Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  “It won’t do to count too much upon the boat’s coming back,” replied Fenton, suddenly hungry at sight of the others eating. “They may find land before night, and they may not find it for two weeks. At any rate, the sharks will be back before they are.”

  Giffen’s jaw dropped, with a large morsel bulging his cheek.

  “Come, man!” cried Fenton sharply, “you’d better have crowded into the boat with the others, if you’re sorry you stayed.”

  “I don’t suppose I’ve got any great physical courage,” said Giffen, in his slow weak voice. “But I’m not sorry I stayed. I’m ready to do whatever you say. I’m a born high-private, if ever there was one.”

  “I beg your pardon,” Fenton began, ashamed of his petulant outburst.

  “Oh, that’s all right,” said Giffen quietly. “But I’m in earnest, I’d rather follow some other man’s luck, any time.”

  “I shall not ask you to do anything that I’m not ready to do myself,” returned Fenton. “We must get out to the wreck,” he added, including the Portuguese, “and see what we can make of it. And the sooner we get to it the better.”

  “I’m ready,” said the sailor, closing the clasp knife with which he had been eating; and the Icelander, who seemed to understand everything through him, pocketed his knife also.

  They waded into the shoal water, and swam round the stern of the ship where it overhung the reef, and tried to board her. But there was no means of doing this, unless they passed the reef, and ventured into the sea beyond, where they knew the sharks were waiting. They returned to their rock, and began to gather up the pieces of shattered spars and planks, that the rising tide was bringing in, and with such odds and ends of cordage and rags of sail as clung to these fragments, they contrived a raft, on which they hoped to float out to the wreck when the tide turned once more. After the raft was finished and made fast to the rock, they climbed upon it, and, launching upon the ebb, drifted out through a break in the reef, and contrived to clamber up her broken timbers. They could see that this fragment of a ship must soon go to pieces, under the incessant blows of the waves; and Fenton and Giffen made all haste in their search for tools and materials to strengthen their float so that they might put to sea on it if the worst came to the worst. The sailors began ransacking the wreck with a purpose of their own, and in the end, they all owed their lives to the rapacity which left no part of the ship unsearched; for it was the Portuguese who found wedged in among the shattered timbers of the hulk, where some caprice of the waves had lodged it, the boat that had foundered the night before. Every blow of the sea had driven it tighter into the ruin, and it was an hour’s struggle in the dark, waist-deep in water, amid the bodies of the drowned Chinamen, and just within the line of the sharks that were preying upon them, before the boat could be cut out. When they pulled it up on the deck at last, it was in a condition that must have seemed desperate to less desperate men; but in this extremity Giffen developed the shiftiness of a dabbler in many trades, and his rude knack with the saw and hammer rendered the battered boat seaworthy. Fenton found a bag of flour, water-soaked without, but fresh and dry within; a few biscuit and some peas and beans, with which he provisioned her; and a shot gun, with a store of water-proof cartridges, with which he armed her. With Giffen’s help he fashioned a mast out of one of the broken yards, and patched together a sail from the shreds and tatters of canvas hanging about it. The wreck was settling more and more deeply into the sea when they launched their boat at sunset, and returned to the rock where they made her fast.

  The last man to come over the side of the ship was the Portuguese, who carried in either hand a buckskin bag.

  “That’s Captain Rollins’s money,” said Fenton. “Take good care of it.”

  “All right. I look out for it,” answered the sailor.

  With the refluent tide the sharks came back again. The dead Chinamen came with them, and seemed to join in beleaguering the castaways, crouching in their boat, which pulled at her moorings, as if struggling to escape the horrors that hemmed them round. They had found no water on the wreck, and a consuming thirst parched them. When the morning broke it showed them the surf beating over the reef where the ship had hung, and the sea strewn with its fragments.

  “We can’t stay here,” said Fenton. “We must find land for ourselves somewhere — and water.”

  “That’s so,” admitted Giffen, with feeble acquiescence.

  “I know they never come back for us,” said the Portuguese. “I goin’ tell you that, yesterday.”

