“How much of a chance is it?” asked Fenton.
“Those clippers often make very quick runs. She’s bound straight for where you want to go. I can’t advise, and I don’t know whether they’ll take you.”
“I’ll risk it!” said Fenton. If he had been given more time to hesitate he might have refused the risk; but he was not given the time. He scratched a line to Helen, telling her what had happened, for the captain of the steamer to post in Yokohama when he got back, so that she might have some intelligence of him in case of further delay; but, when he had finished his letter, he decided that it would distress her with needless anxiety if it reached her before his arrival, and that it would in all probability come after him; and so he put it into his pocket, instead of giving it to the captain. In the meantime, there was further unintelligible parley with the clipper; she shortened sail and hove-to, and before the other passengers had well realised the fact, Fenton and his baggage were in the boat which the steamer had lowered, and was rising and sinking on the long swells that stretched between her and the other ship. Mrs. Bowers had parted from him with effusion: “I know you’ll find her alive and well,” she whispered in generous sympathy; and he volunteered to look Mr. Bowers up in San Francisco, and tell him all about everything.
The other passengers received the adieux which he waved and bowed them, in that awe which Americans like to feel for any representative of the national dignity: we see so little of it. Fenton had put on his uniform to affect as powerfully as possible the imagination of the captain of the clipper, who was quite master to refuse him passage, after all; the captain of the steamer had not thought it best to make too plain his purpose in sending out a boat to the hasty stranger.
Both his precaution and Fenton’s had been well taken. When Captain Rollins of the Meteor came to understand the reason why his ship had been stopped, he discharged a blast of profanity of a range that included nearly everything in animated nature, except Lieutenant Fenton, who stood sternly patient before him, until he should finish; perhaps it devoted him the more terribly by this exception. When the captain stopped for breath, Fenton leaned over the rail, and motioned off the steamer’s boat which lay rocking on the sea by the ship’s side; he had taken the precaution to have his baggage brought on board with himself. —
“I am bearer of despatches to Washington from the flag-ship at Hong-Kong. Of course, you expect to take me on to San Francisco, and I expect to pay you for the best quarters you can give me. I am Lieutenant Fenton of the Messasauga. What is your name?”
“Rollins,” growled the captain.
“Here, my man,” said Fenton to one of the seamen, “take these things to Captain Rollins’s room.” The uniform and the secure bearing had their effect; few men knew just what is the quality and the authority of a bearer of despatches; the sailor obeyed, and the skipper submitted. He was by no means a bad fellow; he belonged to the old school of sea-captains, now almost as extinct as the pirates whose diction they inherited; his furious blasphemies were merely what in another man would have been some tacit reflections upon the vexatious nature of the case. —
Fenton found himself neither uncomfortable nor really unwelcome on the Meteor. Upon the hint given him, the captain turned out of his room for the lieutenant, and he caused some distinct improvements to be made in the ship’s fare. There were a number of Chinese in the steerage, and among the passengers in the cabin a young American lady returning with her mother from a visit to her brother in China, and a man from Kankakee, Illinois, who had been out looking up the sorghum-culture in its native land. The sea-monotony which Fenton’s coming had broken for the moment promptly returned upon this company. The young lady had not Mrs. Bowers’s art of making attentions to herself appear an act of devotion to Helen, and Fenton offered her only the necessary politeness. What companionship he had was with the Kankakee man, a small, meagre, melancholy figure, full of an unembittered discouragement. Continual failure in life had apparently subdued him into acquiescence in whatever happened, without destroying his faith in the schemes he projected; he was disheartened with himself, not with them, and he had the gentleness of a timid nature which curiously appealed to the gentleness of Fenton’s courage. He confessed that the first encounter between the lieutenant and the captain of the ship had given him apprehensions, and he insinuated a deep admiration for Fenton’s behaviour in that difficult moment. He attached himself to the stronger man, and accepted him in detail with a simple devotion, which seemed to refer as much to Fenton’s personal presence as to his moral qualities; and, in fact, the lieutenant was then a gallant figure. The oval of his regular face had been chiselled by his sickness into something impressively fine; with his good nose and mouth, his dark moustache and imperial, and his brown tint, he was that sort of young American whom you might pronounce an Italian, before you had seen the American look in his grey eyes. His slight figure had a greater apparent height than it really attained.
