So long it takes to tell these things. So brief a time to happen. In
eighteen seconds the submarine had gone a thousand yards, and men
struggling in her wake had crowded a lifetime into a span.
Horrible as were the cries of the drowning, Newcomb's crowning fear was
that they would cease. He clung to his broken grating, and strained his
eyes in the changing light. Off there to left of him--not _again_ the
submarine! She had checked her course and swung round. As quickly as she
had shot away after her murderous work was done, here, describing a
half-circle, she was rushing back.
Almost at the instant of recognition of the changed course there, only a
few yards off, a head, two heads, showed above the water. Newcomb
remembered crying out a warning, "She's coming back!" as the swift
seconds brought the swifter U-boat and the sound of renewed firing
nearer. Newcomb could see the figure of the commander jumping about
grotesquely on the narrow platform of the conning-tower, and heard him
calling down to the armed sailors on the deck. And all the while the
commander himself kept firing, like a madman, down on the water at every
head he saw. Hit or miss and on to the next. As the submarine raced by,
he shot even the bits of wreckage; he shot the shadows. "Ha! da ist
eins. Und da--siehst du? Noch eins--!"
Meanwhile the torch-lights and the flash, sweeping again the farther
reaches, lighted fiercely whatever they played on, and thus the
intervening lanes of blackness between the lighted ridges of the waves
offered momentary asylum. Up one of these dim stretches Newcomb trod
water, clinging to his fragment of grating.
How long after he never knew before that moment when he sighted the
moving shadow that turned into a lifeboat. A man clung to the gunwale
with one hand, and with the other helped hands outstretched from the
boat to draw some one on board.
"There is no r-r-room!" a voice was crying. In the midst of the
passionate altercation between the officer in charge and a woman in the
boat, Grant and Newcomb were hauled in and given rum.
At intervals, with his flash, the officer in charge swept the
circumambient shadow. Though Newcomb was beginning to revive, he
couldn't face that void. He turned to the human presences nearest him.
At his side was a man the officer called Gillow, thick-set, ruddy, with
close black beard and lively eyes. Among those last confused
recollections on board the _Leyden_ had been this fellow's running up on
deck barefoot and in his underclothes. He sat now in somebody's
overcoat, with a blanket muffled about his legs and feet. A child
somewhere behind began to cry.
Newcomb turned to look back. The exploring light picked out a head in a
close-fitting cap tied well down with a heavy veil that left the face
uncovered. For an instant Newcomb met the challenging eyes of Greta.
In the bottom of the boat, dead or unconscious, lay the girl, Nan
Ellis.
The night wore on, with low-voiced tales of what they had been through.
Engineer Gillow told how, in the confusion of the launching, lifeboat
No. 11, originally in charge of the officer of the watch, had collided
with two other boats. All three were damaged, No. 11 so seriously as to
be virtually useless. In the end No. 11 wasn't needed, was Gillow's
terse summary of what followed. It hadn't been possible to save
everybody; they had done their best. There was a poor devil there in the
bow, a naked stoker they had picked up. He'd had his clothes burned off
by the fire in the engine-room. Assistant-Engineer Gillow himself had as
narrow an escape as any; he'd been asleep while the torpedoed ship was
sinking. A rush of sea water had washed him out of his bunk barely in
time, as he put it, to catch the last boat. Now he was going to catch
forty winks. He folded his short arms with an air of resolution, and
dropped his beard into the turned-up collar of the borrowed coat. In two
or three minutes he slept. The rest sat waiting for the day.
That dawning, so passionately longed for, showed no hint of man or of
his work on all the plain of ocean, not so much as a shattered thwart.
On the lifeboat itself the gray, sun-shrouded morning showed a company
of eight men, counting Newcomb, Grant, and the stoker; seven women; four
children, fretful from chill and hunger; and a half-grown cabin-boy. The
second officer, a wiry, hard-bitten Welshman, was staring through his
binoculars north, south, east, west. Hardly would he persuade himself to
put the glass down when he would grip hold of it again. Up it would go
to eyes that had gleamed an instant with some new, some always futile
hope.
The naked stoker had been partly clothed. He lay in a stupor of
exhaustion under damp coats and sodden canvas. The gray daylight showed
Julian Grant with feverish eyes, and dry lips that said, "Nan's
sleeping, too." She shared the tarpaulin which had been spread in the
first place for the stoker and two children. Grant and two women, a
stewardess and a passenger with a baby, occupied the seat facing the
captain and the bow, facing that still figure of Nan Ellis. Miss Greta,
as the morning showed, was the only woman not disheveled. Whether in the
collision she had been wet at all, she looked dry now, and still
rigorously buttoned up, tied down, and belted in. She was still wearing
the small flat Ruech-Sak, lying high on her high shoulders, and she kept
her eyes on the second officer; especially when, after he had shut his
binocular case with a snap, he began to serve out rations of biscuit and
water.