  They cut their boat from her moorings, and ran lightly away before the breeze that carried them where it would.

  The sky was again of the blue of the weather that had prospered the first weeks of the Meteor’s voyage; again its vast arch was undimmed by a cloud from horizon to horizon; and it only darkened to a deeper blue, filled with large southern stars, when the sun dropped below the sea, and the swift tropical night closed round them.

  The castaways, voyaging none of them knew where, and trusting for rescue to whatever chance of land or passing sail befriended them, with the danger of tempest, and the certainty of starvation after a given time, before them, had already divided themselves into two camps, tacitly distrustful if not hostile; the sailors guarded between them the booty that they had brought from the wreck, and Fenton and Giffen watched by turns with the gun in their hands. But at daybreak, a common joy united them. On the edge of the sea a line of dark points printed itself against the sky, and, as they approached, these points rounded into tufts, and then opened into the feathery crests of cocoa palms, with broken stretches of delicious verdure between the stems. The long white wall beneath, that glistened in the rising sun, like a bank of snow, expanded into a smooth, sloping beach, the deep surf flashed and thundered along the outer reef; and then the little coral isle, encircling its slumbrous lagoon, took shape before their eyes. They tacked and wore to find a passage through the reef, and so, between the islets of the palm-belt, over smooth depths of delicate yellow and apple-green, they slipped into the still waters of the lake, and ran across to the white coral beach. They fell upon the sand, and scooped with their hands a hollow into which oozed a little water that they could drink; and then they kindled a fire with some matches that Giffen had brought from the wreck, and roasted the shell-fish the sailors found among the rocks.

  “I think this goin’ to be nice place, Cap’n,” said the Portuguese, stretching himself face downwards on the clean sand, when he had eaten and drunken his fill. “Plenty to eat, plenty to drink, nothin’ to do. By-’n’-by some ship goin’ to come here. We ‘re all right, heigh?”

  The little brown-faced man lifted to Fenton’s face his black eyes, sparkling like a rat’s with the content of a full stomach.

  The Icelander laughed as if he had understood his shipmate, and while the Portuguese luxuriously dropped off to sleep, he wandered away, leaving Fenton and Giffen to prospect for the best place to put the hut they must build. “I don’t like the way those fellows take it, exactly,” said the latter. “They let themselves up pretty easy when it comes to a question of work,” he added, with a mild sense of injury in his tone.

  But the Icelander returned after a while with a large turtle he had caught, and with his hat full of turtles’ eggs, which he had found in the sand. The Fayal man, when he awoke, joined him in a second foraging expedition, and they came back laden with fish and birds. John Jones showed himself skilled in primitive methods of roasting and broiling on hot stones. He opened the bag of flour, and made a store of bread, which he baked in the ashes; and by the time Fenton and Giffen had finished the rude shelter they had been knocking together for the night, in the cocoa grove, he called them to a supper which a famine far less fastidious than theirs must have found delicious.

  “Well, you are a cook,” said Giffen, with the innate disrespect for his art, which our race feels.

  “But you’ve got enough here for a regiment,” he added, looking round on the store of provisions
, cooked and uncooked, which was heaped up on the sand.

  “Oh, plenty more where that come from,” said the Portuguese. “They all good cold. I don’t like cookin’ to-morrow; want to eat and sleep for a week.”

  The Icelander had strayed away again, and they saw him climbing the palms, and strewing the earth beneath with cocoa-nuts. “Jake seems to be laying out for a week’s rest too,” said Giffen.

  The Portuguese laughed at the joke. “You better take that money up to your house, Cap’n,” he said to Fenton.

  “Where is it?” asked Fenton.

  The Portuguese showed the two bags, where he had placed them, in a tuft of grass.

  Fenton hesitated a moment. “You can bring it up with you when you get through here,” he said finally.

  The Portuguese and his ship-mate came carrying up the provision to the hut, after Fenton and Giffen had stretched themselves on their beds of grass.

  “Cap’n,” he said, waking Fenton, “here’s the money. What we goin’ do with that boat?”

