Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  Even in that solitude he made Fenton his ideal, with the necessity that is in such natures to form themselves upon some other, and appreciated his confidence and friendship as gratefully as if they had been offered in the midst of men where he must have been chosen out of a multitude for Fenton’s kindness. On his part, Fenton learned to admire the fineness of spirit which survived all circumstance in this poor fellow; and when his hopes were highest, he formed plans doing something for Giffen in the world.

  When they had finished their tower, and removed into it, he bade him make one more errand to the hut they had abandoned, and get fire to light the beacon.

  Giffen refused. “No, sir; better not have any of my luck about it.”

  But he was off, early in the day that followed, to cut wood for their beacon; and it was he who discovered that they could make the densest smoke by day in drying the fuel for the flame by night.

  “Don’t you think we ought to do something with that canoe again?” he asked one day.

  “No, not yet,” answered Fenton. “There’ll be time enough for that if the beacon doesn’t succeed. But it will succeed.” He formlessly felt the need of economising all the materials of hope within him. If he turned so soon from the beacon to some other device for escape, he knew that he must lose his faith in it, and he could not bear the thought of this loss. He was passionately devoting himself to the belief that it must bring a ship to their rescue. He divided the day and night into regular watches, and whenever he came to relieve Giffen, he questioned him closely as to every appearance of the sea; when he lay down to sleep he hastened to take upon himself the burden of disappointment with which he must wake, by saying to himself, “I know that he will not see anything.” He contrived to postpone the anguish of his monotonous failure to conjure any sail out of the empty air by saying, as each week began, that now they must not expect to see anything for at least three days, or five days, or ten days to come. He invented reasons for these repeated procrastinations, but he was angry with Giffen for acquiescing in them; he tried to drive him into some question of them, by making them fantastic, and he was childishly happy when Giffen disputed them. Then he urged other and better reasons: if it were fine, he said that nothing but stress of weather would bring them a ship, and that they could only hope for some vessel blown out of her course, like the Meteor; when it was stormy, he argued that any vessel sighting their beacon would keep away from it till the storm was past, but would be sure to come back then, and see what their fire meant.

  “Yes,” said Giffen, “but if we are going to keep that fire up at the rate we have for the last three months, we must begin to cut our cocoa palms.”

  “It isn’t three months!” cried Fenton.

  Giffen proved the fact by the reckoning he had kept on a block of coral in the tower: the tale of little straight marks, one for each day, was irrefutable.

  “Why did you keep that count?” cried Fenton desperately. “Let the time go, I say, and the quicker it goes, and the sooner we are both dead, the better! Put out the fire; it’s no use.”

  He left Giffen in the tower, and wandered away, as far away as the narrow bounds of his prison would permit. He stopped at a remote point of the island, which he had not visited since the first day when he had hastened to explore the atoll. The hoarse roaring of the surf, that beat incessantly upon the reef, filled the air; the sea was purple all round the horizon, and the sky blue above it; flights of tern and petrel wheeled and shrieked overhead: the sun shone, tempered by the delicate gale, and all things were as they had been half a year ago, as they must be half a year hence, and for ever. In a freak of the idle curiosity that sometimes plays on the surface of our deepest and blackest moods, he descended the low plateau to look at a smoother and darker rock which showed itself at the point where the reef began to break away from the white sand. A growth of soft sea-mosses clothed the rock, and it had a fantastic likeness to a boat in shape. The mosses waved back and forth in the water; the rock itself appeared to move, and Fenton fell upon it, and clutched it, as if it had been some living thing struggling to escape him. He pulled it up on the sand, and then he sank down beside it, too weak to stir, too weak to cry out; the tears ran down his face, like the tears of a sick man’s feebleness.

  Giffen found him beside the boat, which they righted together without a word.

  “Well, sir,” he said at last, “I’m glad you found her.” He went carefully over the places where it had been patched, with a solemn and critical scrutiny. “That’s our boat,” he added.

  “Yes, I thought so,” assented Fenton.

  “And those fellows—”

  Neither of them put into words his conjecture as to the fate of the men who had abandoned them: they accepted in silent awe the chance of escape which this fate, whatever it was, had given them; but late that night, when they lay hopefully sleepless in their tower, Giffen said, “I don’t know as they meant to leave us for good. I reckon, if they’d got through all right, they’d have come back for us.”

  “Yes, we must believe that,” replied Fenton.

  How the boat had reached their atoll, and when, remained the secret of the power that had given it back to them. It was enough for them that the little craft was not beyond repair; it was thoroughly waterlogged, and it must be some time before they could begin work upon it; but they spent this time in preparing material, and gathering provision for their voyage. They stocked it with nuts, and dried and salted fish sufficient to last them for six weeks; they filled Giffen’s crop of gourds with water. “More of a tank than cucumbers or musk-melons would have been, after all; and better than cocoa-nuts,” he quietly remarked. They were of one mind, whatever happened, never to return to their atoll; they had no other definite purpose; but they talked now as if their escape were certain.

