MAROONED
A cry in the windy dusk; a sudden, hollow booming overhead; a vision of
countless wings in panic, sketched in black upon a background of dulled
silver; two heavy detonations and, with the least of intervals, a
third; three vivid flashes of crimson and gold stabbing the purple
twilight; and then the acrid reek of smokeless drifting into Amber's
face, while from the sky, where the V-shaped flock had been, two
stricken bundles of blood-stained feathers fell slowly, fluttering....
Honking madly, the unscathed brethren of the slain wheeled abruptly
and, lashed by the easterly gale, fled out over the open sea,
triangular formation dwindling rapidly in the clouded distances.
Shot-gun poised abreast, his keen eyes marking down the fall of his
prey, Amber stood without moving, exultation battling with a vague
remorse in his bosom--as always when he killed. Quain, who had dropped
back a pace after firing but one shot and scoring an unqualified miss
at close range, now stood plucking clumsily, with half frozen fingers,
at an obstinate breech-lock. This latter resisting his every wile, his
temper presently slipped its leash; as violently as briefly he swore:
"Damn!"
"Gladly," agreed Amber, without turning. "But what?"
"This gun!"
"Your gun?"
"Of course." There were elaborations which would not lend themselves to
decorative effect upon a printed page.
"Then damn it yourself, Quain; I'm sure you can do it ever so much more
thoroughly than I. But what's the matter?"
"Rim-jammed cartridge," explained Quain between his teeth. The lock
just then yielding to his awkward manipulation, stock and barrel came
apart in his hands. "Just my beastly luck!" he added gratuitously. "It
wouldn't've been me if--! How many'd you pot, Davy?"
"Only two," said Amber, lowering his weapon, extracting the spent
shells, and reloading.
"Only _two!_" The information roused in Quain a demon of sarcasm.
Fumbling in his various pockets for a shell-extractor, he grunted his
disgust. "Here, lend us your thingumbob; I've lost mine. Thanky....
Only two! How many'd you expect to drop, on a snapshot like that?"
"Two," returned Amber so patiently that Quain requested him,
explosively, to go to the devil. "If you don't mind," he said, "I'll go
after my ducks instead. You'll follow? They're over there, on our way."
And accepting Quain's snort for an affirmative he strolled off in the
direction indicated, hugging his gun in the crook of his arm.
Fifty yards or so away he found the ducks, side by side in a little
hollow. "Fine fat birds," he adjudged them sagely, weighing each in his
hand ere dropping it into his lean game-bag. "This makes up for a lot
of cold and waiting."
Satisfaction glimmering in his grave dark eyes, he lingered in the
hollow, while the frosty air, whipping madly through the sand-hills,
stung his face till it glowed beneath the brown. But presently, like
the ghost of a forgotten kiss, something moist and chill touched gently
his cheek, and was gone. Startled, he glanced skywards, then extended
an arm, watching it curiously while the rough fabric of his sleeve was
salted generously with fine white flakes. Though to some extent
apprehended (they had been blind indeed to have ignored the menace of
the dour day just then dying) snow had figured in their calculations as
little as the scarcity of game. Amber wondered dimly if it would work a
change in their plans, prove an obstacle to their safe return across
the bay.
The flurry thickening in the air, a shade of anxiety colored his mood.
"This'll never do!" he declared, and set himself to ascend a nearby
dune. For a moment he slipped and slid vainly, the dry sand treacherous
to his feet, the brittle grasses he clutched snapping off or coming
away altogether with their roots; but in time he found himself upon the
rounded summit, and stood erect, straining the bitter air into panting
lungs as he cast about for bearings.
Behind him a meagre strip of sand held back a grim and angry sea;
before him lay an eighth of a mile of sand-locked desolation, and then
the weltering bay--a wide two miles of leaping, shouting waves,
slate-coloured but white of crests. Beyond, seen dimly as a wall
through driving sheets of snow, were the darkly wooded rises of the
mainland. In the west, to his left, the blank, impersonal eye of the
light-house, its pillar invisible, winked red, went out, and flashed up
white. Over all, beneath a low and lustreless sky as flat as a plate,
violet evening shadows were closing in like spectral skirts of the
imminent night. But, in the gloom, their little cat-boat lay occult to
his searching gaze.