A child began to wail. "I can't keep him warm," said the mother. Her
face was wet.
After consultation with Engineer Gillow, the second officer decided it
was no use waiting for the rescue ship. He called for rowers. He called
for something white for a flag of distress.
A man offered a gray sweater for the crying child on condition the
mother should take off its white frock and let that be flown as a
signal. The mother wanted to take the sweater and keep the white frock,
too. With difficulty she was persuaded to the exchange.
Grant had roused Nan Ellis to take her share of the biscuit and water
ration. She opened heavy eyes, ate, drank, and slept again the profound
sleep of exhaustion.
Newcomb and Grant had been among the first to take each his turn at the
oars. They kept it up in shifts all the windless day, and all day long
the baby's frock signaled the distress which there seemed no eye on all
the globe to heed.
Toward evening the stoker grew delirious. Out of the wrappings that
concealed him he lifted a huge head, bristling with coarse, red hair.
"I know," he shouted in a Devon accent--"suffocated in the bunkers!
That's it; yes, suffocated!" The giant choked and began to thrash about.
"Can't have that!" called out the second officer. "Quiet there!" The
stern voice seemed to bring the man to himself for a minute. At the
first sign of disturbance Newcomb had turned with an impulse to reassure
Nan Ellis; but she slept on.
The eyes of the second officer came back once more from that endless
interrogation of the ocean. "Boat won't stand much," he said in an
undertone. "Mended one leak."
Down at his feet the red-haired giant was stirring again. He heaved, he
cursed at some obstruction there under the canvas. He sat up and pulled
out a block and tackle; and with it he fell to hammering at a stay.
"Open the hatch..." he shouted a string of foul language.
Nan Ellis started up, and turned with horror to face the incredible
apparition.
"Lash him down," ordered the second officer, calmly.
It was a horrible performance. The girl hid her eyes till Grant had put
her in his own place, but facing the other way, while he helped the
engineer, the cabin-boy, and Newcomb to overpower the man. The girl sat
crouched at Greta's side, each looking a different way. In an interval
in his grim business Newcomb watched for the moment of recognition
between the two, a moment strangely long delayed. Presently it dawned
upon him that each was intimately aware of the other's presence and that
neither meant to make a sign.
In the little breeze that at last was springing up the second officer,
with help of Gillow and the cabin-boy, was getting up the sail. For the
space of a good hour the boat sped over the water. At dusk the wind
freshened, the sail was reefed down for the night under a sky all nimbus
near the horizon, the zenith full of drab-colored cumulus moving
sullenly northeast.
"It's below freezing all right," some one said.
Another spoke of the effect of icebergs drifting down.
"It's the time of year that happens."
"I wish it would freeze the stoker's tongue," said the cabin-boy.
An hour went by, longer than the longest day. Newcomb was dropping into
a painful doze when something brought him back to a yet more painful
consciousness. What was it? He was too much reduced to take the smallest
initiative in finding out. He sat huddled, staring at the moon risen
well above the nimbus and for the moment riding clear even of the
scattered cumulus. Engineer Gillow had the watch. The second officer sat
in the bow, with rigid back and open eyes. The stoker moaned. Every one
else slept or seemed to sleep. No, not the two women sitting together
with eyes averted.
"I didn't know it was _you_, Nan," he heard Greta whisper.
"You knew it was somebody," came the answer at last.
"All I could think of is, he's waiting for me! Ernst! He's escaped. I
_dare_ not die while Ernst needs me."
The girl made no sound.
"Can't you understand what it means to me that he should say, 'For the
sake of everything we care for, I must come and help him!' How could I
think that anybody else's life mattered--when Ernst is waiting for me!"
"Waiting for you.... Where?"
"Oh, I shall find him--And nobody else will! 'It all depends on you,
Greta'; that's what he says. He'll see that I'm safe, he says,' _and
happy_!' For the first time he speaks of marriage. He _needs_ me!" she
triumphed.
"One last great service is laid upon us, then Buenos Aires--Ernst and
I."
The stoker's moaning mounted to a horrible, hoarse yell. It waked the
sleeping, half-numb children. They, too, screamed with fright and
misery. So the hours wore on, with appeals for water, with weeping and
with worse. Once the stoker wrenched himself free. They bound him again.
That made him more violent than before. All the rest of the night he
raved. In the morning he was gone. No one asked a question.
