THE S.S. MILO
Major Vigoureux fell asleep almost as soon as his head touched the
pillow. He owed this habit originally to a clear conscience, and
although (as the reader knows) his conscience was no longer quite
clear, the habit had not forsaken him.
He dreamed that he was presenting himself at Mr. Fossell's bank, and
giving Mr. Fossell across the counter a number of plausible reasons why
his pay should be handed to him as usual. He knew all the while that
his arguments were sophistical and radically unsound; but he trusted
that he was making them cogent. (Why is it that in dreams we feel no
remorse for our sins, but only a terror lest we be found out? I cannot
tell; but the best men and women of my acquaintance agree that it is
so.) Mr. Fossell preserved an impassive, inscrutable face; but every
time the Commandant ventured a new argument Mr. Fossell's high, bald
head twinkled and suddenly changed colour like a chameleon. It was
green, it was violet, it was bathed in a soft roseate glow like an
Alpine peak at sunset; and still while he argued the Commandant was
forced to dodge his body about lest Mr. Fossell should catch sight of a
mirror fixed in the opposite wall, and perceive how strangely his scalp
was behaving. Finally, Mr. Fossell turned as if convinced, walked away
to an inner room, and came back bearing a bag of money, round and
distended--so tightly distended, indeed, that the Commandant called out
to him to be careful of the contents. But the cry came a moment too
late; for the bag, as it touched the counter, exploded with a dull
report, collapsed, and flattened itself out into a playing-card--the
queen of hearts!
At this point the Commandant excusably found himself awake, and sat up
blinking at Sergeant Archelaus, who stood in a haze of fog by his
bedside with a lighted candle.
"You heard it?" asked Sergeant Archelaus.
"Heard it?" echoed the Commandant, trembling, not yet in full
possession of his senses. "Of course, I heard it. The Bank--." Here he
checked himself and rubbed his eyes.
"You're dreaming; that's what's the matter with you," said Sergeant
Archelaus, using the familiarity of an old servant. "There's a ship on
the rocks."
"A ship? Where?"
The Sergeant, candle in hand, stepped to the casement, which the
Commandant, following his custom, had opened a little way before
getting into bed.
"Lord knows where she be by this time, if St. Ann's pilots ha'n't found
her. The gun sounded from west'ard, down by the Monk."
"Fog, is it?" asked the Commandant, staring about him and remembering.
"Fog it is," answered Sergeant Archelaus, and added, "Poor souls!"
"Thick?" By this time the Commandant had flung back the bed-clothes and
was thrusting his feet into his worn slippers.
"I never seen a thicker in my born days."
"If we had a gun----"
"Ah--if," agreed Sergeant Archelaus, curtly, and turning, let his voice
rise in a sudden passion. "Why did I wake ye? Set it down to habit.
I've known the time when the sound of a gun would have fetched forty
men out of the Barracks to save life or to take it; and a gun within
thirty seconds to alarm all the Islands. But we! What's the use of us?"
"Get on your coat," said the Commandant, sharply, putting on his
trousers. "Get on your coat and run to the bell--that is, if
Treacher----"
But at this moment the muffled note of a bell began to sound through
the fog, vindicating Treacher's vigilance. Treacher, however, was not
the ringer. The Commandant had scarcely slipped on his fatigue jacket,
and begun to search in the wardrobe for his overcoat, when Treacher's
voice sounded up the staircase, demanding to know if the garrison was
awake.
"Awake?" called back Archelaus. "Of course we be, and coming before you
can sound th' alarm. Reach down the bugle, man--from the rock behind
th' door, there--and sound it."
Treacher sounded. He was out of breath, and the two high notes quavered
broken-windedly; but the Commandant's chest swelled with something of
old pride. The alarm would reach the town, and the town would know that
the garrison had not been caught napping. He snatched at the candle
from the candlestick in Sergeant Archelaus' hand and rammed it into the
socket of a horn lantern he had unhooked from the cupboard.
"Come along, men! Keep sounding, Treacher--keep sounding!"
