The Complete Works of Stephen Crane (147 page)

‘I wish we had a sail,’ remarked the captain. ‘We might try my overcoat on the end of an oar and give you two boys a chance to rest.’ So the cook and the correspondent held the mast and spread wide the overcoat. The oiler steered, and the little boat made good way with her new rig. Sometimes the oiler had to scull sharply to keep a sea from breaking into the boat, but otherwise sailing was a success.

Meanwhile the lighthouse had been growing slowly larger. It had now almost assumed colour, and appeared like a little grey shadow on the sky. The man at the oars could not be prevented from turning his head rather often to try for a glimpse of this little grey shadow.

At last, from the top of each wave the men in the tossing boat could see land. Even as the lighthouse was an upright shadow on the sky, this land seemed but a long black shadow on the sea. It certainly was thinner than paper. ‘We must be about opposite New Smyrna,’ said the cook, who had coasted this shore often in schooners. ‘Captain, by the way, I believe they abandoned that life-saving station there about a year ago.’

‘Did they?’ said the captain.

The wind slowly died away. The cook and the correspondent were not now obliged to slave in order to hold high the oar. But the waves continued their old impetuous swooping at the dinghy, and the little craft, no longer under way, struggled woundily over them. The oiler or the correspondent took the oars again.

Shipwrecks are à propos of nothing. If men could only train for them and have them occur when the men had reached pink condition, there would be less drowning at sea. Of the four in the dinghy none had slept any time worth mentioning for two days and two nights previous to embarking in the dinghy, and in the excitement of clambering about the deck of a foundering ship they had also forgotten to eat heartily.

For these reasons, and for others, neither the oiler nor the correspondent was fond of rowing at this time. The correspondent wondered ingenuously how in the name of all that was sane could there be people who thought it amusing to row a boat. It was not an amusement; it was a diabolical punishment, and even a genius of mental aberrations could never conclude that it was anything but a horror to the muscles and a crime against the back. He mentioned to the boat in general how the amusement of rowing struck him, and the weary-faced oiler smiled in full sympathy. Previously to the foundering, by the way, the oiler had worked double-watch in the engine-room of the ship.

‘Take her easy, now, boys,’ said the captain. ‘Don’t spend yourselves. If we have to run a surf you’ll need all your strength, because we’ll sure have to swim for it. Take your time.’

Slowly the land arose from the sea. From a black line it became a line of black and a line of white, trees and sand. Finally, the captain said that he could make out a house on the shore. ‘That’s the house of refuge, sure,’ said the cook. ‘They’ll see us before long, and come out after us.’

The distant lighthouse reared high. ‘The keeper ought to be able to make us out now, if he’s looking through a glass,’ said the captain. ‘He’ll notify the life-saving people.’

‘None of those other boats could have got ashore to give word of the wreck,’ said the oiler, in a low voice. ‘Else the lifeboat would be out hunting us.’

Slowly and beautifully the land loomed out of the sea. The wind came again. It had veered from the north-east to the south-east. Finally, a new sound struck the ears of the men in the boat. It was the low thunder of the surf on the shore. ‘We’ll never be able to make the lighthouse now,’ said the captain. ‘Swing her head a little more north, Billie,’ said he.

“‘A little more north,” sir,’ said the oiler.

Whereupon the little boat turned her nose once more down the wind, and all but the oarsman watched the shore grow. Under the influence of this expansion doubt and direful apprehension was leaving the minds of the men. The management of the boat was still most absorbing, but it could not prevent a quiet cheerfulness. In an hour, perhaps, they would be ashore.

Their backbones had become thoroughly used to balancing in the boat, and they now rode this wild colt of a dinghy like circus men. The correspondent thought that he had been drenched to the skin, but happening to feel in the top pocket of his coat, he found therein eight cigars. Four of them were soaked with sea-water; four were perfectly scatheless. After a search, somebody produced three dry matches, and thereupon the four waifs rode impudently in their little boat, and with an assurance of an impending rescue shining in their eyes, puffed at the big cigars and judged well and ill of all men. Everybody took a drink of water.

IV

‘Cook,’ remarked the captain, ‘there don’t seem to be any signs of life about your house of refuge.’

‘No,’ replied the cook. ‘Funny they don’t see us!’

A broad stretch of lowly coast lay before the eyes of the men. It was of dunes topped with dark vegetation. The roar of the surf was plain, and sometimes they could see the white lip of a wave as it spun up the beach. A tiny house was blocked out black upon the sky. Southward, the slim lighthouse lifted its little grey length.

Tide, wind, and waves were swinging the dinghy northward. ‘Funny they don’t see us,’ said the men.

The surf’s roar was here dulled, but its tone was, nevertheless, thunderous and mighty. As the boat swam over the great rollers, the men sat listening to this roar. ‘We’ll swamp sure,’ said everybody.

