THE CRABS
“How do you mean?” said he.
She explained. It was like her to forget and spend the precious time
lazing and playing about with “wuzzards.” The sun was taking his plunge
into the sea, darkness was upon them, and she could not find her way
back in the dark. Moon or starlight would be of no use. The thriddy
spars of the _Sarah_ and _Juan_, invisible from the sandspit even in
daylight, would be picked up only several miles out. She could not
steer by the stars, and there was a great sweep of current setting
sou’east which might take them to Timbuktu. Satan would have done
the business right enough blindfolded; but she was a night-funk, she
confessed it. Night put her all abroad and mixed up everything in her
mind so that front seemed back and west seemed east, besides filling
the world with “hants.” She had “near died” of fright fetching that
sack from the cache the other night.
All this in a lugubrious voice not far from tears, as they stood facing
each other, and lit by the remorselessly setting sun.
“All right,” said Ratcliffe. “Cheer up. We’ll just have to stick here
till daybreak. We have some grub left and lots of water. No use
pulling the boat farther down. But I expect Satan will be in a stew.”
“I reckon he’ll know,” said Jude. “The weather’s all right. He’d scent
if we were in any trouble, and he’d borrow Cark’s boat to hunt for us.”
“How do you mean ’scent’?”
“He’d smell trouble; he’s awful sharp.”
“Sort of telepathy.”
“Which?”
“Mind reading.”
“I dunno, but I reckon he’s not worrying, and if he was he’d be
alongside here pronto.”
Her face was like a buttercup in the extraordinary light of that
sunset. The whole sky was buttercup color; the great sea was seething
round the great sun, now half-gone, churning and washing round him, a
blazing globe sinking in boiling gold.
Golden gulls, golden sky, golden sea,—all fading at last, the purple
of night breaking through, rushing dark from the west across the sea.
The shipwrecked mariners lost their golden faces and hands, and,
as they sat down with their backs to the dinghy and the remains of
the “grub” between them, laughing gulls, passing like ghosts in the
twilight, hailed them, while the stars broke out to look above the
darkness and the tepid wind.
There is nothing like eating to keep up the spirits. Jude got less
doleful. In the stir of mind caused by the new circumstances she had
clean forgotten the “hants,” nor did she remember them for a moment
now, as she chatted away in an uplift of spirits caused by the food
and the recognition that to be downcast was futile.
“I sure am a mutt!” said Jude. “Reckon I was born on a Friday—they say
mugs are all born on a Friday. We should a been off two hours before
sundown, and there I was talking and listening to your yarns, and here
we are on the beach—oh, mommer!” Then after a long pause:
“What’s them stars, do you reckon?”
“Suns.”
“Gar’n!”
“It’s so.”
“Say!”
“Yes.”
“Did you notice anything looking north before sundown, or were you
asleep sitting on that spar?”
“I did see something over there; looked like the ghost of a cloud.”
“That was Rum Cay, and a sure sign the weather’s going to hold. It
lifts itself into the sky like that, evening times; you can see it from
Lone Reef too.”
“I wish I had known that and I should have looked at it more
particularly. I was thinking.”
“What was you thinking about?”
He laughed. “My people.”
“Which people?”
“My relations.”
“What made you think of them for?”
“You.”
“Me?”
“Yes, I was wondering what you’d think of them if you saw them,
especially my aunts.”
“Well, you take the bun,” said Jude, “you sitting there thinking of
your aunts and me running with them eggs!” She stopped of a sudden; her
memory had suddenly conjured up the “wuzzard.”
“That cuss!” said Jude.
“Which?”
“The one I saw.” She wriggled close to him till their sides touched.
“S’posin’?”
“Yes?”
“S’posin’ he was to take it into his head to do a walk along here?”
“Don’t you bother about him,” said Ratcliffe. “I’d kick him into the
sea—besides, he was only an optical illusion. It was my stupid talk
did it.”
“I’m not bothering,” said Jude, “only it’s a durned long time till
morning. N’matter,” she rested her hand on his shoulder in all the
familiarity of companionship; then she shifted her hand from his left
to his right shoulder so that her arm was across his back, and then she
fell silent and he felt something poking into his left shoulder—it was
her nose! She had evidently under his protection forgotten “hants” and
“wuzzards,” forgotten him, even, for she was humming a sort of tune
under her breath.
He knew exactly her mental condition,—mind wandering,—and it
was a strange feeling to be cuddled like that by a person who had
half-forgotten his existence, except as a protection against fears,
especially when he remembered her recent antagonism that had developed
so mysteriously and as mysteriously vanished. He slipped his left arm
round her to make her more comfortable. Then her nose gave place to her
cheek against his shoulder and she yawned. He could feel her ribs under
her guernsey and the beat of her heart just beneath the gentle swell of
her breast. He remembered her coat, which was in the dinghy. She had
thrown it in as an after-thought in case of a change of weather, but
had never worn it.
“Hadn’t you better put on your coat?” asked he.
“Lord! I don’t want no coat.”
“But the night air.”
“Nothing wrong with it. It’s a Gulf wind an’ as hot as a blanket—ain’t
you warm enough?”
“Lots.”
“Ever slept out before?”
“Only in a tent—have you?”
“Which?”
“Slept out before?”
“Heaps o’ times. But I wouldn’t sleep out in a full moon.”
“Why?”
“’Cause I don’t want to wake up with my face twisted to one side like
a flat fish—mean to say you don’t know?—either that or a chap goes
loony. But there’s no fear tonight; it’s only a half-moon. The only
thing I’m frightened of is crabs. We’ve gotta keep our eyes skinned for
crabs. This mayn’t be a crab spit; then again, there’s no knowing but
it may.”
“What on earth is a crab spit?”
Jude raised her face from his shoulder and sat up a bit straighter as
though the question had roused her.
“Place where crabs come, hun’erds of millions of them, same as Crab
Cay. There’s crabs everywhere of course, but not in shiploads same as
Crab Cay. Three men were drifted ashore there once, and after sundown
up came the crabs and fought them all night, and there was nothing but
their skeletons left in the morning. We’d better take it turn about to
keep watch.”
She released herself from his arm and scrambling about in the starlight
on her hands and knees began to make a sand pillow.
“There you are!” said she. “Stick your head on it; I’ll take first
watch. You be port watch, and I’ll be sta’board.”
“No, you won’t! I will. I’m not a bit sleepy.”
“Neither’m I. Stick your head on it. You’ve gotta turn in or you’ll be
no use tomorrow.”
He did as he was bid, and Jude took her place sitting on the sand close
to him.
“Give us a call if anything happens,” said he.
“You bet!” replied Jude.
Then he closed his eyes. A moment before and he had been leagues away
from sleep, but with the compulsory closing of his eyes a drowsiness
began to steal on him. The wind had died to nothing and in the dead
silence of the night the sound of the waves on the mile and a half of
spit came loud and low, rhythmical, mesmeric. It was as though the
tide of sleep were rising to drift him off.
Now, suddenly, he was walking in the blazing sunlight on the spit, and
toward him was walking the “wuzzard,”—a little old man in a cocked
hat with a spyglass under his arm, who vanished, giving place to Jude,
carrying a hatful of gulls’ eggs.
Then Skelton landed from somewhere, and Jude, turning, was calling him
a “pesky brute.”
The words broke the dream, and he opened his eyes. The moon had just
risen, touching the spit, and in her light, seated on the sand propped
up on its stilts, a spirit crab, white as snow with ruby eyes, was
staring at Jude.
Drugged with weariness and ozone, he closed his eyes for one moment,
determined to rise up and drive the thing away in one moment. When he
opened his eyes again the sun was rising.