by Max Brand
She started to cry out that it was poison; the doctor would prevent danger with a stomach pump. But then she realized how much that confession would mean. She had boarded the ship under an assumed name with some difficulty, but under the pressure of such a circumstance her identity was sure to come out, and how the newspaper bloodhounds would fasten on that story: LOUISE LOMBARD ATTEMPTS SUICIDE AT SEA. FORMER SCREEN BEAUTY...
After the first impulse to give the warning was checked, she thought of another thing that was important. She could not tell how the veronal killed and whether, before the end, there were nausea, a swelling or distortion of the face, frantic struggles against death. But Bliss would show her the entire truth, and, if it were not too revolting, she could follow his involuntary example. She felt no pity. Bliss was only one of the swine, and it did not matter when his ghost went stumbling, blubbering, arms a-grope through the outer darkness. And if she went on, quickly, how could she be supposed to know what had happened? She went on quickly.
An ecstasy possessed her, a bodily sensation of delight. The stupid pleasure of most women is merely to bring life into the world, she felt, but Louise Lombard was handling death, literally tasting it with an exquisite connoisseur- ship. She hardly knew where she walked, except that she had seen the pale, suffering face of Katherine Wayland somewhere.
An appetite for more delicious knowledge drove her. Then she was again at the open door of the smoking room. She looked into the bar and saw Bliss, sagging like a loosely-filled sack, perched on one of the tall stools, yawning; because it was after two o’clock, the fool would be thinking. But ah! The depth of knowledge which only she, of all the world, could impart to him. It was right that the swine should die first and trample the way out before the more elected spirits of men and women followed.
Here the Yorktown swayed a little to the starboard and kept on listing a trifle as though a very long, gentle wave were passing under the keel.
It was best for her, under any circumstances, not to be found staring through the doorway at the sinking body of Bliss. So she went forward and leaned at the rail. The Yorktown began to shudder, and an odd drumming sound passed through the ship. Something slid out of the fog near the prow at the same time; it was long and very low and dark. Vaguely she saw it nuzzle the bow just where it curved out to the full width of the hull. Then it slid on down the side with a decreasing speed.
Something showered up from it, and here the moon parted the mist to show her that that whirlwind in still air was composed of gulls and sooty terns which rose and fell like the swirling head of a fountain. They seemed to have risen, parasites, from the back of a sea-monster. But now she saw that it was a ship with sharp bows, a deck almost awash out of which sprouted the stumps of three masts. The fallen spar pointed like a cannon at the great wall of the Yorktown. No bow-waves curled from the cutwater of the derelict, no wake left a widening pattern behind her; she came with the sea, softly. Already the birds began to drop back to her, settling on the sway of cordage, balancing their long, curved wings; then a deeper fog swallowed her astern.
Louise Lombard became aware that the throbbing shudder no longer troubled the Yorktown; the hum and quiver of the engines had ceased. A false sense of motion still seemed to carry them forward, but Louise knew that they were lying still, as though the touch of the derelict had poisoned the life of the great ship. She thought of Bliss, the fat steward, yawning on his stool in the bar, then she went up to the boat deck and up to the game deck above it to sit on a bench and watch the interweaving designs of the fog beneath the moon.
Her thoughts would not progress; something happening to the ship held her in the present moment. She heard feet thumping over the decks at a run; bells rang as dimly as voices heard through the deadening wall of ether. Then the whistle blew six short blasts, followed by a long hoot.
All the Yorktown wakened at once. Officers, sailors, appeared on the boat deck; a murmur of feet and voices poured upwards. They were rising about her like a swarm. She leaned over the rail and called to a sailor who was coiling down a rope on the deck just beneath: “What’s it all about, Jack?” He looked up at her so suddenly that his mouth pulled open; then he bent his head and went on silently with his work. Down on the promenade were many people gathering. She heard now and then a sharp outcry, the rest murmurs.