Quain's voice recalling him, he turned to discover his host stumbling
through a neighbouring vale, and obeying a peremptory wave of the elder
man's hand, descended, accompanied by an avalanche in miniature.
"Better hurry," shouted Amber, as soon as he could make himself heard
above the screaming of the gale. "Wind's freshening; it looks like mean
weather."
"Really?" Quain fell into step at his side. "You 'stonish me. But the
good Lord knows I'm willin'. Whereabout's the boat?"
"Blessed if I know: over yonder somewhere," Amber told him, waving
toward the bay-shore an arm as vaguely helpful as his information.
"Thank you so much. Guess I can find her all right. Hump yo'self,
Davy."
They plodded on heavily, making fair progress in spite of the hindering
sand. Nevertheless it had grown sensibly darker ere they debouched upon
the frozen flats that bordered the bay; and now the wind bore down upon
them in full-winged fury, shrieking in their ears, searing their eyes,
tearing greedily at the very breath of their nostrils, and searching
out with impish ingenuity the more penetrable portions of their
clothing.
For a moment Quain paused, irresolute, peering right and left, then
began to trudge eastwards, heavy boots crunching the thin sedge-ice. A
little later they came to the water's edge and proceeded steadily along
it, Quain leading confidently. Eventually he tripped over some
obstacle, stumbled and lurched forward and recovered his balance with
an effort, then remained with bowed head, staring down at his feet.
"Hurt yourself, old man?"
"No!" snapped Quain rudely.
"Then what in--"
"Eh?" Quain roused, but an instant longer looked him blankly in the
eye. "Oh," he added brightly--"oh, she's gone."
"The boat----?"
"The boat," affirmed Quain, too discouraged for the obvious retort
ungracious. He stooped and caught up a frayed end of rope, exhibiting
it in witness to his statement. "Ain't it hell?" he inquired
plaintively.
Amber's gaze followed the rope, the further end of which was rove
through the ring of a small grapnel anchor half buried in the spongy
earth. "Gone!" he echoed dismally.
"Gone away from here," said Quain deliberately, nodding at the rope's
end. "The tide floated her off, of course; but how this happened is
beyond me. I could kill Antone." He named the Portuguese labourer
charged with the care of the boats at Tanglewood. "It's his job to see
that these cables are replaced when they show signs of wear." He cast
the rope from him in disdain and wheeled to stare baywards. "There!" he
cried, levelling an arm to indicate a dark and fleeting shadow upon the
storm-whipped waters. "There she goes--not three hundred feet off. It
can't be five minutes since she worked loose. I don't see why...! If it
hadn't been for that damned cartridge...! It's the devil's own luck!"
A blur of snow swept between boat and shore; when it had passed the
former was all but indistinguishable. From a full heart Quain
blasphemed fluently.... "But if she holds as she stands," he amended
quickly, his indomitable spirit fostering the forlorn hope, "she'll go
aground in another five minutes--and I know just where. I'll go after
her."
"The deuce you will! How?"
"There's an old skimmy up the shore a ways." Already Quain was moving
off in search of it. "Noticed her this morning. Daresay she leaks like
a sieve, but at worst the water's pretty shoal inshore, hereabouts."
"Cold comfort in that."
"Better than none, you amiable--"
"Can you swim?" Amber demanded pointedly.
"Like a fish. And you?"
"Not like a fish."
"Damn!" Quain brought up short with a shin barked against a thwart of
the rowboat he had been seeking, and in recognition of the mishap
liberally insulted his luck.
Amber, knowing that his hurt was as inconsiderable as his ill-temper,
which was more than half-feigned to mask his anxiety, laughed quietly,
meanwhile inspecting their find with a critical eye.
"You don't seriously mean to put off in this crazy hen-coop, do you?"
he asked.
"Just precisely that. It's the only way."
"It simple madness. I won't--"
"You don't want to stay here all night, do you?"
"No, but--"
"Well, then, lend us a hand and don't stand there grumbling. Be
thankful for what you've got, which is me and my enterprise."
