THE NIGHT--AND MORNING
With a rattle and scraping along the deck, the device with the two
prone figures desperately clinging to its surface, was halted and
tilted nearly level as it struck a spar and partially mounted upon it.
A sudden glare lit up the scene where the fire had burst through
shattered windows. Screams yet more appalling than those already
piercing the gale arose with the movement of the vessel. A picture
grotesque and monstrous was for one awful moment presented. The huge
iron entrails of the vessel heaved up into sight with her breaking.
Her funnels, masts, and superstructure pointed outward, strangely
horizontal. Innumerable loose things rattled down the decks. She
belched forth flame and clouds of steam, against which one huge iron
rib, rudely torn on its end to the semblance of a giant finger, seemed
pointing the way to inscrutable eternity.
The lantern, up at the "Inca's" masthead, describing an arc as it swept
across the heavens, was the last thing Grenville noted. He thought how
insignificantly it would sizzle in the sea! Then he and Elaine, with
raft and all, were flung far out, by the suddenly accelerated velocity
of the doomed leviathan, turning keel upwards as it sank. When they
struck, their puny float dived under like a crockery platter, shied
from some Titanic hand.
With all his strength the man clung fast to Elaine and the lattice-like
planking of their deck. It seemed to Grenville, still submerged, he
could never resist the force of the waves to wash them backwards to
death. It appeared, moreover, the raft would never return to the top.
A million bubbles broke about his ears. He felt they were diving to
deeps illimitable.
With a rush of waters drumming on their senses, it shot precipitately
upward at last, till air and spray greeted them together. Then, sucked
deep under, anew, and backward, by the gurgling vortex where the ship
had gone, and swirling about, pivoting wildly, as the raft now
threatened to plunge edge downward to the nethermost caverns of the
hungry sea, they met a counter-violence that forced it once more
towards the surface.
The boilers had burst in the steamer's hold, with confusion to all
those tides of suction. Erratically diving here and there, a helpless
prey to chaotic cross currents in all directions, the float swung
giddily in the mid abyss, while the water walls baffled one another.
Elaine, even more than Grenville, was bursting with explosive breath
when, at length, the raft came twisting once more to the chill, sweet
region of the gale. And even then strong currents drew it fiercely in
their wake before it rode freely on the waters.
Dripping and gasping, Grenville half rose to scan the troubled billows
for companions in distress. Not a sound could he hear, save the swash
of the waves. Not a light appeared in all that void, save the distant,
indifferent stars.
Elaine, too, stirred, and raised herself up to a posture half sitting.
She was hatless. Her hair was streaming down across her face and
shoulders in strands too wet for the wind to ravel. Her eyes were
blazing wildly.
"The ship?" she said. "What happened?"
"Sunk." He stood up. Their platform was steadying buoyantly as it
drifted in the breeze. "I can't even see the spot," he added,
presently. "We couldn't propel this raft to the place, no matter who
might be floating."
"It's terrible!" she whispered, faintly, as one afraid to accuse the
Fates aloud. "Couldn't we even---- You think they are all--all gone?"
"I'll shout," said Grenville, merely to humor the pity in her breast.
His long, loud "Halloo" rolled weirdly out across the wolf-like pack of
waves, three--four--a half dozen times.
There was not the feeblest murmur of response. Yet he felt that,
perhaps, one boatload at least might have sped away in safety.
"God help them!" he said, when the silence became once more
insupportable. "He only knows where any of us are!"
"After all we'd been through!" she shivered in awe. "If only we two
were really saved---- Oh, there must be land, somewhere about, if the
Captain was trying to reach a port! But, of course, this isn't even a
boat, and, perhaps, it will finally sink!"
He tried to summon an accent of hope to his voice.
"Oh, no; it will float indefinitely. It's sure to turn up somewhere in
the end."
"We haven't food--or even water," she answered him, understandingly.
"What shall we do to-morrow?"
"We are drifting rapidly northward. We may arrive somewhere by
to-morrow.... You'd better sit down. It taxes your strength to stand."
"God help us all!" she suddenly prayed in a broken voice, and, sinking
lower where she sat, was shaken by one convulsion of sobbing, in pity
for all she had seen. She had no thoughts left for their earlier,
personal encounter.
