by John Hersey
Tom saw what he must do—or what he thought he must do, for Esmé was a trickster and had made Tom distrust what he had considered his greatest strength of all, his ability to watch out for “things”; he was tired, muddled, deprived of all the usual measures of decision, and it was hard to tell his beloved details from dreaded wholes. It seemed that he must wear off on a close reach, southwesterly in tendency, driving down away from the island; that he must advance the throttle, take the prolonged risk of three thousand r.p.m.’s; that he must try to keep Harmony’s bows fairly well up into the wind by holding the helm far to leeward as she ran down a great sea-back and through the valley of skids and most of the way up the next oncoming mass; but that then he must head her sharply up—the only way to do this being to ease the wheel to midships just before the crest and then whirl it back down again to make a kind of flapping fan of the rudder and so nudge her bow up—in order to come into the breakers nearly head on, to keep the boat moving by taking the wavetop fury equally down both flanks. So it seemed, and so he did, or thought he did.
He thought he was doing. This was too hard. He was in a dream. There had been too much of seeming. One could not live without differentiations, one simply could not get along without being able to see outlines, borderlines, and without being able to feel more or less action in one’s arms.
But there was an outline! To windward. A heaviness, a bulk, a darker place. Was that a glimpse of Block Island? If it was, then islands, like boats, could move in the sea, and Block Island, not Harmony, was out of place. Perhaps it was just a lowering bank of cloud. Surely she was well away from land by now! There was a reality of something dark there, couching an illusion.
Tom recognized now the final humiliation: not to be sure of anything.
Or was it? Wasn’t there something even worse? To be condemned to a monotony of this unsureness? His hand, a glove-shaped bag of weakened sinews and many little bones, curling around a piece of wood ornately shaped on a lathe, repeating an identical action over and over again. Hold down, wait, ease up, whirl; repeat; repeat; repeat. The waves had somewhat different shapes but uniform intent. One had to repeat the action, or else—cease repeating the action, cease being, cease seeming. Camus’s rendering of Sisyphus came to him, the aptest picture of modern man—in a hurricane wind. Tom was tempted to stop this repetition, for he felt that if Esmé would take the hint and just stop on her side for five minutes, then he would be able to resume and carry on forever.
But what was that concept that had sneaked into his mind? Five minutes. Tom quickly looked at his watch and, without having taken in the message of the metal hands, he sensed a change. Was it in himself? What was it?
Flick was shaking. Monotony for him was to be an endless existence of shivering. Smart bastard who liked to be rained on. (There was a change; a tremulous lightening of the weight of monotony.) Tom could only see part of Flick’s profile as he maintained his fixated vigil to port: pale, except for the lips, which had a color of no good. The eyes were rapt; they seemed to be reading in a fascinating book a single perfect sentence. But they were, at the same time, sound asleep to anything actual.
After her pumping, Audrey had stayed in that corner of the cockpit, Dottie’s former safe place. Now she was steadily watching Flick’s trembling shoulders, just as hypnotized, in her way, as Flick in his. But there seemed now—Tom scanned her as he had his watch, without really taking in the message—some kind of imminence in her stare; her private monotony was on some kind of verge, and this contributed to Tom’s sense of some slight change having set in, or being about to.
And Dottie? Too bad, no visible change there. She sat holding on with the weak hands of one who had regurgitated all energy, sick to emptiness of the sea’s anger yet somehow in love with it, watching with huge eyes, passive, helpless except for a tiny dampened spark still in her eye of her quarrel with Flick and of wanting to care for Flick, wanting to hand-brush the hair from his brow, or slap comprehension into his stare.
And what about Harmony? (One certain change: a sharpened awareness in Tom, something making him look around again at “things,” even if he did not clearly understand them.) Harmony was making that deep music all the time now, and even it could be said to have changed. On the edge of the thrumming there was a kind of fluttering, a soft throbbing as of the beating of wings or the trembling of the luff of a genoa jib in gentle airs, coming up from beneath. There was a new edge to the sound; that was a change.