“You see,” explained the Kankakee man, whose named proved to be Giffen, “my idea was that if I could go right in among the Chinese people, and find out how the thing was carried on, and mebbe talk with some of their leading agriculturists about it, I could do more to get the sorghum culture going among us in six months than the agricultural department of Washington could in six years. It’s bound to come. It won’t come in my time, nor through anything I’ve done, but that sorghum interest is bound to be a big thing with us yet. We’ve got the climate, and we Ve got the soil for it. I’ll allow I’ve had sorghum on the brain ever since I first saw it; but that’s no reason I’m mistaken about it. I know it’s got to come, and if I could have hit it the way I expected, I could have done more good, and made more money in two years after I got home than I’d known what to do with.”
“And how was it you didn’t hit it?” asked Fenton.
“Well, you see,” said the Kankakee man, whose name was Giffen, “I found I couldn’t talk the language, for one thing. And then I couldn’t seem to get anybody interested. I did try to get into the country districts, but I couldn’t make any great headway: such a prejudice against foreigners amongst the Chinese; and I hadn’t very much money with me, and I concluded to give it up. But I found out enough to know that our people can’t grow sorghum on the Chinese plan and make it pay; labour’s too dear and we’ve got to employ machinery. I’ve got the idea of a sorghum-planter, that, if I can get any one to take hold of it, is going to make somebody’s fortune. Have you ever been to Alaska?”
“No,” said Fenton.
“They say there’s good soil in Alaska, and there’s nothing to prevent it’s being a great agricultural country except the frost four or five feet down. Sun can’t get at it on account of the moss. But you scrape that moss off once, and let the sun have a fair show for one summer, — well, I believe the thing can be done, if any one had the sense to go about it the right way. And I’ve got my eye on a kind of coffee they grow on the Sandwich Islands, that I believe can be introduced with us, if the right parties can be got to take hold of it.”
The good weather continued for another week, with westerly winds that carried the Meteor on her course till she had made nearly three thousand miles since leaving Shanghai. Each day took him two hundred or two hundred and fifty nearer home, and Fenton looked forward to a prosperous run all the way to San Francisco with hopes that he dutifully disguised to himself as fears. Towards the end of the week, the wind began to haul back to the southward, and fell till it scarcely stirred a ripple on the sea, but he did not lose courage. He explained to the other passengers that they could afford to lose a few days’ time and still make one of the greatest runs on record. They heard him with the trust due a man of his experience and profession, and when the wind again sprang up in the west, they paid him the honours of a prophet with the idle zeal of people at sea, glad even of the distraction which respect for another’s wisdom afforded them. But the wind suddenly backed from the west to the south, a strange yellow tinge spread over the purple s
ky, and faded to a dull grey, through which the sun burnt only the space of its rayless ball. The mercury fell, and the wind dropped again to a dead calm, from which it rose in sharp gusts that settled, as the day closed, into a heavy gale from the northwest. The ship drove before the storm for three days and nights. When the fourth morning broke she seemed to have been blown beyond its track; but one of her masts was gone; the sails hung in ribbons from the yards; the tangled and twisted shrouds swept her deck, and all but two of her boats had been carried away. The first observation possible since the storm began showed that she had been driven nearly a thousand miles to the southeast; but she was put upon her course again, and laboured on till night-fall. At nine o’clock the passengers huddled together in the cabin heard a cry of “Hard down your helm!” and the ship struck with a violence that threw them to the floor; then recoiling, she struck again, with a harsh, grating force, and ceased to move. In this instant of arrest Fenton found his feet and scrambled to the deck.