For a time Grenville stood there, braced to take the motion of the
raft. The wind continued brisk and undiminished. Aided by tides,
which had turned an hour earlier, to flow in its general direction, it
drove the raft steadily onward over miles of gray, unresting sea.
The water slopped up between the slats whereon Elaine was sitting. She
was cold, despite the tropic latitude. She was hopeful, only because
she wished to contribute no unnecessary worry to the man.
Grenville at length sat down at her side, but they made no effort to
converse. Elaine was exhausted by the sickening strain and the shock
of that tragic end. For an hour or more she sat there limply, being
constantly wet by the waves. She attempted, finally, to curl herself
down and make a pillow of her arm, and there she sank into something
akin to sleep.
Gently Grenville thrust out his foot and lifted her head upon the
cushion of flesh above his ankle. The night wore slowly on. Three
o'clock came grayly over the world-edge, where the waves made a
scalloped horizon.
Slowly the watery universe expanded, as the dawn-light palely
increased. By four Grenville's gaze could search all the round of the
ocean, but nothing broke either sky or sea.
Five o'clock developed merely color on the water, but no sign of a sail
or a funnel. Elaine still slept, while Grenville, cramped almost
beyond endurance, refused to move, and thereby disturb her slumber.
But at six, as he turned for the fiftieth time to scan the limited
horizon, he started so unwittingly, at sight of a tree and headland,
flatly erected, like a bit of sawed-out stage scenery, above the waste
of billows, that Elaine sat up at once.
"It's land!" he said. "We're drifting to some sort of land!"
She was still too hazy in her mind, and puzzled by their surroundings,
to grasp the situation promptly.
"Land?" she repeated. "Oh!" and a rush of hideous memories swept
confusedly upon her till she shivered, gazing at the water.
Grenville had risen to his feet, and Elaine now rose beside him.
Somewhat more of the flat, wide protrusion from the sea became thus
visible to both. It still appeared of insignificant extent, a blue and
featureless patch against the sky, with one half-stripped tree upon its
summit.
"I should say it's an island," Grenville added, quietly, restraining an
exultation that might prove premature. "It is still some miles away."
"There must be someone there," Elaine replied, with an eagerness that
betrayed her anxious state of mind. "Almost anyone would certainly
help us a little."
What doubts he entertained of some of the island inhabitants in this
particular section of the world, Sidney chose to keep to himself.
"It's land!" he said, as he had before. "That means everything!"
"Do you know of any island that ought to be in this locality?"
"I haven't the remotest notion where we are--except we are somewhere,
broadly speaking, in the neighborhood of the Malay peninsula. The
steamer must have drifted tremendously out of her course after we lost
our rudder."
"Have you been awake for long?"
"I haven't slept."
"Have you seen or heard anything of any of the others?"
"Not a sign.... We may find some of them, landed on this island."
He had no such hope, and this she felt. She summoned a heart full of
courage to meet the situation, however, and gazed off afar at the misty
terra incognita enlarging imperceptibly as they drifted deliberately
onward.
"It's fortunate," she said, "the steamers pass this way."
"Yes," he said, unwilling to shake this solitary hope that brightened
her uncertain prospect, but he knew they were leagues from the nearest
track that the ocean steamers plowed. "And I trust we'll find it
entirely comfortable while we're waiting," he added. "We're sure to
get dry and find something fit to eat."
She was silent for a moment. A sense of constraint was returning at
last for their scene of the previous day. "It seems to be rather far
away," was all she said.
"About another hour--if the breeze and tide continue favorable."
It was nearer an hour and a half, however, before they were finally
abreast the headland with the tree, and swinging and turning slowly by
the island's coast on the surface of a complicated tide.
The features of the land had developed practically everything usual to
this latitude except habitations of men. That it was entirely
surrounded by water was convincingly established. Indeed, it was not
an extensive outcrop of some ocean-buried range, and, despite the
luxuriance of its various patches of greenery and jungle, it was
decidedly rugged in formation.
The edge past which the raft was leisurely floating was a broken and
cavern-pitted wall of rock affording no promise of a landing. Above
this loomed the solitary tree that Grenville had seen from a distance.
