West Wind Drift Part 9

CHAPTER VI.

For three days and nights the Doraine drifted lazily in a calm and rippling sea, always to the southward. The days were bright and warm, the nights black and chill. It was the spring of the year in that zone.

Without adequate navigation instruments, Mr. Mott was forced to rely to a great extent on speculation. He was able to make certain calculations with reasonable accuracy, but they were of little real significance.

It was, of course, possible to determine the general direction in which they were drifting, and the speed. They were slowly but surely edging into the strong west wind drift. The Falkland Islands would soon be off to the right, with South Georgia and the Sandwich group farther to the south and east, the southernmost tip of Africa to the left.

Not a sail had been sighted, not a sign of smoke appeared on the spotless horizon. At regular intervals the gun on the forward deck boomed thrice in quick succession, startling the lifeless hulk into a sort of spasmodic vitality. Then she would sink back once more into the old, irksome lethargy, incapable of resisting the gentlest wave, submissive to the whim of the slightest breeze. The ship's carpenter and his men were making slow headway in the well-nigh impossible task of repairing the rudder. Attempts were being made to rig up makeshift sails to replace those licked from the supplemental spars by flames that had earned considerable progress along the roof of the upper deck building before they were subdued. Blackened, charred masts and yards, stripped of rigging, reared themselves like pines at the edge of a fire-swept forest. Sail-makers and riggers laboured stubbornly, but the work was slow and the means of restoration limited.

The occupants of the derelict had settled down to a dull, almost dogged state of resignation. There were several deaths and burials, incidents that made but little impression on the waiting, watchful survivors. Each succeeding day brought forth additional watchers to swell the anxious throng,--resolute and sometimes ungovernable men who, defying their wounds and the nurses, refused to stay where they could not have a hand in all that was going on.

Back of all this pitiful courage, however, lurked the unholy fear that they might be left to their fate in case the ship had to be hurriedly abandoned.

Mr. Mott watched the weather. Every seaman on board the Doraine scanned the cloudless sky with searching, anxious eyes. They sniffed the steady wind that blew them farther south. Always they scanned the sky and sniffed the wind.

"It's got to come sometime," repeated Captain Trigger, after each report from Mr. Mott.

"I've known weather like this to last for weeks," said the First Officer.

"In the South Pacific, yes," said the Captain grimly. "But we're in the South Atlantic, Mott."

On the sixth day the barometer began to fall. The breeze stiffened.

The sea became choppy, and white-caps danced fitfully over the greenish stretches, growing wilder and wilder under the whip of a flouting wind.

The two patchwork sails on the lumbering Doraine flapped noisily for awhile, as if shaking off their tor-por, then suddenly grew taut and fat with prosperity. The twisted, half-jammed rudder,--far from worthy despite the efforts of its repairers,--whiningly obeyed the man at the wheel, and once more the ship felt the caress of the deep on her cleaving bows.

The horizon to the north and west seemed to draw nearer, the contrast between the deepening blue of the water and the clear azure of the contracting dome more sharply defined. The sky that had been cloudless for days still remained barren, but the sailor knew what lay beyond the clear-cut rim of the world. The man of the sea could look far beyond the horizon. He could see the ugly clouds that were even now speeding down from the north, invisible as yet but soon to creep into view; he could see the mighty billows on the other side of that distant line; he could hear the roar and shriek of the tempest that was still hundreds of miles away. It was the matter of but a few hours before the wind and the billows would rush up to smite the Doraine with all their might under the cover of a black and storm-rent sky. And what was to become of the vessel, floundering in the path of the hurricane?

Late afternoon brought the forerunner of the gale, a whistling, howling squall that frantically strove, it would seem, to outrace the baleful clouds. Then the Doraine was in the thick of the furious revel of sea and sky, plunging, leaping, rolling like a monstrous cork....

How she managed to weather the storm, G.o.d knows, and He alone. At the mercy of wave and wind, she was tossed and hammered and racked for two frightful days and nights, and yet she remained afloat, battered, smashed, raked from stem to stern, stripped of everything the tempest could wrench from her in its fury. And yet on the third day, when the storm abated, the st.u.r.dy ship was still riding the waves, flayed but un-conquered, and the baffled sea was licking the sides of her once more with servile though deceitful tenderness.

But there was water in the hold. The ship was leaking badly.

Up from the stifling interior straggled the unhappy inmates. They looked again upon the unbelievable: a smiling, dancing sea of blue under a canopy clean and spotless. It was unbelievable. Even the stouthearted Captain and the faithful mate, blear-eyed and haggard from loss of sleep, were filled with wonder.

"I can't understand it," muttered Mr. Mott a dozen times that day, shaking his head in a bewildered sort of way. "I can't understand how she did it. By right, she ought to be at the bottom of the ocean, and here she is on top of it, same as ever."

"Do you believe in G.o.d, Mr. Mott?" asked the Captain solemnly.

"I do," said Mr. Mott emphatically. After a moment he added: "I've been a long time coming to it, Captain Trigger, but I do. Nothing short of an Almighty Being could have steered this ship for the past two days."

The Captain nodded his head slowly, his gaze fixed on something above and far beyond the horizon.

"I suppose it's too much to ask of Him, though," said he, audibly completing a thought.

Mr. Mott evidently had been thinking of the same thing, for he said:

"I'm sorry to say it's gained about two feet on the pumps since last night."