Then Tom realized it had stopped raining. He had no idea how long before. Raising his eyes as Harmony made a curvet on the summit of a wave, he saw a sharp horizon far away; then the yawl was in a hollow and the horizon had leaped in heaving and high. He wondered, thinking of the vague illusion of imminent change he had had for some time, whether he had confused it all along with the reality of the stopping of the rain. Shadow and substance: he must have translated a cessation of the stinging of drops of storm-blown rain in his face into a mere sense of becoming, an anticipation. The danger, now, was inward: it was false interpretation. When a man looked at realities and saw chimeras, when he read past events as future promises, he was in a danger more profound than that of the closeness of death; the danger was the horror of being alive and not knowing it.
Tom could still fight the spokes of the wheel; he would with equal effort fight this awful danger. Item the first: look for Block Island. Harmony came up on top, and he looked in the direction of the dim shape he had seen, or imagined, a few centuries (moments) ago. There was nothing there. It had been a cloud, a fogbank, a dreamland. He looked back over his left shoulder to where the island actually should have been, and there it was. Anticipation and reality rejoined! How far away? Five miles? What did it matter? He could run to leeward forever in the new wind after the eye, to the Azores, to Portugal, to Casablanca! Hooray for rocks and soil and sand and bayberry bushes, out of the way where they belonged!
But Block Island’s obliging location did not mean that the fight against the new danger was won; for now came a new sensory dislocation. Tom saw that the rollers were no longer breaking along the tops of the waves. How long had this been true? He was still repeating the robot ritual at the wheel, easing it up and whirling it down near the crests, to head up—into combers no longer there. He could steer a straighter course now.
What else? Look at the water! What else? Why, the vastness was still there, the awesomeness of immensity that made Tom think small, and there were still hard climbs to acrophobic nightmares and then plunges with the lance of the bowsprit aimed down to split the back-scales of slimy dragons of the unconscious crawling on the bottom of the sea—but see: the skin of the waves had changed. That urgent building of ripples on ripples was no longer going on; the furious corrugation had stopped. For how long?
And what did the disappearance of the breakers and the smoothing of the complexion of the seas mean? Translate with care, he told himself. These phenomena may have been there, or rather not there, for a long time, unobserved or misinterpreted. Be careful what you think of them.
Before Tom satisfied himself on this point there was a “thing” to be seen to. Harmony was going with more ease than—than in an earlier era—and he wanted to throttle down the engine to avoid overheating. This was a perfectly reasonable and necessary precaution. Bending down and watching the tachometer he pulled back the throttle: twelve hundred, and the thrumming still there but the fluttering gone. Yes, she held her own at twelve hundred. How could she?
That problem of the breakers. The problem of the ruffling-on-ruffling no longer there. The problem, now observed but not yet translated, of no more spume flying off every protuberance and wedge of water.
All right, one more practical move: If no more rain, why not take down the waterproof hood? He hooked both knees over opposite spokes of the wheel and after some picking and tugging at the bowknot under his chin he loosened the drawstring of the hood and flipped his head bare.
First things first: the thrumming. It was a sound, sure enough.
Now at last, with a whole face naked and ears out in the open and hair free, Tom understood all those seen changes. The wind had dropped. There was almost no wind. An end had come to the wind.
And as if this were an enlightenment in every sense, as if far more than a mere answer to riddles had dawned on Tom, the day was suddenly brighter. A strange glare, hard on eyes adjusted to the possibility that gloom would last forever, making one squint at its unexpectedness, lay on the decks.
Tom looked up and saw ahead a great curved gulf of blue sky.
The thrumming sound was so much on his mind that it took him some time to feel that blueness as a hope of warmth. He was trying to remember: in that worst of all skids, when turning turtle had seemed a certainty, the first sign had been an end to the thrumming—and what had that meant?
