“Guess it’s your turn,” said the American, venturing a step upward but no more. His manner had become sheepish, I observed, and he spoke with less truculence.
“My turn, as you say, sir,” I rejoined with what composure I could. “I am now going aboard my yacht, and there I will decide what is to be done with you. That will depend upon your behaviour, I advise you to remember as much.”
I lit my cigarette and waited for him to go on. White Wings was evidently quite near to us now—I could hear the throb of her turbines; her siren hooted repeatedly. The night was mine but for an accident. And yet, heaven knows, it appeared to me then that an accident must befall me unless a miracle intervened.
“That’s your yacht right enough,” the Yankee went on immediately. “And so far as it’s her, we’re in a clove-hitch ourselves. The question is, who’s to put you aboard her, and what shall we be about when he’s doing of it? Now, see here, as between man and man—you give us your solemn affidavit not to do anything against this ship’s crew and you’re free to come and go as you choose. That’s my first condition—the second is as you sign the paper Will Rayner has drawed up and abide by its terms. Do as much as that and your friends shan’t be more willing to help you. But if you don’t do it—why, then, look out for yourself, for, by the Lord above me, you ain’t got ten minutes to live.”
He came another step up the ladder, cheered, as it seemed, by his own eloquence. As for the men, they opened their lips for the first time since my yacht had answered me, and their hoarse roar of defiance, uttered in that unpleasant timbre to which the sea attunes the human voice, backed the threat and made it their own. Had it been left to me in circumstances less dangerous, I might have given them my word to let me go free, and signed the paper their leader spoke about; but just in the same measure that they threatened me, so did my anger against them rise—and stepping briskly to the topmost rung of the ladder, I answered them in a sentence that even their dull intellects could understand.
“Not a word or a line, by God! That is my answer, sir. You may take it or leave it; but if you leave it, some of you shall as certainly hang for this night’s work as this is a pistol I hold in my hand. Now stand back, for I am coming down amongst you. Yonder, you see, is the boat I am expecting.”
Lifting my hand, I pointed with dramatic intent to the port quarter of the ship. The sea was void upon that quarter—what need to tell it? But my eyes had already detected the black outline of a ship’s boat upon the starboard bow, and my very life depended upon the ruse which should divert the men’s attention from it. Never shall I doubt the ruffians would have made an end of it there and then, and have murdered me as they had murdered the criminals upon the ship, if the argument had been carried but another sentence. I had seen knives unsheathed at my words, had heard the promptings of rogue to rogue, that low muttering of the human beast who has scented prey, and whose nostrils are distended by the lust of it. Let the talk run on, and they would be up the ladder and upon me, cost what it might—up and on me, and their knives at my throat. This I understood when I pointed to the port quarter and sent them gaping there in a body—as children who are not content to hear, but with their own eyes would see.
My freedom, nay, my life depended upon the ruse. Such a fact was clear above all others. It had been no lie when I said that my friends were coming to me. Athwart the great ship, not fifty yards from the starboard bow, lay the long boat which had been sent out to me. I took one last look at the huddled forms below me, debated the possibilities in one of those swift mental surveys to which long habit has trained me, and staking all upon the venture, risking every peril both of the men and the sea, I leaped boldly from the bridge and left the issue to the God of my destinies.
So the tragic hour began for me, and such were its circumstances! The rushing waters booming as a dirge in my ears, my clothes dragging me down as a burden insupportable; darkness and the dread sea all about me; a black sky meeting my vision as I rose gasping to the surface—no knowledge now of where the boat lay or in what direction to strike out; no certainty that my friends had seen me or were alive to my situation—nothing but silence and the long rollers carrying me, and far away a distant shouting, an echo of pistol shots, a rejoinder of strong voices and then a silence, so deep, so profound that the very wavelets were as cataracts beating at my brain. This, surely, was the moment when a man might have told himself that he was cast out utterly from man and the world, a true derelict of the vast ocean, a voice crying in a monstrous silence, a sacrifice to wind and wave and the gaping sea. The deepest dungeon ashore could not have inflicted a wound of desolation so terrible.
I was there within a cable’s length of those who would have given their very lives for me, and yet as far away from them as though I had stood at the foot of Mount Terror and cried to the skies for my salvation. Not a sound, not a whisper of life did the wind bear to me. A strong swimmer, I lay deep in the water, the spindrift cold upon my face, the ripples of the crests soaking my hair, the blue-black sky for my zenith. And how far had those minutes carried me from humanity and all human interests!
Calmly, as a man in a reverie of the mind could, I recounted this adventure from the beginning, and wondered why I had set out upon it at all. What was it to me that these rogues pitted their wits against their brother rogues ashore? Who had made me the judge of crime and its servants, or permitted me to say that one man was a thief and another man honest? The great ocean laughed at such laws and their makers. Might and majesty and the throne of winds—were not they a kingdom stupendous in its grandeur and unsurpassable in its magnitude? No sense of danger, indeed, went with me to the waters. I heard their dulcet voice and answered them—I saw the figures I had known and loved, and no sense of regret attended the vision. An unquenchable fire of confidence burned in my brain. I believed that I should see little Joan again, though the waters engulfed me utterly.
Let me claim no merit for a mental attitude so unusual. I have known many men who have been taken from the water almost upon the point of death, and in no case does fear seem to have been a part of their experience. Certainly, in one or two instances, they have spoken of great pain in the lungs, but their chief recollection has been a supreme content and of a profound sense of rest as though the peace and loneliness of the deep had communicated itself to their souls and robbed them in an instant of that burden of life of which all, with whatever courage they may bear it, are sensible. Speaking again for myself, I do not think it is a misrepresentation to say that I had no overmastering desire to be saved from the peril which had overtaken me. Not a morbid man, or one who is insensible to the privileges and duties of our common destiny, I will confess that a certain ironical view of human things came to me as the good tide carried me, and the surf bathed my face. All the littleness of the everyday existence, its petty bickerings, its trumpery ambitions, were so much sport for the rolling waves about me, so much silvery laughter for the surging swell and the cradle of the billows. And if this mood changed at all—as I know that ultimately it did change—the new spirit breathed human love as its chief desire, the simplest of the human affections, the depth, the truth and the nobility of them.
I saw then that there is nothing permanent in life but love, nothing to be so surely desired, no human quality so precious as that habit of loving. And passing from the more general admission, my own story must present itself to me again, and bid me ask why I had left Joan Fordibras at all when I found her at Dieppe; why I had accepted the challenge there thrown down to me when I might have taken her in my arms and written the golden page in our lives once and for ever? This reflection could move me instantly to a great pathos of regret, and inspire in me a mad striving after some shore of my safety when I could say, “I have not done well; the blame is mine.” And from this time I thought but of Joan alone; saw her face looking down to me from the skies above, and heard but the plaintive music of