“But it’s a hundred and eighty-five bucks a day, clear, for me,” he thought. “And we gotta have at least five hundred, to save Bill. Three days’ll give us the five, and a little over. I only wisht it would take three days!”
Then, almost before this desire had registered, he saw the object of his search.
Yes, there it lay, hardly twenty feet from one of the big concrete cubes. Dim though the down-filtering light was, none the less that light revealed the son of Eccles, the millionaire, sunk in a hollow amid plant-grown boulders.
The boy lay on his right side, clad in a blue bathing suit. The face was averted; one arm outstretched as if in final, agonized protest against death.
Spurling’s first reaction was an exultant: “Found him, by gosh!”
But on the instant a devastating thought surged through his brain:
“One day’s work — only a hundred and eighty-five bucks. And — and how about my kid?”
A little dazed, groping more perhaps in mind than in body, he started toward the other man’s son. Against smothering resistance at that great depth, he walked with circumspect caution, lest he lose his footing. Once that should happen, quick as a flash he might turn topsy-turvy, hang upside down, helpless and imperiled. His own life — no, he mustn’t lose that, now!
Almost weightless, he moved. His heart was pounding thickly as an overtaxed pump.
“Our Bill! What about our Bill, I’d like to know?”
Yes, furiously, Tim Spurling, diver, was thinking about his only son. A sick and quivering sensation gripped and shook him. Only one day’s work.
“What the blazes good is one day’s work to us, now?”
After all that Blanche and he had hoped and planned on, from this job, just one day’s work. What the blazes, indeed?
He thought of Blanche, mother of the boy now doomed to death. Then his mind nickered round to this drowned boy’s mother and father.
“They’ll suffer, if this kid don’t come up. Sure they’ll suffer like the flames o’ hell, if I don’t bring him up. Yeah, but what about us?”
Over him surged the words of the loose-lipped truckman:
“If you make a good job of it, why, mebbe that five grand might be stretched a bit, too.”
Five grand, and then some! Five thousand dollars and more, plus his wages for a few days’ work — all of six thousand or better! And for what? Why, for just doing nothing at all. For just seeing nothing, down there where nobody could check up on him. For just finding nothing, bringing up nothing.
Had ever a man in all this world been left so starkly alone with his own conscience? In all of life, could any possibility exist, for Tim Spurling, of so much money being won by so little effort? Money, money that now meant life itself to his boy, life to little family!
*****
TIM FELT STRANGELY dizzy and sick. Heart pounding and air pump throbbing hammered his brain with maddening tempo, as he stood there in that green gloom and peered down at the corpse, and tried to think.
Just a dead body, the body of a very rich man’s son. That was all — cold flesh and bones. And what on earth good, in bringing that up? Oh, yes, of course, it would give back to a father and a mother the thing they longed for; a lifeless thing, but still passionately desired. Without it, of course they’d agonize.
“But how ’bout us, if our kid dies? How ’bout us, watchin’ our Bill die? How many dead boys is one live boy worth?”
Tim Spurling seemed to hear words, echoes of his own speech hardly an hour ago:
“Nix on that stunt. I couldn’t do it. Thanks, a heck of a lot, but nothin’ doin’!”
And then the truckman:
“The hell you say! Why not?”
“Well, it ain’t the way us divers does business, that’s all. What we’re hired to risk our lives for, we allus does the best we can. It ain’t a gyp game, for any diver as is a diver. So thanks, mister, but forget it!”
Already he was stooping to pick up the body. It would weigh almost nothing. A signal on the cord, and with the millionaire’s son in his arms, Tim Spurling could in less than no time be back up there at the diving float. Already he was reaching for the body.
But there before him, suddenly he beheld — plain as if reality — the pinched, hollow, and suffering face of his own boy. The terror-stricken and hopeless eyes of his wife. Eyes now all too often red with secret weeping.
“What a fool I am!” growled the diver, his brain clearing. “This here kid don’t go up, now nor never! I don’t locate him, and no other diver don’t, neither. And that is that!”
