You had to assume two things, she thought. The first was that Hughie was capable of evaluating two different fears and making a conscious choice of the lesser. Could he? Probably, at least part of the time, but at any specific moment it would be as unpredictable as tossing a coin. The second was that a quaking matron with a gun would be more fearsome than the irrational horror that had already taken possession of his mind. No. Certainly not. The things in the darkness beyond the firelight were always more terrible than the ones that you could see. He’d either pay no attention to the gun at all, or at the mere mention of going back he’d go berserk and charge straight at her.
But it was still worth trying, wasn’t it? Even if there was only one chance in a thousand she could bluff him into going back and could control him all the way there without actually having to shoot, at least there would be that one. No. She saw the stupidity of it. Trying to bluff a man she couldn’t bluff, with a gun she hoped she wouldn’t have to use, was nothing short of suicide. In that second when she was still hysterically voicing threats and praying he would stop before she had to shoot, it would be too late to shoot, even if she could, and he’d have the gun away from her and he’d kill her. If she took it up that ladder at all and committed herself, it had to be with the hundred-per-cent certainty she was prepared to use it. And that she didn’t have.
Why not? It was Warriner, wasn’t it, who’d backed her into this corner from which there was no other exit?
Legally there was no question of her right to do so. There would be a hearing, somewhere and sometime, at which she would have to testify as to the circumstances, but that was all. She wouldn’t be charged with anything, and nobody would attach any blame to her. Then it was simply because of all those nights she’d wake up screaming, and the fact that until the day she died her mind would never emerge completely from the shadow of that unanswered question: could there have been some other way?
So in the end it boiled down to a simple act of purchase, didn’t it? If she had no illusions about the price or about the fact she would have to pay it, the terms were clear and understood. For John’s life she gave up her peace of mind for the rest of her own. Why not? People gave up their lives themselves for others, didn’t they? This was the opposite of heroic, and the act itself was abhorrent, but the same love was involved, the same willingness to pay.
She realized then there was no sense to any of these arguments. You couldn’t rationalize killing a man with a shotgun, and you didn’t arrive at the deed by any process of thought, of weighing the advantages and disadvantages. If you did it at all, it was after you’d quit thinking, in desperation, when nothing else was left.
And, anyway, she probably couldn’t even assemble the gun. John had never done it since it had been aboard, and it had been nearly twenty years since she’d seen her father do it. And it could be a different kind, or a later model. Guns must change over the years, the way cars did, didn’t they? Of course they did.
But there were only two pieces.
No, it was just her impression there were only two pieces. There might be more. She’d never counted them, had she?
Well, if she found out she couldn’t assemble it, that would settle it, and the torture would stop.
Then, without even knowing how she’d got there, she was kneeling beside the bunk in the after cabin, pulling out the drawer. There were only two rolls of the fleece, one long one and another shorter and bulkier. She ran back into the forward cabin with them and bolted the door. She put them on the bunk and began untying the cords that bound them.
There were three pieces.
The long roll contained only the barrels, the twin dark tubes fixed side by side, but the other held two pieces. One was the part that went against your shoulder—the stock, she thought it was called—with the lever for breaking it open to put in the shells, and the trigger guard and the triggers. The other piece was a hand-grip sort of thing she seemed to remember went under the barrels just in front of the stock. It was mostly of wood, rounded on the sides and bottom, tapering at one end and fitted with a concave piece of steel at the other. She had no idea how it was supposed to be attached to the barrels.
The barrels themselves had a projection at one end, on the bottom, that must fit into something in the metal part at the front end of the stock. She took them in one hand and the stock in the other and began trying to match them. Yes, there it was. They went together, and formed a hinge. She swung the barrels up, and they locked in place.