"Oh, all right."
Together they put their shoulders to the bows of the old, flat-bottomed
rowboat, with incredible exertions uprooting it from its ancient bed,
and at length had it afloat.
Panting, Quain mopped his forehead with a handkerchief much the worse
for a day's association with gun-grease, and peered beneath his hand
into the murk that veiled the bay.
"There she is," he declared confidently: "aground." He pointed. "I'll
fetch up with her in no time."
But Amber could see nothing in the least resembling the catboat, and
said so with decision.
"She's there, all right," insisted Quain. "'Tain't my fault if you're
blind. Here, hold this, will you, while I find me a pole of some sort."
He thrust into Amber's hand an end of rotten painter at which the
rowboat strained, and wandered off into the night, in the course of
time returning with an old eel-pot stake, flotsam of some summer storm.
"Pure, bull-headed luck!" he crowed, jubilant, brandishing his trophy;
and jumped into the boat. "Now sit tight till I come back?...
Huh--what?"
"I'm coming, too," Amber repeated quietly.
"The hell you are! D'you want to sink us? What do you think this is,
anyway--an excursion steamer? You stay where you are and--I say--take
care of this till I come back, like a good fellow."
He thrust the butt of his shot-gun into Amber's face, and the latter,
seizing it, was rewarded by a vigorous push that sent him back half a
dozen feet. At the same time the painter slipped from his grasp and
Quain, lodging an end of the eel-pot stake on the hard sand bottom, put
his weight upon it. Before Amber could recover, the boat had slid off
and was melting swiftly into the shadows.
After a bit Quain's voice came back: "Don't fret, Davy. I'm all right."
Amber cupped hands to mouth and sent a cheerful hail ringing in
response. Simultaneously the last, least, indefinite blur that stood
for the boat in the darkness, vanished in a swirl of snow; and he was
alone with the storm and his misgivings. Upon these he put a
check--would not dwell upon them; but their influence none the less
proved strong enough to breed in him a resistless restlessness and keep
him tramping up and down a five-yard stretch of comparatively solid
earth: to and fro, stamping his feet to keep his blood circulating,
lugging both guns, one beneath either arm, hunching his shoulders up
about his ears in thankless attempt to prevent wet flakes from sifting
in between his neck and collar--thus, interminably it seemed, to and
fro, to and fro....
In the course of time this occupation defeated its purpose; the very
monotony of it sent his thoughts winging back to Quain; he worried more
than ever for his friend, reproaching himself unmercifully for that he
had suffered him to go alone--or at all. Quain had a wife and children;
that thought proved insupportable.... Had he missed the catboat
altogether? Or had he gained it only to find the motor disabled or the
propeller fouled with the wiry eel-grass that choked the shoals? In
either instance he would be at the mercy of the wind, for even with the
sail close-reefed he would have no choice other than to fly before the
fury. Or had the boat possibly gone aground so hard and fast that Quain
had found himself unable to push her off and doomed to lie in her,
helpless, against the fulling of the tide? Or (last and most grudged
guess of all) had the "skimmy" proved as unseaworthy as its dilapidated
appearance had proclaimed it?
Twenty minutes wore wearily away. Falling ever more densely, the snow
drew an impenetrable wan curtain between Amber and the world of life
and light and warmth; while with each discordant blast the strength of
the gale seemed to wax, its high hysteric clamour at times drowning
even the incessant deep bellow of the ocean surf. Once Amber paused in
his patrol, having heard, or fancying he had heard, the staccato
_plut-plut-plut_ of a marine motor. On impulse, with a swelling heart,
he swung his gun skywards and pulled both triggers. The double report
rang in his ears loud as a thunderclap.
In the moments that followed, while he stood listening, with every
fibre of his being keyed to attention, the sense of his utter isolation
chilled his heart as with cold steel.
A little frantically he loaded and fired again; but what at first might
have been thought the faint far echo of a hail he in the end set down
reluctantly to a trick of the hag-ridden wind; to whose savage voice he
durst not listen long; in such a storm, on such a night, a man had but
to hearken with a credulous ear to hear strange and terrible voices
whispering, shrieking, gibbering, howling untold horrors....