A tall, bending figure in uniform paused beside her: “Go down to the boat deck!” he commanded. “Get down there at once!”
The officer went on, and Louise Lombard sat where she was, dreaming that perhaps she was not to die alone, after all. The bench, she noticed, had altered a little beneath her as though the ship were being lifted from the stem by a wave that never ebbed, and it was this which made her see that the Yorktown was slightly down by the head. An instant later a scurry came up all the four companionways from the promenade, a scurrying, the whisper of dresses like the wind, and a rapid little murmur suppressed, not unlike the noise of a stream along a hillside. These were all women or children tugged along by the hand. The officers met them with pointing arms and sharp commands, shepherding them in small groups in front of the double rows of the boats. The women seemed trying to make it all a whispering secret, but the big-throated men were giving the mystery away.
A voice called, quiet with awe: “Billy! Billy! Where are you?” Then, in a sudden screech: “Billy! Who’s seen my boy? He’s in shorts. He’s only ten. Billy! Billy! Oh, my God, where’s my son!”
The eyes of Louise Lombard half closed; she drew in a long breath through her teeth with a sound like straining water. She told herself at once that she did not care. Her unborn son had killed her beauty, and, even if he had lived, what return would he have made to her for that?
A boat filled on the port side. One of the officers was handing in the passengers and reassuring them: “Now this is going to be all right. Just keep your heads. Sit tight. We’ve got to have these drills. Sit fast and hold on a little. No more danger than in an elevator.”
The boat filled; the davits bent outwards. Two sailors began to hand the ropes of the tackle, and the lifeboat dropped gently from view. Louise Lombard, surveying the vastness of the Yorktown, found it hard to believe that even the vast throat of the ocean could swallow such a morsel, but she knew that the ship was being abandoned in the middle of the sea. Boats swung out on the starboard and to port. They were lowered away.
“Shall I help you to a place in a boat?” asked a voice above her. Louise Lombard looked up at Michael Carmichael, who was lifting his gray cap to her. She had seen him here and there, moving with a quiet step and sometimes with a faint smile. A whisper among the passengers had told her his name. He was someone important. Now that she saw him so close she realized that he had been walking up and down in her thoughts since her first glimpse of him. The treacherous moon, at this moment, divided the mist and looked straight down upon her face, but no shadow of surprise or disgust appeared in Michael Carmichael. He held out his hand, smiling still. “Won’t you let me take you to a boat?” he repeated.
The quiet of his eyes told her that he was seeing everything, and yet to him certainly she was appearing as no less than a woman. Thin images out of the past rushed through the eyes of Louise Lombard faster than even landscapes whirled away across the windows of a train. She knew that she was confronting at least a reality worth more than all the shadows which had filled her brain, like a sick man who tastes wine for the first time, and on his final day.
“I’ll stay here... a while,” she said, and turned her back on him. She faced a blankness of moving fog with silly little creatures astir in it. All the lives on the Yorktown were so petty compared with the one man she might carry down.
That deep voice continued beside her: “You know we all can have the same idea when we’re tired... but sleep and a touch of friendship make a difference, don’t you think? Please let me take you to the boats.”
Because there was no sham of priestly unction for the very sake of this utter reality, grief wrung the sou
l of the woman. In her soul there was little taste of the distinction between grief and any other pain. That was why she whirled about and cried: “Ah, damn the boats! I’ll stay here!”
Even then he waited for a moment until she turned her back the second time. At last he was gone, leaving her in such a blankness that she saw and heard nothing except the chirping voices and the dwarfed forms that were in her past. She wished she had asked him why he bothered about her. She yearned desperately to learn what effect her bruised and starving face had had upon him. She knew the answer would come from a profound knowledge of life which she herself could neither touch nor see.
Something like a padded fist struck the Yorktown and shook it slightly with a following sound like the rush of wind or of water. The long deck heeled to the starboard and sent her staggering across to the lower rail. There had been a list of twenty or thirty degrees before the ship steadied again. It seemed to be sweeping sideways on an unending wave.