  “It stands to reason,” said Giffen, “that it’s meant for us to get back, or else this boat wouldn’t have been sent for us;” and he began to plan a life as remote from the sea as he could make it. “When I put my foot on shore, I ain’t going to stop walking till I get where salt water is worth six dollars a quart; yes, sir, I’m going to start with an oar on my shoulder; and when some fellow asks me what that thing is, I’m going to rest, and not before!”

  They built a fire on the tower that would last all day and night, and then they set sail out of the lagoon, and through the breakers beyond the reef. The breeze was very light, but the sky was clear, with the promise of indefinite good weather; and before nightfall they saw the plumes of their palms form themselves into the tufts into which they had grown from the points they had first discovered on the horizon; they became points again, and the night softly blotted them from the verge of the ocean.

  They had neither compass nor sextant; under strange stars and alien constellations they were wandering as absolutely at the will of the winds and waves as any savages of those seas. For a while they saw the light of their beacon duller and paler on the waters where their island had been. This, too, died away, and the night fell round them on the illimitable sea.

  Fenton stood the first watch, and when he gave the helm to Giffen, he simply bade him keep the, boat before the wind. In the morning, when he took it, he asked if the wind had shifted or freshened, and still kept the boat before it. Toward sunset they sighted a series of points on the horizon, which, as they approached, expanded into the plumage of palms; the long white beach of an atoll grew from the water, and they heard faintly the thunder of the surf along the reef. It looked larger than their own island, and they scanned it anxiously for some sign of human life. But there were no huts under the palms, and no smoke rose above their fronds.

  The breeze carried their boat toward the shore, and Fenton decided to pass the night on the atoll.

  If it were, as it looked, larger than the atoll they had abandoned, it must be known to navigation, and sooner or later it might be visited by ships for water; or the bêche-de-mer, which abounds in the larger reefs, might bring American traders for a freight of
the fish for China. They might find traces of European sojourn on the island, and perhaps some hint by which they could profit when they set sail again.

  In the failing light, they stove their boat on the reef, but the breaker that drove them upon it carried them beyond, and once in the smooth lagoon, they managed to reach the shore before the boat filled. They pulled her up on the sand, and climbed to the top of the low plateau on which the palms grew; but it was now so dark that they could see nothing, and they waited for the morning to show them the familiar paths and trees of their own atoll, and their tower gleaming white through the foliage in the distance. They walked slowly towards it in silence, and when Giffen reached it, he busied himself in searching the ashes of the beacon for some spark of fire. He soon had a blaze; he brought water from the well, and boiled the eggs of the sea-birds, which he gathered from their nests in the sedge. He broke some young cocoa-nuts, and poured the milk into the shells they had made for drinking-cups, and then he approached Fenton, where he sat motionless and vacant-eyed, and begged him to eat, humbly, as if he expected some outbreak from him.

  “No,” said Fenton quite gently. “But you eat. I’m not hungry.”

  “I reckon,” said Giffen piteously, “the wind must have changed in the night without my knowing it, and brought us right back.”

  “Very likely,” answered Fenton. “But it makes no difference. It was to be, any way.”

  He hardly knew how the days began to pass again; he no longer thought of escape; but a longing to leave some record of himself in this prison, since he was doomed never to quit it, grew up in his heart, and he wrote on the walls of his tower a letter to Helen, which he conjured the reader, at whatever time he came, to transcribe and send to her. He narrated the facts of his shipwreck, and the barren history of his sojourn on the island, his attempt to escape, and his return to it. He tenderly absolved her from all ties and promises, and prayed for her happiness in whatever sort she could find it. In this surrender he felt the pang which the dead may be supposed to know, when the soul passes into the exile of eternity, and sees those it leaves behind inevitably committed to other affections and other cares. Sometimes it seemed to him as if he might really be dead, and all his experience of the past year a nightmare of the everlasting sleep.

  The tern that were nesting on the atoll when he first landed, and that visited it every six months to rear their young, were now a third time laying their eggs in the tufts of coarse thin grass. He thought these visits of the birds were annual, and there was nothing in the climate to correct his error, or group in fixed periods the lapse of his monotonous days. There was at times more rain, and again less rain; but the change scarcely divided the year into seasons. flower and fruit were there at all times, and spring, summer, autumn, and winter, with their distinct variety, were ideas as alien as hills, and valleys, and streams, in this little land, raised for the most part scarcely a man’s height above the sea, where there could never even be the names of these things in any native tongue. Once or twice the atoll felt the tremor of an earthquake, that perhaps shook continental shores, or perhaps only sent its vibrations along the ocean floor, and lifted, or let fall beneath the waves, some tiny point of land like their own; and once there had fallen a shower of ashes from the clear sky, which must have been carried by a wind-current from some far-off volcano. This, with the log that had drifted to their reef, was their sole message from beyond the wilderness that weltered around them from horizon to horizon, and knew no change but from calm to storm, and then to calm again. The weather was nearly always fair, with light winds or none; and often they saw an approaching cloud divide before it reached their atoll and pass on either hand, leaving it serenely safe between the two paths of the tempest. At last, how long after their return Fenton could not tell, in his indifference to the passage of the weeks and days, — a change came over the sky different from any that had portended other storms, and before night a hurricane broke from it that heaped the sea around their island, and drove it across the lagoon and high over the plateau. For two days and nights it beat against the walls of their tower; then the waters went down, and the ravaged atoll rose from the sea again. But when Fenton clambered to the top of the tower, and looked out, he saw that it could no longer be a refuge to them. The trees of the cocoa groves were blown down and flung hither and thither; their tops were twisted off and tossed into the lagoon; their trunks lay tangled and intertwisted, as if they had been straws in the frolic of a whirlwind. The smooth beach of the lagoon was strewn with fragments of coral, torn from the reef and tossed upon it; the grassy level where the sea-birds nested was scattered with their dead bodies, caught among the coarse herbage and beaten into the white sand.