The Meteor hung upon a coral reef, that defined itself under the starlight in the curving line of breakers on either hand. The seas swept over her where she lay on her beam-ends, and at every rush of the breakers she pounded heavily on the reef. Beyond it was a stretch of smoother water, from which seemed to rise a low irregular mass of rock, forming with the reef a rude quadrangle. There was no hope for the ship, and no hope for her people unless they could somehow reach this rock. It was useless to launch the boats in such a sea; they tried one, but it filled as soon as it touched the water, and nothing remained but to carry a line, if it could be done, to the island beyond the reef. The captain called for volunteers, but the men hung back. It was not the time to parley; Fenton passed one end of the line round his waist, and plunged into the gulf under the lee of the ship. When he reached the rock, he found that two sailors had followed him, and these now helped him to pull in the heavier line attached to the cord, which he had made fast to a point of the rock. A hauling rope was carried along this line, and in the glare of the lights burned on the ship, they began to bring her people away one by one. A sailor mounted into the sling running upon the rope, with a woman or child in his arms, and was hauled to the rock and back again to the ship; and all the women and children were set ashore, even some poor creatures among the Chinese, before any of the men were suffered to land. These followed, till none of the passengers but the Chinamen were left. They stood huddled together at the bow, which had shifted round under the blows of the surf, and was hanging seaward, and the lights, burning now green, now crimson, now purple, showed them tossing their arms into the air, as if in some weird incantation, as they tried to free the wet joss-papers that clung to their fingers; their shrill supplications pierced through the roar of the breakers. The captain reported that he tried to make them understand how they were to reach the reef; but they would not or could not understand. He and his officers then flung themselves upon the line, straining under the seaward lapse of the wreck; and at the same moment the vessel parted amidships, and the bow where the Chinese were grouped weltered back with them into the sea. The lights died out, and the ship’s bell, which had been tolling dismally as she pounded on the reef, suddenly ceased to sound. The broken hulk grew up once more in the dark, and the roar of the breakers rushed loud again upon the moment of horror that had been like a moment of silence.
When Fenton first touched the rock where all the survivors of the wreck were now gathered, it rose scarcely a foot above the water at the highest point, and by the time the captain reached it, they stood knee-deep in the rising tide. An hour after midnight it was high-tide, and it was only by holding fast to each other that they could keep their footing.
The moon broke from the clouds, and one of the sailors whipped out his knife, with a cry of “Look out for yourselves!” and made a cut at something in the water. Fenton looked, and saw that the sea around them was full of sharks. He helped the captain form the men about the women and children, and they fought the fish away with cries, and thrusts of their knives, and blows of the splinters and fragments of the wreck which the breakers had flung them over the reef, till the tide turned, and the most hideous of their dangers had passed for the time.
With the first light of day came their first gleam of hope. One of the ship’s boats, which must have been carried around the line of their reef, came floating to them, bottom up, on the refluent tide from the other quarter. It proved to be so little injured that the captain and some of his men were able to put off in it to the wreck, where they found tools for repairing it, and abundant stores. When they returned to the rock, they had a mast with its sail ready to be stepped, lying in the boat, and several pairs of mismated oars, which they had picked up outside. But it was the smallest of the boats, and the castaways counted each other with cruel eyes as it drew near. The rock where they stood was one of those dead atolls in which the Pacific abounds: a tiny coral isle, once tufted with palms, and gay with perpetual green, which the sinking of the ocean’s floor had dropped below the tide, and left lurking there with its guardian reef, a menace and a deadly peril to navigation. Somewhere within a day’s sail there must be other islands of kindred origin, but with a certain area of dry and habitable land, which the boat might reach. But who should go, and who should wait her uncertain return? It was not a question of the women and children, nor of their husbands and fathers, but when all these had crowded into the boat, seven men remained upon the rock.