An hour passed, punctuated at frequent intervals by gunshots. Though
they evoked no answer of any sort, hope for Quain died hard in Amber's
heart. With all his might he laboured to convince himself that his
friend must have overtaken the drifting boat, and, forced to relinquish
his efforts to regain the beach, have scudded across the bay to the
mainland and safety; but this seemed a surmise at best so far-fetched,
and one as well not overlong to be dwelt upon, lest by that very
insistence its tenuity be emphasised, that Amber resolutely turned from
it to a consideration of his own plight and problematic way of escape.
His understanding of his situation was painfully accurate: he was
marooned upon what a flood tide made a desert island but which at the
ebb was a peninsula--a long and narrow strip of sand, bounded on the
west by the broad, shallow channel to the ocean, on the east connected
with the mainland by a sandbar which half the day lay submerged.
He had, then, these alternatives: he might either compose himself to
hug the leeward side of a dune till daybreak (or till relief should
come) or else undertake a five-mile tramp on the desperate hope of
finding at the end of it the tide out and the sandbar a safe footway
from shore to shore. Between the two he vacillated not at all; anything
were preferable to a night in the dunes, beaten by the implacable
storm, haunted by the thought of Quain; and even though he were to find
the eastern causeway under water, at least the exercise would have
served to keep him from freezing.
Ten minutes after his last cartridge had been fruitlessly discharged,
he set out for the ocean beach, pausing at the first dune he came upon
to scrape a shallow trench in the sand and cache therein both guns and
his game-bag. Marking the spot with a bit of driftwood stuck upright,
he pressed on, eventually pausing on the overhanging lip of a
twenty-foot bluff. To its foot the beach below was aswirl knee-deep
with the wash of breakers, broad patches of water black and glossy as
polished ebony alternating with vast expanses of foam and clotted
spume, all aglow with pale winter phosporescence. Momentarily, as he
watched, at once fascinated and appalled, mountainous ridges of
blackness heaved up out of the storm's grey heart, offshore, and,
curling crests edged with luminous white, swung in to crash and shatter
thunderously upon the sands.
Awed and disappointed, Amber drew back. The beach was impassable; here
was no wide and easy road to the east, such as he had thought to find;
to gain the sandbar he had now to thread a tortuous and uncertain way
through the bewildering dunes. And the prospect was not a little
disconcerting; afraid neither of wind nor of cold, he was wretchedly
afraid of going astray in that uncertain, shifting labyrinth. To lose
oneself in that trackless wilderness...!
A demon of anxiety prodded him on: he must learn Quain's fate, or go
mad. Once on the mainland it were a matter of facility to find his way
to the village of Shampton, telephone Tanglewood and charter a "team"
to convey him thither. He shut his teeth on his determination and set
his face to the east.
Beset and roughly buffeted by the gale; the snow settling in rippling
drifts in the folds of his clothing and upon his shoulders clinging
like a cloth; his face cut by clouds of sand flung horizontally with
well-nigh the force of birdshot from a gun: he bowed to the blast and
plodded steadily on.
Imperceptibly fatigue benumbed his senses, blunted the keen edge of his
emotions; even the care for Quain became a mere dull ache in the back
of his perceptions; of physical suffering he was unconscious. He fell a
prey to freakish fancies--could stand aside and watch himself, an atom
whirling in the mad dance of the tempest, as the snow-flakes whirled,
as little potent. He saw himself pitting his puny strength of mind and
body against the infinite force of the elements: saw himself fall and
rise and battle on, gaining nothing: an atom, sport of high gods! To
the flight of time he grew quite oblivious, his thoughts wandering in
the past, oddly afar to half-remembered scenes, to experiences more
than half-forgotten, both wholly irrelevant; picturesque and painful
memories cast up from the deeps of the subconsciousness by some
inexplicable convulsion of the imagination. For a long time he moved on
in stupid, wondering contemplation of a shining crescent of sand backed
by a green, steaming wall of jungle; there was a dense blue sky above,
and below, on the beach, dense blue waters curled lazily up the feet of
a little, naked, brown child that played contentedly with a shell of
rainbow hues. Again he saw a throng upon a pier-head, and in its
forefront an unknown woman, plainly dressed, with deep brown eyes
wherein Despair dwelt, tearless but white to the lips as she watched a
steamer draw away. And yet again, he seemed to stand with others upon
the threshold of the cardroom of a Hong-Kong club: in a glare of garish
light a man in evening dress lay prone across a table on whose
absorbent, green cloth a dark and ugly stain was widening slowly....