But there was still the third part. And it was obvious it was the wrong piece for this kind of gun, or that something was missing. It was supposed to go under the barrels, right there, and there was nothing to hold it. The concave end must go against the rounded metal end there at the front of the stock. And you could see it didn’t even fit; it still stuck out at a slight angle. Well, John must have ordered another one to be shipped to them in Papeete. And since the gun couldn’t be assembled without the right piece— There was a little click, and she gasped. The fore end had snapped up into place against the spring tension that held it there.
She stared at it in horror. It was a complete shotgun. It was all there, and it was assembled.
* * *
For the third time in ten minutes Lillian Warriner saw Ingram glance off to the northeast where the squall flickered and rumbled along the rim of the world. She could see no appreciable difference in the squall itself. It was still the same swollen mass of purple, shot through with the fitful play of lightning and trailing its skirts of rain, seemingly no larger or nearer than it had been a quarter of an hour ago—but it was Ingram himself she was watching. She judged by the simple fact that he kept looking at it that he was worried about it, though he said nothing. He continued to bail, the gray eyes expressionless.
Well, it wasn’t likely he’d be running in circles and wringing his hands. And there was nothing they could do about the squall anyway, except get the sail off, and probably he’d send her to wake Bellew. No doubt there was some quixotic male convention against allowing the porcine bastard to drown in his sleep.
She liked Ingram and was conscious of increasing admiration for him, though this of course only added to the burden of her guilt, while at the same time evoking a mild sort of wonder at her willingness to credit her appraisal of anybody any more after having been so conspicuously wrong about Bellew. No, it wasn’t so much that she’d been wrong as that she’d simply had no way of knowing how small even a large yacht could become after a few days at sea. Human beings confined in too small an area were apparently subject to the same laws regarding molecular friction and the generation of heat as gases under compression.
So now not only had they managed to blow themselves up, but the spreading shock wave of disaster had engulfed two other people whose only crime had been the fact they were in the same part of the ocean. The guilt was still hers, and she accepted it, though it seemed a terrible price to pay for the pursuit of an impossible dream, a few minutes of arrant and unforgivable bitchiness, and an accident. There were beckoning avenues of escape: the accident couldn’t have been her fault because she’d been asleep at the time, and she’d been goaded into the bitchiness, but these were sleazy evasions and technicalities for which she had nothing but contempt. They were the type of thing that Hughie— She stopped.
Well, it was true, wasn’t it? And therein, unfortunately, lay her guilt, the real responsibility from which there would never be any escape—the pursuit of the impossible dream, while she knew it was impossible. She’d known it would never work, that temperamentally she was wrong for him and she’d demand too much of him, but she’d managed to ignore the warnings of her mind.
If only, she thought now in her own contained and private agony, she’d left him alone. She was worse than any of them; she’d utterly destroyed him. Because she did love him. She wondered what crimes the human race could have found to commit without those great ennobling causes like freedom, religion, and love.
She glanced
up. Ingram had stopped bailing and was preparing to lower the mainsail. She looked out toward the squall still making up in the northeast. “Is it coming nearer?”
“I can’t tell yet what it’s going to do,” he replied. “But there’s no use letting the sails slat any longer.”
“Do you want me to help?”
“No. Better keep pumping. Or just rest for a few minutes.”
She was conscious of numbness in her arms and shoulders, but she shook her head. “No. I’m all right.” She bent to the pump again.
If only she’d left him alone…
* * *
The main and mizzen were tightly furled. Ingram finished lashing the genoa rolled up along the lifeline and looked at his watch. It was 3:50 p.m. The sun, though lower in the west, still beat on them with sullen weight in the sticky and unmoving air that felt as if you were trying to breathe in a vacuum. The day was a squall-breeder if he’d ever seen one. There was no sound except water going overboard from the pump and those other and inexorably increasing tons of it sloshing back and forth inside the hull as Orpheus lurched over on the swell. The whole northeast sky was black now, but then squalls always looked worse when they were opposite the sun. There was still a chance it would pass to the northward of them, and he didn’t want to call Bellew. Not yet. Let him get all the sleep he could. There was a long night ahead of them—if they were still afloat.
