When Tess came home to supper that night she was all changed again: her
looks gay once more, and her step light, and a sort of flutter about
her lips--as if she was wanting to smile and was trying not to--and a
soft look in her eyes that I never had seen there, but knew the meaning
of and found the worst of all.
I couldn't eat my supper; and got up presently and went out leaving
it--my mother looking after me wondering--and walked up and down on the
cliff-edge in the darkness with my heart all in a blaze of hate for
John. For a good while I had been looking for what I knew was in the
way of coming to me; but it was different, and worse, and hurt more
than I had counted on, when at last it came. Out there in the darkness
I staid until the night was well on--not wanting for a while to hear
the sound of Tess's voice nor to lay eyes on her. Not until I was
sure, by the lights being out in the house, that she'd gone to bed, did
I go in again. My mother was waiting waking for me. She came to me in
the dark and put her arms around me and kissed me; by which I knew that
Tess had been telling her--and knew, too, she always having looked to
the wedding of us, that her heart was sore along with mine. But I could
not bear even her soft touch on the hurt that I had. I just kissed her
back again and broke away from her and went to bed. And in the very
early morning, not having slept much, I slipped out of the house before
either she or Tess was stirring and down to my boat and so away to sea.
What I was after was to get some quiet time to myself that would steady
me before I had things out with John. I was not clear in my mind how
I meant to settle with him. I did know, though, that I meant to have
some sort of a fair fight with him that would end in my killing him or
in him killing me--and I knew that to tackle him with my head all in a
buzz would be to throw too many chances his way. And so I got away in
my boat, at the day-dawn, to the sea's quietness: where I could clear
my head of the buzzing that was in it and put some sort of shape to my
plans.
Had I been in my sober senses that morning I never should have gone
away seaward at all. Backing up the promise of the yellow sunset of
the night before, pink clouds were showing in the eastern sky as I
started; and as I sailed on in loneliness--standing straight out from
the land on a soft leading wind from the south-west westerly--the pink
turned to a pale red and then to a deep red, and at last the sun came
up out of the water a great ball of fire. The look of the sea, too,
all in an oily bubble, and the set of the ground-swell, told me plain
enough--even without the sunrise fairly shouting it in the ears of
me--that a change of wind was coming before mid-day, and that pretty
soon after the wind shifted it would be blowing a gale.
I will say this, though: If I'd missed seeing the red sunrise--and
all the more if I'd been full of happiness and my wits gone a
wool-gathering--I might have thought from the look and the feel of the
water, and from the set of the high clouds, that the wind would not
blow to hurt anything for a good twelve hours. That much I'll say by
way of excuse for John. Like enough he slept late that morning--through
lying awake the night before thinking what he'd be likely to
think--and so missed seeing the sun's warning. When he did get away in
his boat it was well past eight o'clock; and there was no man on the
beach when he started, so they told me, to counsel him. And, all being
said, even a good sailor--and that John was--starting off as he was to
buy a wedding-ring might not look as sharp as he ought to look at the
sea and at the sky.
As to my own sailing seaward--I seeing the storm-signals and knowing
the meaning of them--I have no more to say than that I was hot for
a fight with anything that morning, and didn't care much what I had
it with or how it came. Anybody who knows how to sail a boat, and to
sail one well, knows what joy there is in getting the better of foul
winds and rough seas for the mere fun of the thing; but there is still
more joy in a tussle of that sort when you are in a towering rage.
Then you are ready to push the fight farther by taking more and bigger
death-chances: since a man in bitter anger--at least in such bitter
anger as I was in then--does not care much whether he pulls through
safely or gets drowned. And so I went on my course seaward, on that
soft wind blowing more and more lazily, until the coast line was lost
in the water behind me: knowing well enough, and glad to have it that
way, that the wind would lull and lull until it failed me, and that
then I would get a blow out of the northeast that would give me all the
fight I wanted, and perhaps a bit to spare!
But because I meant my fight to be a good one, and meant to win it, I
got myself ready for it. When the wind did fail--the sun was put out
by that time, and from high up in the northeast the scud was flying
over me--I took in and snugged away everything but my mainsail, and
put a double reef in that with the reef-points knotted to hold. Then
I waited, drifting south a little--the flood having made half an hour
before, and the set of the ebb taking me that way.
I did not have to wait long. Out of the mist, banked thick to the
north-eastward, came the moaning that a strong wind makes when it's
rushing down on you; then from under the mist swept out a dark riffle
that broke the oily bubble of the water and put life into it; and
then the wind got to me with a bang. There was more of it than I had
counted on having at the first, showing that the gale behind it was a
strong one and coming down fast; but I had the nose of my boat pointed
up to meet it, and with no more than a bit of a rattle I got away
close-hauled. There was no going back to Southwold, of course. What I
was heading for was the Pakefield Gat into the Stanford Channel, and so
to the harbour at Lowestoft; and I pretty well knew from the first that
no matter how close I bit into the wind--and my boat was a weatherly
one--I had my work cut out for me if I meant to keep from going to
leeward of the Pakefield Gat in the gale that was coming on.
Go to leeward I did, and badly. When I raised the coast again, and a
lift of the mist gave me my bearings, I saw that Kessingland tower was
my landfall. As to working up from there to the Pakefield Gat--the
edge of the gale by that time being fairly on me--I knew that it was
clean impossible. I still had two chances left--one being to cross the
Barnard by the Wreck Gat, and the other to round into Covehithe Channel
across the tail of the bank. To the first of these the wind would help
me; but I knew that even with the wind's help it would be ticklish
work trying to squeeze through that narrow place at the half ebb--when
the strong outset of the current would be meeting the inpour of the
storm-driven sea. It would be better, so I settled after a minute's
thinking, to pass that chance and take the other--which would be a
fairly sure one, though a close one too. And so I wore around--with a
bad wallow in the trough of the sea that set everything to shaking for
a minute--and got on my new course pretty well on the wind.
Just as I was making ready for wearing, and so had my hands full, I
glimpsed the sail of a boat in the mist up to windward; and when I was
come about she was abeam to leeward, showing her high weather side to
me, not twenty yards away. Then I saw that it was John Heath's boat,
and that John was standing up alone in her at the helm. Why the fool
had not staid safe in Lowestoft harbour, God only knows. But it's only
fair to him, again, to say that he must have got away from Lowestoft
a good while before the wind shifted; and like enough he would have
worked down to Southwold, and got his boat safe beached there before
trouble came, if the calm had not caught him sooner than it did me--he
being all the time close under the land.