Even so he had called once--a many years ago--in the trenches under the
Redan. Treacher sounded obediently, and down the hill all three
staggered--past the garrison gates, with a call to Mrs. Treacher to
pull for all she was worth--and still forward among the ruts and loose
stones, all so familiar that relying on tread alone (as in fact they
did) they could not miss their way. Below them, along the quay, and on
the causeway at the head of it--voices were calling and lights moving;
but the fog reduced the shouts to a twitter, as of birds, and the
torches and lantern to mere glow-worm sparks. The coastguards were
embarking and the Lord Proprietor, just arrived upon the scene, was
running about--as Sergeant Archelaus put it afterwards, "like a paper
man in a cyclone"--calling out the names of volunteers for the
lifeboat.
If Sergeant Archelaus ever afterwards spoke disparagingly of the Lord
Proprietor's activities that night, something may be forgiven him; as
something may be forgiven the Lord Proprietor--for on such occasions
men blurt out what rises to their lips.
The fog had found its way into Treacher's bugle before our three heroes
reached the quay; but he continued to blow his best; and there, at the
end of the causeway, Sir Cæsar ran into them--ran straight into the
Commandant, almost knocking out his breath--calling, as he ran, for
someone to take bow oar in the lifeboat.
"Will I do?" asked Sergeant Archelaus, coolly, as became a soldier.
"You?" The Lord Proprietor thrust his torch close. "Oh, get out of my
way--this is work to-night, work for men! And you"--catching sight of
the Commandant--"how much do you think you are helping us with this
tom-fool noise?"
The Commandant drew himself erect, but before he could answer, the Lord
Proprietor had gone his way, waving his torch and still shouting for
someone to man the bow thwart.
There was a slow pause.
"Can you get to our boat, Archelaus?" asked the Commandant. The two
sergeants heard his voice drag on the question. They could not see his
face.
"She's afloat, sir," answered Sergeant Archelaus.
"Find the frap then, and pull her in."
"Is it our boat you're meaning, sir?" asked Archelaus, hesitating.
"Certainly."
"There's a certain amount of sea running, sir, out beyond the point."
"I observed as much this evening."
"Very good, sir." Something in the Commandant's voice forbade further
argument.
They were afloat almost as soon as the coastguard, and a full five
minutes before the life-boat. Sergeant Archelaus pulled stroke, and
Sergeant Treacher bow. The Commandant steered, his lantern and pocket
compass beside him in the stern sheets.
The boat--she had once been a yacht's cutter--measured sixteen feet
over all. She was fitted with a small centre-plate, and carried a lug
sail (but this they left behind; it was in store, and would have been
worse than useless). They pulled out into a fog so thick that only by
intervals could the Commandant catch sight of Sergeant Treacher's face,
and Sergeant Treacher's eyebrows and sandy moustache glistering with
beads of mist.
They had left the pier but a short two hundred strokes behind them when
the little tug belonging to the Islands came panting out of the harbour
with the lifeboat in tow, and passed on, blowing her whistle, to
overtake and pick up the coastguard galley. So unexpectedly her lights
sprang upon them, and so close astern that Treacher, with a sharp cry
of warning--for the Commandant's gaze was fastened forward--had barely
time to jerk the boat's head round and avoid being cut down. Then,
dropping his paddle, he made a grab at the painter and flung it,
calling out to the lifeboat's crew to catch and make fast. But either
he was a moment too late in flinging, or the lifeboatmen, themselves
bawling instructions to the tug's crew, were preoccupied and did not
hear. The rope struck against something--the lifeboat's gunwale
doubtless--but no one caught it, and next moment the tug had slipped
away into darkness and into a silence which swallowed up the shouts and
the throb of her engines as though she had dropped into a pit.
"Darn your skin, Sam Treacher!" swore Sergeant Archelaus. "There goes a
couple of hours' pulling you might have saved us!"
"Then why couldn't you have given warning?" retorted Treacher. "Pretty
pair of eyes you keep in that old head of yours!"
"Be quiet, you two!" the Commandant ordered. "They'd have caught the
painter if they wanted us."