  “Let her be where she is; nothing can happen to her,” answered Fenton, heavy in heart and soul, and sodden with sleep, as he placed his hand on the bags the sailor had put down beside him.

  “Yes,” chuckled the Portuguese, “I guess nobody goin’ steal her.”

  The sailors did not come into the hut; they began to build a shelter of their own, and the noise of their work followed Fenton into his sleep. He had watched for three days and nights; he could not rouse himself from the deathly slumber into which he dropped again in spite of a formless fear that beset him; but he woke toward morning, with this terror, which proved more potent than the fatigue that drugged him. The money was still there; the sailors were peacefully snoring in their hut; and Giffen lay asleep across the gun. He staggered down to look at the boat. It was safe where they had left it, and he returned to their shelter, where he watched an hour, as he thought; then he woke Giffen, and bidding him call him in his turn, when he could no longer keep awake, he fell asleep once more. It must have been his visit to the boat that suggested the dream which seemed to begin as soon as he closed his eyes. He dreamed that they were at sea again in the boat, and that they saw a sail in the offing, so near that those on board, who did not see them, must hear them if they united in one loud cry. They rose up together for the effort, but their voices died in a gasp on their lips. Fenton burst into a groan of despair. —

  “My Lord! what’s the matter?” cried Giffen, shaking the dreamer. Fenton scrambled to his feet; the money-bags were still there, but the sailors were gone; he tore open the bags; they were filled with shells and sand. He rushed down to the beach; the boat had disappeared; on the horizon a sail, no bigger than the petal of a flower, flickered and faded.

  It was sunset, and they had slept through the night and the whole day.

  Fenton turned a look on his fellow-captive, which Giffen met with a face of ghastly self-upbraiding. “My God,” he said, “I fell asleep! I hated to wake you, and I fell asleep before I knew it!”

  “It doesn’t matter,” replied Fenton, with the nerveless quiet of his despair. “Sooner or later, they meant to do it.”

  They turned blankly from the fact; it was days before they could confront it in speech; and then, with the conjecture that the sailors had set out in search of some inhabited land, where they could enjoy the spoil of the ship, their desertion remained incredible, unimaginable.

  XII.

  IT has been intimated that Helen entered upon her new life at Mrs. Hewitt’s with social preoccupations in her own favour which she was by no means prepared to surrender; and she did not think of yielding them, even in the abjectest moments of her failure and humiliation. In the interval of idleness that followed, she was again purely and simply a young lady, not attached by any sort of sympathy to the little boarding-house world, though she had always meant to treat it with consideration. But it is impossible that one who has been bred to be of no use should not feel an advantage over all those who have been bred to be of some use; and if for no other reason Helen must have confessed, wittingly and unwittingly, by a thousand little recoils and reserves, that her fellow boaders and herself could never meet on a level. It was perfectly easy, however, to keep aloof. After the first necessary civilities with the Evanses, she only met them on the stairs or at the table, where the talk was mainly between Mr. Evans and Miss Root, the art-student. It appeared from the casual confidences of the landlady that Miss Root was studying to be a painter, and that some of her work was beautiful. Mrs. Hewitt owned that she was no judge of painting, but she said that she knew what she liked. She told Helen also that Mr. Evans was one of the editors of Saturday Afternoon, a paper which she praised because she said it gave you the news about everybody, and kept you posted, so that you could tell just where they were and what they were doing, all the while; she believed that Mr. Evans was not connected with this admirable part of the paper: he wrote mostly about the theatres and the new books.

  Helen was amused by some of his talk at the table; but she was not at all sure about the Evanses. She could not tell exactly why; one never can tell exactly why, especially if one is a lady. Mrs. Evans seemed well enough educated and well enough dressed; she had been abroad the usual term of years; she neither unduly sought nor repelled acquaintance; but from the first, Helen was painfully aware of not having heard of her; and one is equally uncertain of people of whom one has heard nothing, or heard too much. As soon as she learned what Mr. Evans’s business was, she understood, of course, that they could never have been people that people knew; and, Were they not a little Bohemian? she asked, rather tepidly, one day, when an old friend of hers, whom she happened to meet, broke into effusive praise of them, on hearing that Helen was in the same house with them.