She saw the clumsy women tumbled in heaps on the deck beneath. Some of them screamed. Some of them clung together as though the water were even now closing over them. She wanted them all! She grudged every boatload that sank from the davits toward the second chance of life. Yet how good would that chance be if the storm, which the falling barometer had promised the evening before, should arrive? Not to go alone into the outer night but in a flock swifter than sea birds? Let all the future days be shut away — all the days for all of them.
The noise from the men that stirred her, as though her own throat uttered it, had ended. Now the women on the boat deck were being herded to the starboard side alone. A few random exclamations told her why: the cant of the vessel made it impossible to launch all the remaining boats on the port side. The gate to safety was narrowing — not half of those who remained could escape through it.
The Yorktown was uttering two blasts on the fog horn every two minutes. It was after one of these that a tumult spread all around the hidden promenade deck, a yelling of despair as though the sea were reaching now for those unseen men. Up the four companionways came a pressure that staggered the men on guard. They beat that pressure away. It came again. She could hear the blows struck that knocked the mob leaders down.
It was good this way, thought Louise Lombard. Down there on the promenade they knew by this time that half the boats were useless and that the remainder could contain only a portion of their number. They were tasting death not in one great swallow but distilling the cold poison gradually against the palate. It was better, it was perfect this way, for at the best what one of them had rubbed elbows with death daily for three long years? This was merely a little last-minute ripening of their souls before they passed along with her upon the great journey.
A moment of comparative quiet followed, as more boats put off and dropped over the starboard rail. Six of the twelve, well loaded, already had gone down toward safety, when the Yorktown, poised for its long downward rush, lifted and trembled like a spear in a hand grasp, and the heart of Louise Lombard trembled also, raised with joy to find in herself no fear.
From the unseen crowd on the promenade deck she heard voices strangled in mid-cry by fear, the trampling of feet like thunder on the horizon, then harsh shouting from the sailors who guarded the companionways. A last rush for the boat deck was starting.
She wanted the stampede to break down the barriers and flood the upper deck because she would be standing here above them, watching the yelling panic which would make all further launching of the boats impossible. So the Yorktown would sweep downwards, and the clusters of struggling humanity, like knots of fighting cats, would be swallowed by the same wide throat that drank down the liner. But the crews which manned the companionways seemed perfectly competent to discharge their duty, particularly those who were commanded at the aft-port companionway by the chief surgeon, Doctor Nash. Fresh from the operating room in long white garments, he looked like one who played the ghost in the play, or like an even more symbolic figure. She knew him less by his dim features in the moonshine and more by the extreme rigidity of his military carriage.
Three times a tumbling wave of figures struggled up to the feet of the doctor and fell away again. The fourth effort was more sustained. Men rose as high as the waist above the deck in spite of the poised automatic of the chief surgeon. He leveled the gun; erratic sparks sprang from the muzzle of it. A noise like the chatter of a riveter rattled for an instant in her ears, and the wave of passengers receded. Perhaps one of them had reached Nash with a stabbing knife or a bullet, for he himself faltered backwards, throwing an arm up across his face.
“Now!” screamed Louise Lombard. “Now! Now’s your chance!”
It seemed as though those men on the stairway might have heard her. They lunged upwards in uncontrollable numbers that swept the guard aside. An active fellow in a sweater and cap knocked the chief surgeon headlong, picked up his fallen gun, and ran on.
At the three other companionways, as though one break in the dam had ruined the whole strong wall of discipline, the passengers flooded upwards and a new voice, great and wild, rang from the Yorktown into the sky. To Louise Lombard they were the mob, the supernumeraries, the color and sound effects of her last and greatest stage. All courage, all steadfast manliness, now would be dissolved in the mob frenzy, she hoped. But no, there were still officers who stood against the rush till they were overwhelmed like small islands by a flood. When she saw this, she looked upwards with a cringing, sudden expectancy; but there was only a luminous entanglement of the fog beneath the moon. She glanced hungrily down again.