Still stooping, what he picked up was not the body, but a weed-grown rock. Then another, and still another, and many more. Presently the body had vanished under layers of stones which so perfectly masked it that never could any diver locate it, no matter what his skill might be.
“Six thousand bucks!” thought Tim Spurling, as he straightened up from this macabre task. “I’ll put in at least three days, and collect both ways. Make a good job of it, while I’m at it. And any man as wouldn’t do the same, to save his own boy’s life, he’d be a quitter an’ a coward, on top o’ bein’ a poor damn fool!”
All of a sudden very weak and trembling, he wanted to regain the upper air. Then after a while he could go down again, could continue the fictitious search. But for now, he must quit a spell.
Tim twitched the signal rope, felt an upward pull, saw the lake bottom slide down and away. Down, away, with that pile of stones under which lay a secret that only he knew. Only he, in all this world! Light strengthened, pressure steadily diminished. And then quite suddenly he saw the weighted bottom of the ladder. He grappled it, climbed up, emerged monstrous and dripping, his helmet goggling over the edge of the float.
McTaggart and a couple of others gripped and hoisted him. Up and out he came, while cameras were busy and eager eyes watched from boats and from the float. Sitting down on the edge of the float, he motioned for McTaggart to unscrew his helmet and take it off.
“Whew!” he breathed, deep-lunged and glad of air not pumped through a rubber hose. “Gimme a drag!”
“Find anythin’?” Mac eagerly queried.
“Not yet.”
Another voice cut in — a trembling voice, a woman’s:
“But you will? You will?”
Astonished, Spurling turned his head. He blinked in the sunshine that cut his eyes after the vague obscurity of the depths. Beside the float he saw a motor launch, all brass and varnish, with a uniformed mechanician at its gleaming engine. In wicker chairs, aft, a man and a woman were sitting — Eccles and his wife.
“Look a here, mister!” Spurling reproved the millionaire. He felt aggrieved, to have these two hanging round while he was at work. “See here, now. You hadn’t oughta be here. This here ain’t no place for you two!” His clumsy, rubber-gloved hand sketched a crude gesture. “No place, ’tall!”
“I know it,” the magnate assented, while listeners stretched their ears. Eccles, for all the heat of that July day, was shivering. His body shook as with a palsy. “I know it, but —”
“I had to come. I had to!” put in his wife. “I couldn’t stay away and wait —”
Spurling’s lip tightened with acid disapproval. An extraordinary and grotesque figure — with his head, seemingly far too small, projecting up out of that vast suit — he looked at the dead boy’s mother. And what he saw was human agony, raw and bleeding.
The diver understood. The woman’s sunken eyes and pale lips, her deep-lined face, told the whole story. This story was underscored by her quivering fingers that tightly clutched the arms of the wicker chair.
“If you only knew,” the mother half-whispered. “If you could only understand what it means to lose an only son!”
“Reckon I do ma’am,” answered the diver. “Or reckon I will, pretty soon.”
“Why — how —”
“Well, I got a kid o’ my own, see? ’Bout the same age as yours was, and he’s dyin’. Arizona’
s all that’ll save him. But Arizona ain’t for us. Huh! Fat chance we got o’ that!”
“Oh!” breathed Mrs. Eccles comprehendingly, while the reporters pounced on a wonderful human-interest story. “You mean you’ve got a —”
“Tell me,” the millionaire brusquely cut in. “You haven’t found anything, yet? No sign, no indication?”
“Nothin’, so fur. Not yet.”
“But you will? You’re going down again, right away?”
“Yeah, pretty soon. Quick as I rest up, a little, and get this cold out o’ my bones.”
“And you’ll find my son?” asked the mother. “You will, won’t you?”
“Well, gee, I’ll try.”
“No, no! Promise you’ll find him. Oh, don’t you see, you’ve got to?”
Tim Spurling began to feel very queer and sick again. Something seemed to have hold of his guts and to be twisting them. He blinked as he looked that woman fair in the eyes. Between the float and the motor launch extended a distance of not more than four feet. Between Tim Spurling, workman, and those two millionaires, stretched infinity. But something strove to bridge that infinity.