  “My dear,” said Miss Kingsbury, summing up in a word the worst that a New England woman can say of a man, he is easy-going! But he is very kind; and she is the salt of the earth.”

  “And some of the pepper?” suggested Helen.

  “A little of the pepper, without doubt. But not a grain more than is good for him. He would be nothing without her,” she added, in the superstition ladies love to cherish concerning the real headship of the family. “She makes up all her own things, and teaches that boy herself. And you have another person there who is really a character: Miss Root.

  If you see any of her work, you’ll see that she is an artist; but you’ll have to see a great deal of her before you find out that she’s the best soul in the world. With her little time, and her little money, she does more good! She’s practical, and she knows just how to help people that want to help themselves: poor girls, you know, trying to learn things, and get into occupations. And so rectangular she is!”

  Miss Kingsbury ran off, professing an instant and pressing duty. “I’m coming to see you very soon. Good-bye, Helen dear! You know how I feel for you,” she added tenderly.

  Many other people, returning to town, looked Helen up, and left cards, and messages of friendly interest. She did not see any one that she could help seeing; she was doubly exiled by her bereavement and her poverty from the gay and prosperous world they belonged to; she knew that they were kind, and meant well, but she knew that henceforward she could have few interests in common with them. She was happiest when she was quite alone with her sorrow and with her love, which seemed to have sprung from it, and to be hallowed by it. Their transmutation gave her memories and her hopes a common sweetness, which was sometimes very strange; it seemed as if Robert were present with her when she thought of her father, and that her father came to share all her thoughts of Robert.

  Her old life had otherwise almost wholly dropped away from her. After her return from Beverley, Margaret came often to see her, but the visits were a trial to Helen; and perhaps Margaret saw this, for she came at longer and longer intervals, and at last came no more. Helen supposed that she had taken a place, but waited patiently till she should reappear.

  She spent a great part of each day
in writing to Robert and thinking about him, and trying to contrive their common future, and she made over all her bonnets and dresses. She saved a good deal of money by not buying anything new for the winter, and after her benefaction to Mrs. Sullivan, she found that even with these economies, she had nothing to buy spring dresses. But that mattered very little; she had not cared, after she first put on black, to mark the degrees of mourning punctiliously; she had always dressed quietly, and now she could wear what she wore last year without treason to her grief. The trouble was that she would soon need money for other things, before any interest would be due from the money in Mr. Hibbard’s hands, and she spent several days in trying to put into dignified and self-respectful terms the demand she must make upon him for part of her capital. She felt rather silly about it, and the longing to do something to earn a little money for herself revived. At the bottom of her heart was the expectation, always disowned and silenced, that Robert would somehow soon return; she had told Mrs. Butler that she knew he would come back as soon as he got her letter; but after the first keen pang of disappointment and surprise with which she realised that he could not at once ask leave of absence, or resign without a sort of ignominy, she heroically accepted the fact of a prolonged separation. She had caused it, she said to herself, and she must bear it; she must do everything she could to help him bear it. She idealised him in his devotion to duty, and worshipped him as if he had been the first man to practise it. She was more than ever determined not to be a burden to him in any way; she determined to be a help to him, and she had planned a pretty scene in which she brought out a little hoard of earnings, in addition to her five thousand dollars, and put them into Robert’s hand the day after their marriage. It would be doubly sweet to toil for Robert; in the meantime it was sweet to dream for him; and she had not yet decided how the sum she intended to bestow upon him was to be earned, when she found herself obliged to borrow of the future rather than able to lend to it. But she resolved all the more severely to replace with interest what she borrowed; she would not leave a stone unturned; and she forced herself, in going to Mr. Hibbard’s office, to pass the store where she had left her painted vases on sale six months before. She said to herself that they would be all in the window still; but when she dared to lift her eyes to it there were none. Then she said that they must have been taken out, and stuck away in some corner as too hopelessly ugly and unsaleable.