But for the most part he fancied himself walking through scented,
autumnal woods, beside a woman whose eyes were kind and dear, whose
lips were sweet and tempting: a girl he had known not an hour but whom
already he loved, though he himself did not dream it nor discover it
till too late.... And with these many other visions formed and
dissolved in dream-like phantasmagoria; but of them all the strongest
and most recurrent was that of the girl in the black riding-habit,
walking by his side down the aisle of trees. So that presently the
tired and overwrought man believed himself talking with her, reasoning,
arguing, pleading desperately for his heart's desire;... and wakened
with a start, to hear the echo of her voice as though she had spoken
but the instant gone, to find his own lips framing the syllables of her
name--"Sophia!"
Thus strangely he came to know that beyond question he loved. And he
stopped short and stood blinking blindly at nothing, a little
frightened by the depth and strength of this passion which had come to
him with such scant presage, realising for the first time that his need
for her was an insatiable hunger of the soul.... And she was lost to
him; half a world lay between them--or soon would. All his days he had
awaited, a little curiously, a little sceptical, the coming of the
thing men call Love; and when it had come to him he had not known it
nor guessed it until its cause had slipped away from him.... Beyond
recall?
Abruptly he regained consciousness of his plight, and with an effort
shook his senses back into his head. It was not precisely a time when
he could afford to let his wits go wool-gathering. And he realised that
he had been, in a way, more than half-asleep as he walked; even now he
was drowsy, his eyes were heavy, his feet leaden--and numb with cold
besides. He had no least notion of what distance he might have
travelled or whether he had walked in a straight line or a circle; but
when he thought to glance over his shoulder--there was at the moment
perhaps more wind with less snow than there had been for some time--he
found the lighthouse watching him as it had from the first: as if he
had not won a step away from it for all his struggle and his pains. The
white, staring eye winked sardonically through a mist of flakes, was
blotted out and turned up a baleful red. It seemed to mock him, but
Amber nodded at it with no unfriendly feeling. It still might serve his
purpose very well, if his strength held, since he had merely to keep
his back to the light and the ocean beach upon his right to win to the
Shampton sandbar, whether soon or late.
Inflexible of purpose in the face of all his weariness and
discouragement, he was on the point of resuming his march when he was
struck by the circumstance that the whitened shoulder of a dune, quite
near at hand, should seem as if frosted with light--coldly luminous.
Staring, speculative, he hung in the wind--inquisitive as a cat but
loath to waste time in footless inquiry. The snow-fall, setting in with
augmented violence, decided him. Where light was, there should be man,
and where man, shelter.
His third eager stride opened up a wide basin in the dunes, filled with
eddying veils of snow, and set, at some distance, with two brilliant
squares of light--windows in an invisible dwelling. In the space
between them, doubtless, there would be a door. But a second time he
paused, remembering that the island was said to be uninhabited. Only
yesterday he had asked and been so informed.... Odd!
So passing strange he held it, indeed, that he was conscious of a
singular reluctance to question the phenomenon. That superstitious
dread of the unknown which lies dormant in us all, in Amber stirred and
awoke and held him back like a strong hand. Or, if there be such a
thing as a premonition of misfortune, he may be said to have
experienced it in that hour; certainly a presentiment of evil crawled
in his brain, and he hesitated at a time when he desired naught in the
world so much as that which the windows promised--light, heat and human
companionship. He had positively to force himself on to seek the door,
and even when he had stumbled against its step he twice lifted his hand
and let it fall without knocking.
There was not a sound within that he could hear above the clamour of
the goblin night.
In the end, however, he knocked stoutly enough.