There was blue sky ahead!—as blue as the rim of a summertime high, wafting cool, dry air from pine woods and elk ponds far to the north; only this blue came, less honest, ringed with outrage, from the fetid south. The others should know about this. Tom looked to them, wanting to speak words for the first time in an age. But Flick and Audrey were interlocked, as surely as fornicating animals who get stuck in the act: he staring and shivering, she with that smile and that look of inception. She was really about to do something for him. Let them be. There was always Dottie. “Look up there,” Tom said to her, and he pointed at the huge azure curve.
Dottie looked, and then her eyes came back to his in gratitude and uncomprehending sweetness.
And then, two or three score of huge seas later, in a fullness of kindly brilliance, out came the sun. Tom knew the meaning of everything now. Esmé’s horrid eye was ogling them. They had made it to the eye.
They had made it. Tom looked at his watch, and this time he understood what the hands had to say: It was exactly one-fifteen. He would remember that for the log. He would buy a new log book, even though this one was only half filled; he could not keep looking at that cut-up endpaper. He’d get a new one.
Then he thought: Sufficient unto the day the winds thereof. Make no commitments for the future; sign no contracts today, buy no log books.
Audrey was unbuckling. The sunlight was dazzling on her bulging orange life jacket over her orange slicker; and a golden light was reflected up on her face, which was illuminated, too, by that look of maternal anticipation aimed at Flick. She undid her hood and shook out her hair, and then she stood unsteadily—Harmony was making good time, thrumming along and prancing like a bronco on the queerly unmotivated yet still huge seas, which were now plum-colored and starred with sunglints—and she staggered, looking euphoric and a little foolish like a young girl who had had no idea how strong the drinks were that she had been handed, and she crossed to Flick, whose back was still turned to the cockpit, and she triumphantly put her hands on his shaking shoulders.
It looked as if it would take more than the sun and feminine palms to drive the chill out of him. He did not seem to feel Audrey’s touch at all.
The deck lurched, and Audrey, giving Flick a swift knee in the kidneys, jackknifed at the hips and crashed down beside and partly on him, with one arm thrown over his shoulders and the off elbow digging for his groin. Misguided nurse! How she roughed him up!
Then came the first human sounds Tom had heard for a long, long time: a grunt from Flick and an embarrassed giggle from Audrey.
But most of all he heard the inhuman thrumming of Harmony in the sea.
Leaving her arm across Flick’s shoulders, as if the pair of them were quite alone with the gross monstrosities of the scene, Audrey spoke straight into his ear. Tom could not hear what she said.
Flick’s answer was to shiver and chatter his teeth and stare off with undaunted impersonality at the greenish crescent of storm-cloud retiring to the north.
Tom caught a glimpse of a shadow of bewilderment on Audrey’s face, but that drained away like a fading blush, and she stood up again, and, leaning on the cabin trunk, she pushed forward the companionway hatch, and she pulled herself upward with the obvious intention of going below to get warm clothes for Flick.
“Watch your step!” Tom ambiguously bellowed at her, but she did not turn her head.
Over and into the rectangular opening went one leg, and then the other—she seemed to be holding on tight—and then she disappeared.
What was it he had been trying to remember about the thrumming and the end of thrumming during that almost fatal skid?
Now Dottie was up and unhooded and unbuckled, with her back to Tom, and she was lifting the flap of the seat onto which he had moved her, and she reached down into the locker under it, and up came her hand with the coffee thermos in it. Passive and helpless? Dear Dottie with a quarrel in the bank!
She turned, her big eyes glittering like wave tops, and with a patter of quick little steps she trotted diagonally across the cockpit, holding the cylindrical container in both hands, and plumped down beside Flick. Yes, they would take care of him. Making a face expressive of determination and grit in extremity, as if removing the cap of the thermos were in a class with sailing through a hurricane, she twisted once, and made a bigger face, and then again; and then it gave. She drew the cork and poured a capful and held it out to Flick.
