ear. He
wore a baggy Norfolk jacket, with pockets erupting all over it like
sartorial warts; huge gray worsted stockings came over his knees and
half-way up his thighs, and immense brown boots were laced over his
skinny little calves. In his hand was an axe; round his waist was a
belt; from this dangled a sheath-knife, flanked by an enormous Colt’s
revolver; above his left shoulder flaunted the muzzle of a shot-gun, the
butt of which seriously incommoded the play of his right elbow. He stood
forth the pirate of cheap fiction confessed.
He was scrambling over the boulders frantically. Before he had traversed
twenty yards of the uncertain footing of the moraine he fell upon his
face. He found the position so much to his liking that he remained on
hands and knees, squirming clatteringly over the glassy pebbles. We felt
that Gerry was by no means inapt in likening him to a caterpillar on
eggs. We sat down to smile, take our breath, and let him overtake us.
This he did in the space of about ten minutes, grunting like an
overdriven cab-horse, glowing with perspiration, and begrimed with
unutterable dirt. He sank with a bump of exhaustion upon a handy slab of
granite and began his reproaches.
“You would leave behind your little Lessaution?” he queried accusingly.
“Me, who pant, do you see, to gaze upon the wonders of the land. Where
had you the heart to treat him so?” and his brown eyes directed an
upbraiding glance upon us that might have melted the very stones.
We explained that it was his comfort that had been our first thought,
and that we had deemed the way too long and the work too arduous for
him. We hinted that the ladies would experience a vivid desolation
deprived of his company. We had believed that he would have found ample
room and opportunity for research in the immediate vicinity of the
vessel. He was not to be appeased.
“No,” he replied; “when they told me that you had set forth, and unknown
to me, I asked myself how I had offended you. Is it, I said, that there
can be jealousy between two nations who share the responsibilities of
civilization? Do they wish that France shall not have her part in this
adventure? I could not believe it. I call for the boat. I accoutre
myself”—and he pointed with pride to the armory that swayed about him,
“and I follow with great speed. Let me offer my comradeship in this
expedition. Give me my part in your perils,” and he flung out his arms
entreatingly.
How could one refuse a request so touchingly put forth? We welcomed him
to our company with effusion, though with inward annoyance. We felt that
our progress would of necessity be a great deal tardier in consequence,
but in mere charity and courtesy nothing else was to be done.
He further imparted the information that he was not so young as when he
was of the foremost runners of the Lycée, and that his little heart was
going pit-a-pat. In effect, with this so great racing it quivered like
an _automobile_. But of what consideration was this when he was once
again amongst his dear rascals, and accompanying them in their valiant
purpose of research? One minute to regain the even tenor of his pulses,
and then, forward! Let us press on to victories.
We counselled him bluntly to keep his breath for pure purposes of
locomotion, and after a slight rest set forward again to our monotonous
stumblings among the endless reaches of heaped stone.