Gordon Young

“ My luck runs that way.
Davenant walked off. Erect, with head well up, he stood perhaps watching nothing but his own thoughts. It was a comfortable gray day, with the sea tossing itself into crests that fell sizzling down the steep glassy sides of waves, and with the shrouds humming at times before the gusty blows of the wind.
I studied his back, tall and square and reserved in bearing. He had dignity, the dignity of manners. Williams had dignity of another kind—with the utter lack of manners; the dignity of a sheer, menacing personality. ”

“ Raikes leaned nervously from side to side, his one glittering eye turning about like the gaze of a restless, trapped animal. From time to time he said it was “a hell of a night,” indifferent as to whether he was answered or heard.
All of us were soaked, for all had rushed on deck at the first arousing blast; and a thin sheet of salt water swashed about our feet. Hawkins lay in it, head on arm, indifferently. Though the night was not cold, we were chilled; a nervousness leaves one chilled.
Davenant was dressed, even to shirt and coat, but not collar. ”

“ Nothing was visible except under the flashes of lightning, too often blinding; only there was occasionally the spectral white outline of a foam-crested wave that washed up out of the darkness. Wind, water and thunder filled the air; I doubted not that they filled the universe with stormy orchestration.
I tried to tell myself that death under the volleying thunders of Heaven's cannon, with the sea piling mountains of water for the grave-mound, with the epitaph scrawled in slithering foam, was death and nothing more or less than if one died abed. ”

“ As we drifted closer and I hastily put down the helm, Williams said to let her drift, to collide with the wreck rather than miss it. One minute it looked as if a collision was unavoidable, the next that we would go by far out of reach. If we hit the wreck, we ourselves would be one; but Williams would dare anything.
The ocean is maddening in drawing out its strain on men's hearts. Its tragedies are slow. Fire breaks out and may last a day, or days. A ship that is lost takes, usually, many hours to fill and sink while men climb topmast yards as if to be nearer Heaven with their prayers. ”

“ So completely, with such utter finality, does the ocean wipe out her tragedies.
There was one man left on that wreck who did not yield to the decisions of fortune. Luck decreed that he should be left dangling from the lee side when the spar came within reach; but luck seems to have been meant for those who do not care to put forward their own efforts.
He fought his way across that yard as he had not fought before. Men too timid to leap for the water and snatch at the only chance—no matter how desperate—to be rescued, were scarcely of the fiber to stop so determined a man as himself. ”

“ Miss Davenant asked me.
I was honest and told her that I thought it would. I did not see how we could go long with such wind and waves without being piled on to a reef.
I did not explain all that to her, but I judged we were not more than three or four hundred miles off the mainland; and there are enough reefs and islands scattered about in those waters to wreck all the navies of the world in a week of bad nights; and there is something in the midst of a storm that makes one feel it will never end, that the order of nature has been changed, that the ship is dead and forever damned. ”

“ Probably because I was, I say the others were frightened. There is nothing I like more than a mild storm at sea, with the thunder comfortably in the distance, like deep reports from far battle-fields, with the waves surging and white, but not leaping the rail, a veritable host of watery pirates. But this mad storm shook my ribs clatteringly together.
Raikes and Hawkins and I, Miss Davenant and Davenant, in the fearful communion of those hours, stood about in the passageway like quiet strangers. ”

“ Moreover the chance of any man leaping into the water and reaching the hawser or spar was not to be thought of; and of living through it, if he did, was even less to be believed.
But excitement got into us. For the first time, and that after a wearing, dispiriting night, there were rushing and eagerness among the men as they anxiously paid out the hawser and calculated the diminishing distance. The sodden stern of the wreck, so low in the water that the mizzen-yards were under, gave her a slower drift.
There is something eternal in men that makes them strive to help the danger-stricken ”

“ The man who has no fear in him is a clod. And she was vibrant, strung taut, her black eyes widened into a kind of unaffected wonder.
A few times her hand flew to her ear to shut out the thunder that seemed striking the deck. At such stunning, deafening, ear-crashing peals, that came stroke on stroke like the ragged volley of monstrous cannon fired within arm's reach overhead, I flinched as from an impending blow. ”

“ It was not easy to be sure of what one saw in that brief time and amid that boiling foam and those lunging waves; but it seemed that two or three caught hold, and again and again it appeared that all were shaken off. They were so covered with water that one could not tell. Probably one was crushed, as it appeared when the spar bumped into the wreck.
We could distinctly hear men left in the rigging praying and one strong voice cursing.
The wreck was setting with that—no, this isn't a freak phrase—with that slow rapidity that comes over a ship, which, having struggled valiantly, gives up. ”

“ The ocean is a fearful mistress, and her lovers must be fierce men, ready to pay with flesh, blood and bones—as in the wooing of other mistresses they pay with their gold and their honor—and there is no jealousy between them, at least not in the midst of danger.
All that we could do had been done. And our crew waited, sometimes breast deep in water, unnoticing, indifferent.
A faint cheer, scarcely more than a distant echo, came from the rigging. It was thanks rather than hope; and acknowledgment of what, to those poor devils anyway, seemed chivalrous. ”