A filled boat was leaving the davits when the rush commenced. Perhaps the terror of it made the life crew clumsy, for, while the stern-rope paid out slowly, the bow tackle went on the ran and spilled the living cargo. Their screaming shrilled in the top of her brain, diminished, and went out suddenly like fire blown down the wind. The sea had them, and the boat, headed down, dropped, dangling, from view. Then the panic-driven stormed the lifeboats which remained.
To the rearward of that madness other men came more slowly, all those steadier souls who wished for life, but only if there were some dignity in the keeping of it. But the mob had beaten the women down or thrust them backwards, a lighter flotsam, to the rear of the press. That fellow in the sweater who had felled the doctor and taken his gun was now in a boat amidships, active as a fighting ape. With a club in one hand, the automatic in the other, he cleared the benches quickly of the human tumble which had overheaped them. Continually the crowd surged at him and fell back again, dreading him more than it feared the sea. With a voice that shouted hoarse and far through the tumult, like the cry of a seabird against a storm, he picked his crew now. The chosen tumbled aboard to help their master keep back the unelect. He was a man; the rest were nothing.
From that center of glorious action Louise glanced over the fringes of the crowd just beneath her and marked a woman with pale, blown hair who struggled again and again to make forward through some momentary gap in the throng. As the path closed in heavy tumult, she would shrink away once more, desperately shielding her body with her arms. Thrown back from the last effort against the cabin wall, she stared where the despairing are bound to look, upwards. And Louise recognized Katherine Wayland.
A numbness spread through the brain of Louise. She pressed her hands against her body where pain seemed to be. Bitterness was in her mouth. The world receded as once before it had wavered and been lost behind the impenetrable wall of ether, and an overwhelming sense of loss poured through her soul. In that sickness of the mind she turned her head and saw against the lifting port rail of the game deck, like two figures in the sky, tall Michael Carmichael with a woman close to him.
What right have the Katherine Waylands to wear the child-look, the passive despair? And what right had a girl beside Carmichael to smile upwards at him as though she found in him space and future enough to enclose her soul forever? She was that French maid with the pale, pure face which the moon was outlining now in
soft fire. But what was she to stand in the midst of such a revelation as Louise Lombard had dreamed of but never seen. Or had she even dreamed of it, in fact? Death could not harm that girl beside Carmichael because, for her, existence was complete. It seemed to Louise that her heart was being crushed between two walls of cruel understanding that had come to her how much too late!
That voice which rang like the distant croaking of a gull came to her again and for a wild moment it seemed to her that it was a bodiless cry rising from her own spirit.
“One more place! One woman for luck!”
It was the man in the sweater, blood-drenched now but still the perfect master of his boat and its crew.
Louise Lombard raced down the nearest steps to the boat deck, to the side of Katherine Wayland. “A place for you... if you’ll come... if you’ll fight for it!” she screamed. Katherine Wayland turned her head from that distorted face, but Louise caught hold on her, shrilling: “Stand up, damn you! Stand up and fight for the two of you. There’s one place waiting!”
And through a momentary gap she dragged the girl. The gap closed around her, but still she found a way. Her free hand was armed with talons to claw a passage through. The davits were bending, the boat was swaying out, but still it was not clear of the deck when the two women reached it. Louise Lombard looked up at the man in the sweater, a snarling face that dripped with blood.
“Here!” she cried. “This one! This is your luck!” And she thrust Katherine Wayland forward. Many hands, reaching over the gunwale, gripped the loose, falling body and dragged it on board. The boat sank from the davits at once and passed from view.
Louise Lombard watched it disappear, and it seemed to her that something of herself was being launched to find a second chance. The crowd swept her back and forth on waves and counterwaves. The screaming had grown more frightful, but, still with a strange joy, she watched the smooth running of the ropes through the pulleys as the boat descended.