The sail went up early that day, though the sea looked threatening and
the wind was squally. Within the hour all canvas had to be furled and
the sea-anchor streamed. The lamentable figures in the boat huddled
closer. Of Greta you could hardly see a distinguishing sign, so was she
muffled and surrounded. The seas rose higher and the wash came flooding
in.
"Just as well they should think we get it over the gunwale," the second
officer said to Newcomb. "Some of the damned rivets must have got
strained."
The passengers began to crowd up, half toward the bow, half at the
stern. Amidships was awash.
The hail turned to sleet, and the sleet to fine rain. In the stark
misery of it the longing grew almost irresistible to jump overboard and
end it all. More than one of that tragic company thought again and
again: "I've come to the end. I can bear no more," not knowing yet the
awful power of the flesh to endure and keep the soul imprisoned.
But the chance-made captain knew. "A hand here!" he ordered, and Newcomb
helped the engineer to spread the boat-cover over the people, and to do
it in spite of the icy wind that tore the freezing canvas out of one's
grasp and seemed along with it to tear out one's finger-nails; failing
that, to wrench one's half-frozen fingers out of their sockets. Yet at
last the thing was spread and fastened. There was no one who didn't
welcome it, and none to whom, as shelter, it wasn't a mock. Some craned
out and held the canvas so as to catch the rain. There was enough to
sting, enough to chill the marrow, but not enough to drink; yet furred
and feverish tongues were pressed against the moistened canvas.
Toward evening the appeals for water became demands. One of the women, a
thin, febrile creature with insane eyes, grew violent. For more than one
the early stages of hushed despair had passed. Few were able to sit
still. They came out from under cover with faces that made the heart
shrink. They climbed about the boat in the failing light, moaning,
threatening. Among the worst was the cabin-boy. It was clear he was
light-headed.
"You've been drinking sea-water," the captain arraigned him, fiercely.
The boy denied the charge, whimpering.
"I think, sir," the engineer interrupted, "the sea-anchor's gone." The
captain lashed two oars together and made another. In the early darkness
the wind freshened, drenching the boat with spray.
Greta had joined in the bailing. She came up out of the stern like some
hibernating brown animal of the bursa family. She worked well.
They bailed in shifts, hour by hour. The men bailed all night long. They
bailed till the buckets and pannikins fell out of their swollen hands.
In the small hours of morning Nan Ellis had crawled to the seat by
Grant.
Another eternity went by. Slow daylight battled long with the mists of
night and fog. The girl sat with her arms round the rigid figure of
Julian Grant; but for that he would have slipped away like that
other--Did any one know besides Newcomb of the gray head lying face
downward in the wash that was sucking and slapping to and fro in the
bottom of the boat?
Newcomb himself lost all sense of time in those intervals of partial
unconsciousness too full of suffering to deserve the name of sleep, but
he recollected the timbre of the voice that called out something
inarticulate in German just before Gillow shouted, "Light! a light!"
And there it was, far away to eastward, infinitesimal, but steady, a
gleam. At first it looked as if it might be the morning star shining
through the breaking fog-veil, red like Mars. Then, changing like only
man-made brightness, the light showed green.
The excitement among those who still were conscious bore its touch of
mania. Where the captain's stern call to order might have failed, the
question, "Who knows if it isn't a submarine?" sobered the most hopeful.
"Whatever it is, it's coming nearer!" Nan Ellis cried the news at
Julian's irresponsive ear. Out of the cage of despair her flagging voice
soared in a rapture of recovered faith: "Light, Julian! A light!"
And now there stood out against the streak of dawn the hull and funnels
of a steamer. All eyes watched that phantom ship as though for an
instant to lose sight of her would be tantamount to letting her go to
the bottom. They held her to her holy purpose by that thread of vision,
the optic nerve. And to those passionately watchful eyes the course of
the steamer had seemed to lie in a dead reckoning right across the
lifeboat. She _couldn't_ miss them. Suddenly her course diverged; she
was bearing to the west! Newcomb saw the captain's hand shake as he
lighted a signal, his only and most precious Coston Light. Ah, she got
that! Another feeble cry went up from the lifeboat, for the steamer
slackened speed, she turned. She had altered her course for fear of
running the lifeboat down. Now perhaps she could see--
Anyway, eyes in the lifeboat could see--the steamer sheering off to
southward. The captain and the engineer shot off their pistols. Others
in the boat, not too far gone, screamed like creatures on the rack. It
wasn't tragic so much as horrible. They howled like animals.
The ship went on. She faded. She was gone.
"They're afraid it's a trap," said the engineer. "You didn't know it,
but we're a decoy-boat, ha, ha! Signals of distress? Ha! ha! Too thin.
We're a submarine. Didn't you know?"
More than men and boats had been sacrificed in the war.