“ Hawkins replied that the devil did not have a sense of humor. I urged that we could find out what he was after at Dakaru; that it was a rare chance; Davenant himself had already the idea that we were mutinous.
Hawkins objected. How much of it was fear of Williams, how much of it was the unvoiceable admiration that some men have for others who batter them in a fair fight, would be difficult to say. Maybe Hawkins had caught something of that gleam from Williams's personality that fascinated me, made me, almost unwillingly at times, loyal to him, a follower. ”

“ Seas were still coming at intervals over the waist, but he plunged forward, roused the forecastle, broke out hawsers, bent an end to a spar and cast it over in the desperate, mad hope of having it drift down against the wreck. It was dangerous business, as well as seemingly futile.
In the first place there was little more than blind luck to carry us near enough; and being carried that near gave the risk of collision. ”

“ Anybody who could not hear the terrible menace of the shrieking wind and solid blows of the water, beating like a legion of rams against our frail wooden walls, should not have been expected to hear absurd questions. ”

“ I have often wondered as to her age.
“Raikes?”
“No-no!” Then, whispered with teeth shut: “The black beast!”
“Davenant?”
Maybe she nodded, or it may have been the jerk of the ship. And the sudden warning shh-sh-h may not have, possibly did not, come from her. The water hissing about the deck and the sibilant spray may have made the sound. My imagination, being nimble, often plays tricks.
“They can't hear us. Why?” I asked.
“No.” Then with cutting indifference: “He is no worse than others.” ”

“ At least it was gone, and the others remained. Some of the sails were furled, and others were gone with only wisps of flying rope. She had evidently been caught by surprise.
There were clusters of black spots in the fore-rigging where the crew hung like insects. Below them wolfish waves leaped; yes, with even foam-flecked jaws.
But I turned my eyes from the foundering ship to look at our own helm, where Williams stood with his arms actually about Dula Davenant. What really happened of course I never knew. But I did know about the only thing that could have happened. ”

“ I remembered afterward that she was a fatalist. The earth can blow up, the sky cave in, but the fatalists have counted the sands that mark the hour and know that one by one the little grains must trickle through before Death dares smite the glass. ”

“ Cries of anger went up from our deck, and I detected the sharp, quick, fierce exclamation of Dula Davenant under, rather than above, the voices of the others, of whom Hawkins's was the loudest. There were angry, outraged cries, too, from the rigging. But the man on the extreme end, if his purpose had been to placate the big fellow, gained nothing. The two bodies were merged for a moment, turned on the yard, heads down and legs encircling it—then one fell away.
The big fellow clawed himself up, twisted his head around and shook his fist at men behind him who had started out ”

“ I said.
“Why didn't you?” he growled. “I'm sick, man. Lord, what's happenin' now?”
A ton of water came down the stairs, and a shout from the deck above. The schooner rocked drunkenly, bobbing in a seaway. A fine jamboree. I looked up the companion. The cover was off. Miss Davenant was not in sight.
As I started up I glanced sidewise and carried with me an impression of Davenant's indignant, astonished face, the salt spray dripping from his black beard. He was wet as a drowned cat, and seemed to have a feline aversion to the water—at least on his beard. ”

“ But I had seen behind her mask—not necessarily understanding her the better for it. A woman whose body is heated by heart- beats, who is in spite of her rôle not the character she plays, is more intricate and bewildering than even a symbol. ”

“ CHAPTER VII FATE, THE HUSSY, IS BOLDLY CHEATED MR. DAVENANT subtly encouraged me and Hawkins to remember Williams's outburst. He sounded me with a chill delicacy. How did I feel about it? His words were not that blunt, and scarcely anything more than his manner asked the question.
It was well—or maybe it was unfortunate—that he sounded me first. Hawkins would have been responsive, bluntly so. He did not like Davenant anyway. And Hawkins's brain was not supple enough to be artful and devious.
Of course he would lie, as any man should. All honest men do at times. ”

“ For an instant we could see bodies tossed sprawlingly on a wave's crest, then submerged.
“Look at the big fellow—they're pullin' him off——”
“He's fallin'— No— There!”
“Ow!'
A man whom the others seemed instinctively to have turned on had been beating his way out on the yard-arm. He was pushed off his balance and seemed falling but caught himself and jerked down one above him who had kicked out.
Agilely the big man was back on the yard, enemies on both sides—but they were afraid. Foot by foot he worked himself out, turning every second to strike at any who came within reach from behind. ”

“ But I say that no man, whether by a moment's inadvertence or an evening's coaxing, ever embraced a woman without being the wiser for it. Some definite, convincing—though not necessarily correct—stimulus struck through his myriad surface nerves and, most often, reached his heart ”

“ There is nothing intelligible about women when they break, as most of them do at some time or other, from under the seal of Solomon, or of other wise men, fathers, brothers, husbands; and like the jinn out of the fisherman's bronze bottle, take on the strange shapes and release stranger forces which, since they are common to almost all women, must be called feminine. ”

“ He would not quit, he would not shirk, he would not lash the helm and go below, trusting his luck and God. He may have had more faith in God than that—faith that He would not refuse good fortune to one who made the utter effort.
I doubt if Williams ever thought of God. Perhaps the men who serve Him most do not ”

“ Rain fell. It came in driving shafts of water, not as drops. By morning two boats were smashed, and th$ jolly-boat was gone from across the stern where she had been lashed.
The seas were tremendous. I was caught between the rails, and my lungs were strained to the bursting-point before the deck rose clear; and my arms were nearly jerked from their sockets as my hands held on, while feet and legs swayed about. ”