“Captain Rollins, there isn’t room for us all in that boat,” Fenton heard his voice saying: “I ask no man to share my risk, but I’m going to stay here, for one.”
“I don’t ask any man to stay,” said Captain Rollins. “I’ve left sixteen thousand dollars in gold, — all I’ve got in this world, — on the ship, so as to keep the boat as light as I could; but, as you say, lieutenant, she can’t hold us all.”
There was a little pause; then three sailors, with a shame-faced avoidance of Fenton’s eye, pushed past him toward the boat.
One of the passengers — an Englishman — rose up. “My good men,” he said, “you ‘re surely not coming.”
“Yes, we are,” replied one of them surlily. “Why shouldn’t we come as well as you?”
“But the boat is too full already!” he expostulated. “You endanger the lives of the passengers!” he cried, with that respect for the rights of the travelling public which fills the Englishman when he writes to the Times of the inattention of the railway company’s servants.
“Let the passengers get out, then,” said the sailor. “We don’t want ’em here.” His joke raised a laugh among his fellows. “Come along, John; come along, Jake,” he called to the seamen who still remained with Fenton.
“No; guess not,” said one of them quietly.
The matter-of-fact, every-day character of the details of the calamity, the unchanged nature of the actors in this tragedy of life and death, robbed it of reality to Fenton’s sense, and made it like some crudely represented fiction of the theatre.
The figure of Giffen interposed itself between him and the captain who stood at the bow of the boat, in the act of offering his hand in farewell. “Excuse me,” he said, answering Fenton’s look, “I’m going to stay. But I want Captain Rollins, if he gets back, to write to my brother, George Giffen, at Kankakee.”
The harsh name, so grotesquely unrelated to anything that was there or then, awoke Fenton from his maze. Was there a world beyond these seas where there were towns and fields, chimneys and trees, the turmoil of streets, the quiet of firesides? His heart seemed to close upon itself, and stand still, as the image of Helen sewing beside the little table in the library, in the way he always saw her, possessed him. The next moment, this in its turn was the theatrical vision, and he was standing on a point of rock in a wilderness of waters, the boat at his feet, and the broken wreck upon the reef a stone’s-cast away. He took from his breast the water-tight packet in which he carried his despatches, and wrote upon the back of one of them a line to Helen; with her address, a
nd a request that it might be forwarded to her. “Here are some letters,” he said, handing the packet to the captain, with a light-headed sense of sending them to some one in another life.
“Why, bless you, man!” cried Captain Rollins, “I shall find land before night, and I shall be back for you here by this time to-morrow morning!”
“Yes, yes!” returned Fenton. “Don’t stay, now,” he added impatiently. “Good-bye.”
The four men on the rock watched the boat till she showed so small in the distance that they could no longer be sure whether they saw her or not; then they turned their eyes upon each other. Whatever the two seamen left behind with Fenton may have thought of his looks, he could not congratulate himself upon theirs. But he said, “You are the men who followed me with the line last night.”
“Yes, sir,” answered one of them.
“You ‘re not afraid, any way,” said Fenton, as if this were the most that could be said for them.
“I guess we get along,” said the man, “I rather be on this rock, than that boat, with so much people.”
“What are you?” asked Fenton; for the man spoke with a certain accent and a foreigner’s hesitation.
“I’m Fayal man; I live at. Gloucester, Massa chusetts; John Jones.”
Fenton recognised the name under which most Portuguese sailors ship. “And who are you?” he asked of the other, who was as tall and fair as the Portuguese was dark and short.
He grinned, and the latter answered for him. “He don’t speak much English. He’s some Dutchman; Icelander, I guess.”
“Very well,” said Fenton. “You know where we are, and what the chances are.”
“Yes, sir.”
“I reckon,” said Giffen, “we can make out to worry along somehow till the boat gets back.” The sailors had begun to breakfast on the stores the boat had brought off from the wreck and left for them on the rock, and Giffen turned to with them.
Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells Page 204