Under the compulsion of this something, under the fever of that stricken woman’s look — that appealing, agonized, crucified look — Spurling felt his plans all riven, cast awry and wrecked.
“Hell!” he tried to rally himself. “Don’t be a quitter and a fool!”
But it was no good. For the woman was speaking again.
“Your own boy — you say he’s very ill?”
“Yes. T.B.”
“What’s his name?”
“William. But o’ course we call him just Bill.”
“And how old?”
“Sixteen, ma’am. Your boy — same age?”
She nodded. He saw tears gleaming in her faded eyes.
“Please get away from here,” he begged. “I’m goin’ down again right away, and when I come up mebbe you better not be here.” He appealed to the millionaire. “See here, Mr. Eccles. Get her out o’ here. Won’t you take her away, please?”
“He’s right, Valerie,” the magnate assented. “We really ought to go.” He gave a word of command to the mechanic at the engine. Then, to Spurling: “You’re going down again, right now?”
“Yeah. Just as quick’s I have a smoke and a bit of a rest. And you can count on me. I’ll do the best I can!”
As the powerful engine started, and the motorboat purred away with those two lonely, sorrowful, rich, death-stricken figures, Tim Spurling gazed after them with tragic eyes.
“The best I can, for you,” he thought. “That means the worst for us!” Aloud: “You there, Mac — light me a tack, can’t you? Gee, that water’s awful cold, down there. I sure need a smoke. I sure need it worse’n I ever needed one in all my life!”
*****
TIM SPURLING, that same evening, stood on the platform of the Crystal Lake station with McTaggart, his helper. Their diving gear, all boxed up again, was waiting to be lifted aboard the baggage car of the 7:17, that had already whistled far up Swiftwater Valley.
“Damn short job, Tim,” Mac was complaining. “Seems like we ain’t got no luck at all.”
“Mebbe yes, mebbe no. What’s good for one, is bad for another. Everybody can’t have all they want.”
“Sure, I know. But —”
Down the road swept a long gray car. It slowed, stopped at the station. A chauffeur opened its door. Out stepped Eccles.
The last fading of sunset over the mountains showed his face, which though still grief-ravaged was more at peace. He even managed a wan bit of a smile as he came toward the diver.
“I wanted to thank you again, before you left,” he said, quite simply. “We’ll never forget it, my wife and I. Never forget what you’ve done for us.”
“Oh, that? Well, it’s just my job, I reckon.”
“Perhaps. But at any rate, we want to send your boy something. You’ll take it to him, won’t you?”
“Send my boy somethin’?” And Spurling’s eyes widened. McTaggart was all curiosity. “Why — what could —”
“It’s a memorial. Something in memory of our own lad.”
The envelope from Eccles’s pocket passed to Tim Spurling’s hand. Amazed, the diver stared at it.
“This here; it’s —”
“Call it life, if you will,” smiled Eccles. “It’s a check made out to William Spurling. I’ve signed it. Your boy can fill in the amount. Be sure he makes it enough to get him well and strong. To keep his hold on life — life that, once gone, can never be brought back by all the millions in this world!”
More loudly echoed the train whistle. A glimmering headlight sparkled into view.
“Why, my gosh, I — I been paid, already,” stammered the diver. “I can’t take this and —”
“You’re not taking it. It’s your boy’s. Goodbye, Spurling, good luck to you and yours!”
A handclasp. A silent look that passed, not now between workman and millionaire, but from man to man, father to father. Then Eccles, turning, was gone.
The headlight glare strengthened. Brakes began to grind. The train slowed at the station.
“Gee whiz, Tim!” cried McTaggart, as his chief’s face was for a moment brilliantly illuminated. “What the devil? Why, you’re cryin’!”
“The hell I am!” Spurling indignantly retorted. “It’s just a cinder in my eye. This damn soft coal, and all! If you don’t know when a feller’s got a cinder in his eye — Say, gimme a drag, can’t you? I sure need it!”
AFRICA
“SEE THERE? That’s Africa!”
Dr. Paul Willard gestured far across the night to where, in the vast dark, a spurt of flame glowed like a blood-ruby, died, then trembled forth again.