Nothing suggestive of hearth smoke arose against the sky from one end
of the place to the other.
This one vital fact, in her excitement, Elaine entirely overlooked.
She likewise failed to note the look of concern that Grenville could
not have banished from his eyes. The prospect of reaching a dry, firm
soil outweighed her immediate worries.
"Couldn't we paddle in closer?" she said. "Where do you mean to land?"
"Where the Fates shall please," he answered, grimly. "Without even a
line for me to take ashore we must not be over fastidious."
"We could swim--if we have to," she told him, bravely. "We seem to be
floating farther out."
They were, at that particular moment. The powerful current carried
them swiftly seaward a considerable distance, till at length the raft
was drawn to a species of whirlpool, some two hundred yards in
diameter, the inner rim of which was depositing weed at the edge of
something like an estuary, indenting the shore of the island.
On the huge circumference of this whirlpool they were finally rounding
towards the one bit of beach that Grenville had been able to discover.
Yet when they approached within almost touching distance of this sunlit
strand, the current failed, permitting the breeze to waft them again
towards the center.
"Stand by to go ashore," said Grenville, resolving suddenly on his
course, and overboard he slipped, at the float's outer edge, and, using
his legs like a powerful frog, he pushed at the raft with sufficient
force to overcome the action of the wind.
For a moment his efforts seemed in vain--and then the clumsy affair
nosed reluctantly shoreward an inch, and was once more assisted by the
tide. Ten feet out he found the water shallow and, planting his feet
on the solid sand, drove the raft at once to the estuary's edge, where
Elaine leaped lightly ashore.
Some startled creature slipped abruptly into the pool that the tiny
harbor formed. This escaped Elaine's attention. A moment later the
raft rode scrapingly over a bar that all but locked the inlet, and
Grenville stood dripping on the sand.
"Welcome to our city," said he, an irrepressible emotion of joyousness
and relief possessing him completely at the moment, and, going at once
to the near-by growth, where a long stout limb had been broken from a
tree, he dragged this severed member forth to the beach and across the
estuary's mouth, where it effectually blocked the channel against the
raft's escape. Then he folded a couple of large-sized leaves with his
hands, secured each with a slender twig, and, giving one to Elaine for
a cap, placed the other upon his head.
Elaine was no less relieved than he, so elastic and buoyant is youth.
"The villages must be on the farther side," she said. "What language
do you suppose the natives speak?"
"Well--doubtless some Simian, in any case," he answered, having fancied
one movement half seen in the trees beyond was made by an ape or a
monkey. "I'd suggest you recall your fondness for fruit for breakfast."
She comprehended his meaning with amazing promptness. Her face took on
its serious expression.
"You don't believe we shall find the island inhabited? We shall have
only fruit this morning?"
"I am sure we shall find some fruit," he said, "and we must certainly
look for water."
A sense of helplessness and despair attacked Elaine momentarily. She
began to wonder, with alarm, how long they might be stranded on the
place--and what attitude Grenville might assume. She had thoroughly
comprehended the passion of his nature in the outburst she had seen. A
sense of distrust she dared not show came creeping to her mind.
"We must make the best of it, of course," she said, as calmly as
possible. "We can't even light a fire, I suppose."
"I certainly have no matches," he answered, cheerfully. "All I had
were in my coat. Suppose we explore the island first and leave despair
till after breakfast."
She met his gaze with fearless eyes that set his heart to pounding.
"I shall never despair," she answered, more bravely than she felt,--"at
least, I shall try to do my part, till we are taken off."
He understood the challenge in her attitude.
"I felt that from the first," he answered, easily. "Perhaps we'd
better begin by climbing up to the headland."
He caught up a short, heavy stick and turned about to force a way up
through the rocks and tangled growth between the shore and summit.
And what a figure he presented--even to the frightened girl, whose
anger still lingered in her veins--stripped, as he was, to his
shirtsleeves, a powerful, active being, masterful and unafraid. With a
strange, dreadful sense of isolation and the primitive, aye, even
primal, conditions in which they had been cast, she followed helplessly
at his heels for their first real look at the island.