He was conscious now of his own tiredness and of the fact he had eaten nothing since breakfast. But he wasn’t hungry; it was too hot to eat, even if there was anything aboard not ruined by the water. He picked up the binoculars and climbed atop the deckhouse. Very slowly and carefully he searched the horizon all across the southwest, finding nothing but emptiness. When he lowered the glasses he saw Mrs. Warriner’s eyes on him. He shook his head. She nodded, her face as expressionless as his own, and went on pumping.
He stepped back to the ventilating hatch and looked down at the water washing back and forth in the after cabin. It was worse, he thought; even with one of them pumping and one bailing, they were barely keeping up with it. He started to drop the bucket in but turned and glanced back at Mrs. Warriner. She was on the verge of collapse. The hell with it. There was no use letting her kill herself. He tossed the bucket on the deck, then went over and picked up her cigarettes and lighter from the deckhouse.
“Here,” he said. He set one of the cigarettes between her lips and flicked the lighter. “Let me take it for a while.”
She surrendered the pump reluctantly. “But how about yourself? You haven’t had any rest at all. And won’t it gain?”
“It’ll just have to gain. You’re not going to help things by keeling over. And while you’re resting, you could finish telling me what happened—that is, if you feel up to it.”
She sat down on the deck, facing him. “It’s not the pleasantest thing in the world to tell, but since we did this to you, I’d say you had every right to know how we did it.” She took a puff on the cigarette and went on. “To understand why he thinks we tried to murder him, you need a little background and a thumbnail sketch of the characters involved. Hughie, as I’ve told you, was an oversheltered boy who never had a chance to grow up; Mrs. Bellew was a rather plain, very gentle woman with an infinite amount of compassion; Bellew, of course, is a pig; and I’m an arrogant and insufferable bitch.”
Ingram paused in his pumping. “Do you have to do that?”
She wondered herself. She’d always held a dim view of the therapeutic value of catharsis or confession and regarded all breast-beating and cries of mea culpa as being more vulgar exhibitionism than anything else. If you’d bought it, you lived with it as well as you could and with as little fuss as possible. But on the other hand, if you’d wronged another human being, you at least owed him an explanation.
“You wanted to understand, didn’t you?” she asked curtly. “I’ve never been greatly addicted to the use of euphemisms and evasions, and if I thought you were responsible for something I wouldn’t hesitate to tell you. To be any good, it has to work both ways.”
“I know. But aside from the fact I don’t think it’s true—”
“Thank you. You are nice, Mr. Ingram. But you haven’t heard the story.”
“No.” He resumed pumping. “But there’s more to it than his thinking you tried to kill him. Why is he so afraid of water?”
“Because he thinks that’s the way we tried to kill him, by drowning—”
He shook his head. “No. It’s still not that simple.” He told her briefly of Rae’s throwing the whisky bottle overboard and of Warriner’s reaction to watching it sink.
She nodded. “Yes. I know about that part of it.” She was silent for a moment, thinking. “I’m not sure I can explain it myself, except that I think it’s a fear of drowning carried to the point of phobia. You know what acrophobia is, of course?”
“Yes. A morbid fear of heights. But it has nothing to do with water.”
“I know. But in his case I think it does.” She nodded toward the sea around them. “When you look out there you see nothing but the surface. So do I; so does everybody. We realize vaguely that two miles down there’s a bottom, but we never think of it, even if we’re swimming in it—probably even if we’re in trouble in it. It makes no difference whether you drown in seven feet of water, or seven miles; you still drown within a few feet of the surface. But you’re in the water; I think he imagines himself rather precariously suspended on the surface of it, as if it were a film of some kind, ten thousand feet above the bottom. In other words, I get the impression he sees it all the way down. Hence, acrophobia. As I say, I’m only guessing, but how else can you account for that horror when he sees something sinking below him? To him, it’s not sinking; it’s falling. And, like all people with acrophobia, he imagines himself falling with it.”