It is fair to say here that there was not a life-saving station within twenty miles in either direction, but the men did not know this fact, and in consequence they made dark and opprobrious remarks concerning the eyesight of the nation’s life-saves. Four scowling men sat in the dinghy and surpassed records in the invention of epithets.

‘Funny they don’t see us.’

The light-heartedness of a former time had completely faded. To their sharpened minds it was easy to conjure pictures of all kinds of incompetency and blindness and, indeed, cowardice. There was the shore of the populous land, and it was bitter and bitter to them that from it came no sign.

‘Well,’ said the captain, ultimately, ‘I suppose we’ll have to make a try for ourselves. If we stay out here too long, we’ll none of us have strength left to swim after the boat swamps.’

And so the oiler, who was at the oars, turned the boat straight for the shore. There was a sudden tightening of muscles. There was some thinking.

‘If we don’t all get ashore—’ said the captain. ‘If we don’t all get ashore, I suppose you fellows know where to send news of my finish?’

They then briefly exchanged some addresses and admonitions. As for the reflections of the men, there was a great deal of rage in them. Perchance they might be formulated thus: ‘If I am going to be drowned — if I am going to be drowned — if I am going to be drowned, why, in the name of the seven mad gods who rule the sea, was I allowed to come thus far and contemplate sand and trees? Was I brought here merely to have my nose dragged away as I was about to nibble the sacred cheese of life? It is preposterous. If this old ninny-woman, Fate, cannot do better than this, she should be deprived of the management of men’s fortunes. She is an old hen who knows not her intention. If she has decided to drown me, why did she not do it in the beginning and save me all this trouble? The whole affair is absurd.… But no, she cannot mean to drown me. She dare not drown me. She cannot drown me. Not after all this work.’ Afterwards the man might have had an impulse to shake his fist at the clouds: ‘Just you drown me, now, and then hear what I call you!’

The billows that came at this time were more formidable. They seemed always just about to break and roll over the little boat in a turmoil of foam. There was a preparatory and long growl in the speech of them. No mind unused to the sea would have concluded that the dinghy could ascend these sheer heights in time. The shore was still afar. The oiler was a wily surfman. ‘Boys,’ he said swiftly, ‘she won’t live three minutes more, and we’re too far out to swim. Shall I take her to sea again, captain?’

‘Yes! Go ahead!’ said the captain.

This oiler, by a series of quick miracles, and fast and steady oarsmanship, turned the boat in the middle of the surf and took her safely to sea again.

There was a considerable silence as the boat bumped over the furrowed sea to deeper water. Then somebody in gloom spoke. ‘Well, anyhow, they must have seen us from the shore by now.’

The gulls went in slanting flight up the wind toward the grey desolate east. A squall, marked by dingy clouds, and clouds brick-red, like smoke from a burning building, appeared from the south-east.

‘What do you think of those life-saving people? Ain’t they peaches?’

‘Funny they haven’t seen us.’

‘Maybe they think we’re out here for sport! Maybe they think we’re fishin’. Maybe they think we’re damned fools.’

It was a long afternoon. A changed tide tried to force them southward, but wind and wave said northward. Far ahead, where coast-line, sea, and sky formed their mighty angle, there were little dots which seemed to indicate a city on the shore.

‘St. Augustine?’

The captain shook his head. ‘Too near Mosquito Inlet.’

And the oiler rowed, and then the correspondent rowed. Then the oiler rowed. It was a weary business. The human back can become the seat of more aches and pains than are registered in books for the composite anatomy of a regiment. It is a limited area, but it can become the theatre of innumerable muscular conflicts, tangles, wrenches, knots, and other comforts.

‘Did you ever like to row, Billie?’ asked the correspondent.

‘No,’ said the oiler. ‘Hang it.’

When one exchanged the rowing-seat for a place in the bottom of the boat, he suffered a bodily depression that caused him to be careless of everything save an obligation to wiggle one finger. There was cold sea-water swashing to and fro in the boat, and he lay in it. His head, pillowed on a thwart, was within an inch of the swirl of a wave crest, and sometimes a particularly obstreperous sea came in-board and drenched him once more. But these matters did not annoy him. It is almost certain that if the boat had capsized he would have tumbled comfortably out upon the ocean as if he felt sure that it was a great soft mattress.

‘Look! There’s a man on the shore!’

‘Where?’

‘There! See ‘im? See ‘im?’

‘Yes, sure! He ‘s walking along.’

‘Now he ‘s stopped. Look! He ‘s facing us!’

‘He ‘s waving at us!’

‘So he is! By thunder!’

‘Ah, now we’re all right! Now we’re all right! There’ll be a boat out here for us in half-an-hour.’

‘He ‘s going on. He ‘s running. He ‘s going up to that house there.’

The remote beach seemed lower than the sea, and it required a searching glance to discern the little black figure. The captain saw a floating stick and they rowed to it. A bath-towel was by some weird chance in the boat, and, tying this on the stick, the captain waved it. The oarsman did not dare turn his head, so he was obliged to ask questions.