He fell silent, bending his head to study the compass in the lantern's
ray. "Not wanted"--"not wanted"--the paddles took up the burden and
beat it into a sort of tune to the creak of the thole-pins. As a young
officer he had started with high notions of duty; nor, looking back on
the wasted years could he tax himself that he had ever declined its
call; only the call which in youth had always carried a promise with
it, definitely clear and shining, of enterprise and reward, of
adventure, achievement, fame, had sunk by degrees to a dull repetition
calling him from sleep to perform the spiritless daily round. He did
not sigh that the definite vision had faded; it happened so, may be, to
most men, though not to all. To most men, it might be, their fate
played the crimp; they followed the marsh-fires out into just such a
blind waste as this through which he and his men were groping--darkness
above and below; darkness before, behind, to right, to left; darkness
of birth, of death, and only the palpable fog between. He did not sigh
for this. What irked him was the thought that while he had followed the
mill-round of duty, strength had been ebbing away and had left him
useless.
Yes, there lay the sting. Twenty years ago how like a schoolboy he
would have dashed into this fog, careless of consequence, eager only to
find where men needed his help! He might have found, or missed; but
twenty years ago men would have hailed his will to help. Now he was
useless, negligible. In an ordinary way these neighbours of his might
disguise their knowledge, through politeness or pity; but at a crisis
like this the truth came out. The Lord Proprietor had treated him as a
pantaloon, and these lifeboatmen--so little they valued him--could not
be at the pains of catching a rope.
He steered, as nearly as he could calculate, west-by-south, allowing at
a guess for the set of the tide. The wall of fog, which let pass no
true sound, itself seemed full of voices--hissing of spent waves,
sucking of water under weed-covered ledges, little puffs and moanings
of the wind. He had reckoned that he was bending around shore to the
south of the roadstead, heading gradually for St. Lide's Sound and
giving the rocks on his port hand a wide berth; when of a sudden
Archelaus called out, and he spied a grey line of breaking
water--luckily the sea was full of briming to-night--at the base of the
fog, quite close at hand. It scared them so that they headed off almost
at right angles. This adventure not only proved his reckoning to be
wrong, but complicated it hopelessly.
They were in open water again, still making--or at any rate the boat so
pointed--west-by-south. The short scare had shaken him out of his
brooding thoughts. He saw now, minute after minute, but the sea beyond
the edge of the boat's gunwale, heaving up and sliding astern as it
caught the shine of the lantern. The lantern shone also against the
knees of Archelaus, and lit up the check-board pattern of the
eleemosynary trousers. It was a provocative pattern, but the Commandant
heeded it not....
He looked up from Sergeant Archelaus' knees to Sergeant Archelaus'
face, and past it to the face of Sergeant Treacher, now a little more
distinct. The two men had been pulling for an hour, and the Commandant
saw that they were tired--tired and very old. He recognised it at first
with a touch of anger. He felt an instant's impulse to curse and bid
them row harder. But on the instant came gentle understanding, and
restrained him.
"Archelaus," he said, "you are the older; take the tiller here and give
me the oar for a spell."
Archelaus was not unwilling. Besides, was it not his commanding officer
who gave the order? He relinquished his paddle with a grunt of
exhaustion, and the Commandant stood up to take it, laying both hands
on it while Archelaus stumbled past to the stern-sheets.... And at that
moment a miracle befell.
The fog must have been thinning. The Commandant, standing with both
hands on the paddle and his face to the bows, saw or felt it part
suddenly, and through the parting lights shone and voices sounded, with
the heavy throb of a vessel's screw.
Clank! clank! and it was on them, almost before Sergeant Archelaus
could let out a cry--the stem, the grey-painted bows of a vast
steamship, ghostly, towering up into night. A bell rang. High on the
bridge--but the bridge soared into heaven--a pilot's voice called out
in the Island tongue. As the great bows glided by, missing the boat by
a few yards, the three men stared aloft until they had almost cricked
their necks; and aloft there, as Archelaus raised his lantern, the
Commandant read the vessel's name--"Milo"--glimmering in tall gilt
letters.
Faces looked down from her rail, faces from the shadow of the
hurricane' deck; a line of faces and all looking down upon the little
Island tug that had fallen alongside and drifted close under the
liner's flank, a short way abaft her red port-light. A murmur of talk
went with the faces, as it were a stream rippling by, and mingled with
the splash of water pouring over-side from the pumps. It sounded
cheerfully, and from the voices on board the tug and in the lifeboat
and galley towing astern our Commandant gathered that the danger was
over. Again Sergeant Treacher hailed and flung a rope; this time the
lifeboat's crew caught it and made fast.