Ingram nodded, though still not convinced she was right. “But he wasn’t always like that?”
“Oh, no. He was an excellent swimmer. And skin-diver. It’s simply because of what we did to him ten days ago. But you have to understand what happened before, and what the situation was. Explosive is a good one-word description. To begin with, not one of us was competent to take a yacht across the Pacific, and incompetence multiplied by any number up to infinity is still incompetence. Four people who don’t know what they’re doing—”
“Are simply four times worse than one,” Ingram said. “So nobody was in charge?”
“No. Not after things started to fall apart. Hughie, as legal owner of the yacht and the only one with any sailing experience at all, should have been in command, but you can’t force a man to command, to fight back, to accept responsibility, if the only responsibility he’s ever had in his life was to be acceptable and pleasing to a succession of overprotective women who took care of him. And if you happen to be in love with him and have to stand there helplessly day after day and watch this disintegration under pressure, this thing you can’t do anything about, eventually your own frustration may goad you into doing something stupid and cruel and unforgivable. But I didn’t intend to make excuses, and I’m getting ahead of the story anyway.”
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“Hughie,” she went on, “has always been obsessed by a feeling for the greatness of Gauguin, and it’s been a lifelong ambition of his to go to Polynesia and live among the islands as he did, escape from the rat race the same way, paint the same subjects, experience the same things. So, when we were married in Europe almost a year ago, I let myself be persuaded, in spite of the fact I had some misgivings about it. In the first place, there’s no escape from our so-called civilization any more; the twentieth century is something we’re locked into and there’s no way we can get out; when we got to Papeete we’d probably find the same jukeboxes, the same headlines, the same cocktail parties, the same jet service from here to there, the same Bomb, and the same exhortations to embrace the finer life by buying something. And in the second place, I was more than a little doubtful of our ability to sail a boat d
own there. But at heart I wanted to be persuaded, and I was. From my point of view there were several things in favor of it. No doubt you can guess what some of them were, but in the interests of clarity they might as well be included in this confession. I’m considerably older than Hughie, and when I met him I was a widow, a fairly wealthy one. You know what he looks like. The picture is trite to the point of banality, except that in this case it’s not true at all. He’s no glorified beach-boy, and we were genuinely in love with each other. And while I bleed very little over the opinions of other people, I didn’t want him regarded as something he wasn’t—at least, not yet, by the grace of God. I have a small but very good collection of paintings, and I know the work of talent when I see it. I wanted to help him, and in Hughie’s case one way of helping him—and me—was to keep him out of the reach of all that gaggle of soi-disant benefactresses and panting patrons of the arts who couldn’t keep their hands off him.”
She broke off with an impatient gesture and then went on. “But enough of that. Hughie bought and studied all the books he could find on yachting and navigation. We chartered a yacht, with a professional crew of two, for a cruise in the western Mediterranean, from Cannes down to the Balearics, to learn as much as we could from practical experience. We came back to the States last winter, bought Orpheus, and began getting ready.”
She smiled musingly. “Then I think we were betrayed. No doubt you remember the old ploy of crooked gamblers, letting the sheep, the intended victim, win the first few hands in order to increase the stakes. It was as if the Pacific Ocean, or fate, did it deliberately. The passage from Santa Barbara down to La Paz was ridiculously easy. Nothing went wrong at all. The weather was perfect, Hughie’s navigation was seemingly accurate enough, the couple with us, who were old friends of mine from San Francisco, were congenial, and we were never at sea long enough for the confinement and too close association to cause any friction, because we made stops at San Diego and Ensenada. If anything had gone wrong in that first leg of the trip we would have been brought face to face with our own inexperience and incompetence, and we’d have had sense enough to give it up. But nothing did, and we were far too overconfident and cocky by the time we reached La Paz.
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