Suddenly leaping all the way into a normalcy that was grotesque in its matter-of-factness, Flicker suavely took the thermos cap in his right hand, said distinctly, “Thank you, Dottie-pie,” in a tone that made it seem that the coffee was just a bit on the late side but was his due and had to be acknowledged, and holding the cap in both hands blew gently on it to cool it, so he would not burn his tongue. The incredible unconscious nerve of the lump! But then a bout of shivering hit him, and he spilled some of the coffee and scalded his hands and dropped the cap, dexterously palming it out away from his bare, bluish knees, and clearly forgot at once that there had ever been any coffee or wife or boat or storm.
Patiently Dottie put the cork back, placed the thermos in Flick’s lap, and went on her hands and knees on the heaving deck to catch the cap, which was running and rolling like a snide little kitten that knew how to come close and then get away. She retrieved it finally and rose to the seat and poured another round and tried Flick again. But by now he had suffered a total failure of interest.
Dottie sat holding the cap for a long time, looking down at the coffee in it, and then with perfect grace, smiling apologetically, she reached it out to Tom.
He gulped it down, making a hot metal rod of his esophagus, and handed back the cap.
Dottie began to screw it onto the thermos.
“You’d better have some,” Tom said very loudly, but at the same time he was thinking of the puzzle of the thrumming and was not humanely interested in whether she drank coffee. What a curious effect, here under the eye of the storm, of a return to reason (was that an illusion?) and a wish—but not deep enough to be sincere—to return to the world of amenities, manners, connections one to one. But watch out for Esmé’s tricks! That sound under the boat! It was like an obsessive monotone humming of a mad person. Was it Esmé humming to remind one that this eye of hers, though comely and loving, was fickle, fickle?
Dottie, answering Tom’s bidding to drink, shook her head and made a comical sign of throwing up, putting her hand over her mouth and puffing out her cheeks.
The seas were indeed sickening, still, and as Harmony, no longer obliged to breast the wind, was now making a firm pace, so she pitched more than she had, and drove along with a wild helical motion as if screwing into a vast cork of still air with the intention of backing up and pulling it out of the neck of the windstorm. Sometimes she pounded against a series of short steep seas which were like gaunt ribs on the torso of one of the huge waves. There was a gigantism, a morbidity, about these shapes of water, as of unspeakable mutations from the norm; their leaping and striving under a windle
ss air made them seem all the more freakish.
Tom felt at a loss. He had wanted so desperately to reach the eye that now that he was under it he felt, like any man who has overfed an ambition and then attained it, surprised and a little angry at the taste of ashes in his mouth. There was nothing to savor. Crashes of Harmony’s flanks against hard water, as if she were pounding stones? Savor them? How should he steer? If south, the storm-day would be shorter but so would this time of calm air. If north, back toward Block Island and a bad lee. He actively did not want to think of the other two quarters of the horizon; a wind had lately come from one of them, and from the other, eventually…He would feel too foolish steering in circles, like a man lost in a forest, and with such a struggle to reach a goal so recently won he was incapable of stopping dead. Inertia and indecision carried him along on the same southwesterly bearing with his mind humming in tune with the droning down under the sole of the yawl’s stamping foot.
The housekeeper in Dottie obliged her to replace the thermos in the seat locker to starboard. She seemed restless. She tried awhile her original safe seat; she glanced once at Flick and shook her head; then she stood up and on a rising sea was thrown forward and with both hands leaning on the cabin trunk she craned and looked down into the hatchway.
What she saw below made her wheel around and show a newsy face to Tom, for with Dottie every experience seemed referable to a responsible man. The face she showed wore a stressful look which Tom could not (with half his thoughts on the humming) immediately decipher, though he could not help seeing the elements. Part alarmed, she was; part guiltily triumphant; part tempted to tattle; part secretive; part pitying; part implacable, with a fierce sense of a rare chance. It was a direct and transparent look of strong feelings she could not have understood herself. She opened her mouth, and her throat tightened; but nothing came out.