"Reub Hicks is aboard," said a voice, naming one of the St. Ann's
pilots. "He picked her up not twenty furlongs from Hell-deeps after she
had missed the Little Meadows by the skin of her teeth."
"How in the name of good Providence she got near enough to miss it,
being where she was, is the marvel to me," said another.
"She did, anyway," said the coxswain; "for Reub himself called down the
news to me in so many words."
The Commandant gazed up at the gray shadow reaching aloft into
darkness. He knew those outer reefs of which the men spoke. A touch of
them would have split the plates of this tall fabric like a house of
cards. He and Archelaus had witnessed one such wreck, eight years ago;
had waited in broad daylight, helpless, resting on their oars, unable
to approach within a cable's length of the rocks, upon which in ten
minutes a steel-built five-master, of 1,200 tons, had melted to nothing
before their eyes--"the rivets," as Archelaus put it, "flying out of
her like shirt buttons." But that had happened on one of the outermost
reefs, beyond the Off Islands, far down by the Monk Light. How the
_Milo_, no matter from what quarter approaching, had threaded her way
by the Hell-deeps was to him a mystery of mysteries. She was groping it
yet, her engines working dead slow; but the fog during the past hour
had sensibly lightened and Reub Hicks held open water between him and
the Roads, though he still kept the lead going. At the entrance of the
Roads he sent the tug forward to help the steerage, and so brought her
in and rounded her up as accurately as though she had been a little
schooner of two hundred tons.
As the great anchor dropped, and amid the deafening rattle of its chain
in the hawse-pipe, the crew astern cast off and drew their boats
alongside, eager to swarm aboard and hear news of the miracle. From his
galley Mr. Rogers shouted up to the captain to lower his ladder. He and
his chief boatman mounted first, with a little man named Pengelly, a
custom's official, who happened to make one of the lifeboat's crew--for
the _Milo_ had come from foreign, and thus a show was made of complying
with the Queen's regulations. But the whole crowd trooped up close at
their heels, and with the crowd clambered Sergeant Archelaus and
Sergeant Treacher.
The Commandant had given them permission. He would remain below, he
said, and look after the boat, awaiting their report.
The crowd passed up and dispersed itself about the deck, congratulating
all comers, and excitedly plying them with questions. The Islanders are
a child-like race, and from his post at the foot of the deserted
accommodation ladder the Commandant could hear them laughing,
exclaiming, chattering with the passengers in high-pitched voices.
He stood with his boat-hook, holding on by the grating of the ladder's
lowest step, and stared at the gray wall-sides of the liner. Yes, the
ship was solid, and yet he could not believe but that she belonged to a
dream; so mysteriously, against all chances, was she here, out of the
deep and the night.
Someone had lashed a lantern at the head of the ladder. Lifting his
eyes to it in the foggy darkness, the Commandant saw a solitary figure
standing there in the gangway and looking down on him--a woman.
She lifted a hand as if to enjoin silence, and came swiftly down a step
or two in the shadow of the vessel's side.
"You are Major Vigoureux?" she asked in a quick whisper, leaning
forward over him.
"At your service, madam," he stammered, taken fairly aback.
"Ah! I am glad of that!" She ran down the remaining steps and set her
foot lightly on the boat's gunwale. "You will row me ashore?"
"If you wish it, madam." He was more puzzled than ever. He saw that she
wore a dark cloak of fur and was bare-headed. She spoke in a sort of
musical whisper. Her face he could not see. "In a minute or two my
men----"
"We will not wait for your men," she said, quietly, seating herself in
the stern sheets. "They can easily be put ashore--can they not?--in one
of the other boats."
From under her fur cloak she reached out an arm--a bare arm with two
jewelled bracelets--and took the tiller. "I can steer you to the quay,"
she said, and leaning forward in the light of Sergeant Archelaus'
lantern, she lifted her eyes to the Commandant.
The Commandant pushed off, shipped the paddles into the thole pins, and
began to row, as in a dream.