  He left Giffen cowering within, and ran down from the tower to look for the boat. He found it lodged in a heap of cocoa fronds, and wedged fast among some blocks of coral; and he hurried back with his good news. He met Giffen at the door. “All right,” he said to the anxious face. “The boat is safe, and we must get her afloat. You see we can’t stay here.”

  “No,” said Giffen, “we can’t stay.” He looked drearily out over the wreck of their fairy isle, and then with a sigh he turned into the tower again, and crouched down in the corner where Fenton had left him.

  “What’s the matter? Are you sick, Giffen?” demanded Fenton.

  Giffen did not answer, but rose with a stupid air, and came out into the sun. He shivered, but gathered himself together, and in a dull mechanical way set about his usual work of getting breakfast. He ate little, but when Fenton had finished, he went with him, and helped him to cut the boat free. It was hard getting it out of the mass of rocks and boughs, and it was noon before they had dragged her back from the point where the sea had carried her to a free space where they could begin to repair her.

  At the end of a week they had her afloat in the lagoon once more, and provisioned from the stores accumulated in the tower.

  The morning when they were to set sail, Giffen could not rise from his bed of grass. “I can’t go,” he said; “I’m sick.”

  Fenton had seen that he was ailing with a fear from which he revolted in a frenzy of impatient exertion. If they were but once at sea again, he had crazily reasoned with himself, then they could not help themselves, and, sick or well, they must make the best of it. This illusion failed him now, and he abandoned himself to a cynical scorn of all that had hitherto supported and consoled him. Every act of self-sacrifice, every generous impulse, seemed to him the part of a fool or a madman. Till now he had thought that he had somehow endured and dared all things for Helen’s sake, that anything less than he had done would have been unworthy of her; but now the devil that was uppermost in him mocked him with the suggestion that the best he could ever have done for her was to live for her, and do his utmost to return to her. As he stood looking at the face of the poor wretch who had twice betrayed him to despair, and who, at last, in this supreme moment, had fallen helpless across the only avenue of escape that remained to him, he trembled with a strong temptation. He turned away, and went down to the lagoon-beach, where the boat swung at anchor, and the sail, on which he had worked late the night before, lay on the sand, ready to be stepped. The boat lightly pulled at its moorings on the falling tide, and he felt the strain as if it had been anchored in his heart. He drew it to the shore; he stepped the mast, and ran up the sail, which filled and tugged in the morning breeze. He dropped it again, and went back to Giffen.

  As the days passed, he watched with the sick man, and brought him the water he craved, and the food he loathed; there was nothing else to be done. One night Giffen roused himself from the torpor in which he remained sunken, for the most part, and asked:

  “Did you ever hear that people were not afraid to die when they came to it?”

  “I’ve heard that — yes,” said Fenton.

  “I just happened to think of it; because this is the first time, since I can remember, that I wasn’t afraid.

  I was awfully afraid to stay with
you on that rock when the captain’s boat went away; but I ain’t sorry for it now. No, sir, you’ve behaved to me like a white man from the start; and now, I’ll tell you what I want you to do. I’m all right here, — or I will be, pretty soon, I reckon — and I don’t want you to lose any more time. The boat’s ready, and now’s your last chance. Don’t you mind me; I’d only bring you bad luck, any way. If you find land, or a ship picks you up, you can come back and see how I’m getting along.”

  What had been Fenton’s temptation became the burden of the sick man’s delirium, and he frantically urged him to go while there was still time. He seemed to wear this notion out through mere iteration; and at last, when he awoke one day, “I dreamt,” he said, “that there was a ship!” That night, sleeping or waking, he raved of a ship that had come to take them away. The third morning after, he opened his eyes, and looked into his comrade’s face with ominous recovery of intelligence. “Has it come?” he asked eagerly. “The ship?”

  “No, you dreamed it, Giffen,” returned Fenton, with a tender compassion unalloyed by self-pity.

  “My luck,” said Giffen. He gasped, and made a mechanical effort to rise. He gave a sort of cry, and. fixed a stare of wild demand on Fenton, who caught him in his arms.

  Fenton covered up the dead face with a branch of palm, and walked giddily out into the sun. It was rising a red, rayless ball, and against this disk the figure of a ship seemed printed. He passed his hand over his eyes, but when he took it away, the spectre remained. He thought he saw a boat lying at the lagoon-beach, and her crew advancing up the sand toward him, men with friendly, home-like faces. They wavered and glided in the vision his watch-worn eyes reported to his reeling brain.