“Africa?” the girl questioned vaguely. A nameless awe crept round her heart, in presence of that unseen emptiness looming away to the inverted bowl of sky — a fathomless sky, spattered with great refulgent stars, among which, overhead, the funnels of the Sutherland traced smoky patterns. “Africa?”
“A little corner of it, anyway,” the doctor answered, smiling at her tone. “Cape Roxo light. By two bells of the middle watch we’ll be off the coast of Guinea, running through Bissagos Islands — a bad place at best. I never liked it, and I’ve surgeoned on ‘old Suth’ for more than seven years. Don’t like it now, its reefs and cannibal wreckers and all, even with Captain Lockhart on the bridge.”
The girl made no answer, but she leaned her arms across the rail, swaying as the ship rolled, and gazed out into the unknown. Steadily the Strathglass liner clove the fugitive seas, creaming them astern in surges that hissed away into the black.
He risked a side glance at her.
Never had she seemed quite so beautiful to him as under the lantern light which gleamed upon her heavy yellow braids of hair, her frost-white gown. At sight of her delicate, somewhat pale face, his smile waned. No living man — least of all Willard, in the passion which had obsessed him ever since Ethel Armstrong and her crippled uncle had set foot upon the Sutherland’s deck — could have felt amusement in presence of that gentle, earnest seriousness.
“Somehow, do you know,” she mused at length, “I feel a bit afraid? It’s all so empty! And just to know that Africa is over there.” A gesture rounded out the thought. “I sha’n’t quite like it till we’re at the quay in Cape Town.”
“When you’ll immediately forget the trip, the boat, and — everyone on board?” he led along; but she ignored the opening. Her mood was far from banter. The doctor, too, repented of his speech, the clumsiness of which jarred upon the majesty and wonder of that tropic night. “Oh, well, you’ll see things differently tomorrow,” he retrieved himself. “Quite differently, when the big red sun rolls up over the coast and splashes gold across the sea.”
“Perhaps,” she half assented. “But tomorrow is so far away. I think I’ll go below. This air stifles me.”
He nodded.
“Yes; I
understand. I used to feel it so myself, before I got quite used to it.” His powers of speech had never seemed more pitifully crude.
He helped her down the steep companionway. Then, after a perfunctory good night from her, came up again to the quarterdeck.
“Great guns, what gloom!” he muttered. “Why, India ink is pale beside it. I don’t half like the way these offshore swells are running, either — with Bissagos still ahead of us. Can’t say I’m used to this particular bit of Africa even now. No wonder that she — Ethel — feels so shuddery.”
A moment he pondered in silence.
“That’s an upper-class privilege, anxiety is. A mere proletarian like me has no right to it. No, nor yet to look at an upper-class woman. For such, we aren’t real men — just official objects.”
He leaned upon the railing where her arms had lain, and for a long time stared off across the dark where, on Cape Roxo, winked that dim, retreating eye of flame.
II.
THE DOCTOR found no sleep till long past midnight. Even with his cabin window slid far back, the tepid land breeze choked him, and his thoughts were weft of hot rebellion, longings, and misery. He tossed wide-eyed in his berth, heard the ship’s bell dole out the eternal hours, then the halves, torturing himself with images of Cape Town and the approaching separation, which (only too well he knew) must be forever. Midnight was long gone, when he lost himself in troublous dreams of distant inaccessible things, never to be reached by him.
Toward early morning something flung him back to consciousness — a grinding, raking craunch that shivered the whole fabric of the ship, and roused him to the knowledge he was struggling on his cabin floor, which slanted dizzily. He clambered up, mazed and wit-struck for a moment, groped for the electric-button, and snapped on the light.
As the glare dazzled him, the Sutherland pitched nauseously again; and far below he heard a hideous gnawing and rasping, as of stony Titan jaws devouring steel. Then came sharp cries, oaths, and orders hoarsely bawled, and heavy feet that ran unsteadily along the decks. The pulsing engines suddenly grew still.
THE SUPREME GETAWAY AND OTHER TALES FROM THE PULPS Page 15