Captain Trigger's face was very grave. "That means a couple of days more at the outside." His eyes rested speculatively on the three lifeboats still hanging above the starboard rail. There was another being repaired on the port side. "More than six hundred of us on board, Andrew." His head dropped suddenly, his chin twitched. Mr. Mott looked away.

"I don't believe it will come to that," said he, an odd note of confidence in his voice. "'Tain't likely, old friend, that G.o.d would see us safely through all we've had to tackle and then desert us in the end.

Something's bound to turn up. I've a feeling,--a queer feeling,--that we're going to pull out of this all right. I know it looks mighty hopeless, but--"

"Just the same, Mr. Mott," broke in the Captain, lifting his head and setting his jaw, "you'd better set all available hands to work on the rafts immediately. It's true G.o.d has helped us through a lot, but it strikes me we'd better be on the safe side and help G.o.d a little at this stage of the game. He is wonderful, Andrew, but He isn't wonderful enough to keep man afloat very long unless man himself builds the raft.

So don't lose a minute."

Anxious, inquiring eyes followed the Captain and his First Officer wherever they went. On all sides were silent, beaten people who asked no questions, for they were afraid of the answers. Sick, dazed, haggard, they stared hopelessly, drearily out over the water; for all that their faces revealed the end was near at hand and they cared but little. They had been through one h.e.l.l; death could bring nothing worse.

Here and there a stout-hearted optimist appeared among them, but his very cheerfulness seemed to offend. They did not want to hear his silly, stupid predictions that something was "sure to turn up." They knew that water was coming into the hold; they knew that there were but four lifeboats and seven hundred men and women; they knew that the Doraine was going down in a very few hours; they knew that the Captain had given up all hope of rescue. Nothing could "turn up" now but death.

Madame Obosky had taken a great fancy to Algernon Adonis Percival, and for a most peculiar reason. He had, it appears, abused her roundly on the first night of the storm for venturing on deck against orders, compelling him to risk what he considered a very precious life in a successful effort to drag her back to safety. As a matter of fact, he did not drag her back to safety. That feat was accomplished by two sailors who managed to reach both of them before another devastating wave came up to tear his grip loose from the broken rail to which he clung with one bandaged hand while he kept her from sliding into the sea with the other.

He was very angry. In the first place, his hands hurt him dreadfully, and in the second place she had forced him to disobey orders by going out to save her. He did not mutter his complaints. He told her in plain and violent English what he thought of her, and if she went out there again he'd be d.a.m.ned happy to let her drown.

Now, it had been some time since any man had had the hardihood or temerity to upbraid Madame Obosky. No male had cursed her since she left Petrograd,--and that was four years ago. She had been cursed often enough by her own s.e.x,--professionally, of course,--but the men she had encountered since leaving Russia were either too chivalrous or too cowardly to abuse her, and she missed it terribly.

She had gone through a very hard school in order to become one of the princ.i.p.al dancers in her land. Teachers had cursed her, teachers had beaten her,--and they always were men.

When she was eighteen she married a lion-tamer. Who would have thought that a man who trained lions could be gentle and mild, and as tame as the beasts he had beaten for years? She was barely nineteen when he died, quite suddenly. There was a dark rumour that she had poisoned him.

True or false, the rumour persisted, and she soon became one of the most popular dancers in the Empire. For three years she had a manager who treated her so vilely, so contemptuously that she tried to kill his wife, whereupon the unnatural husband refused to have anything more to do with her.

She was dancing in Germany when the War broke out, but succeeded in getting over into Holland within a week or two, thereby escaping what she was pleased to describe as "something zat no woman could endure, no matter how long she have live' in Russia." Paris and London had treated her kindly, courteously, but that was to be expected, she repined, because all of the real men were off at the front fighting. Instead of being scowled at and ordered about by managers and orchestra leaders, or brow-beaten by hotel-clerks and head-waiters, she met with nothing but the most servile politeness,--due, she was p.r.o.ne to argue, to the unquestioned decadence of the French and English races. They were a bloodless lot, those Frenchmen and Englishmen.

It was the same in Rio Janeiro, Buenos Aires and Santiago,--and it would be even worse in New York, Chicago and San Francisco. The Americans, she had heard, were the worst of them all. They didn't know the first thing about the majesty of s.e.x. The Indian, she understood, was an exception.

From all accounts, he knew how to treat his woman.

She was homesick. Her heart leaped with joy when she discovered in Percival what she believed to be a domineering, masterful man. He had been neither servile, nor polite, nor afraid. He had treated her,--at least for an illuminating, transcendent ten minutes,--as if she were the dirt under his feet,--and he was an American at that. True, he had apologized a little later on, and had blushed quite becomingly in doing so, but nothing,--nothing in the world,--would ever make her believe that he was not the sort of man who could be depended upon to put a woman in her place and keep her there. He might apologize until he was black in the face and still be unable to take back the words he had uttered. Notwithstanding that he, in his apology, professed to have mistaken her in the darkness for one of the Portuguese immigrant women who didn't understand a word of English, she forgave him quite humbly, and that was going pretty far for Olga Obosky, whose ident.i.ty ought not to have been a matter of doubt, even on the darkest of nights.

She was a lithe, perfectly formed young woman, beautiful in an unusual way. Her body was as sinuous as that of a woodland nymph. Indeed, in one of her most spectacular dances, she appeared as a nymph, barefooted, bare-legged, and,--as Mrs. Spofford caustically remarked,--bare-faced.

She possessed the marvellously clear, colourless complexion found only among the purely Slavic women. Her lips were red and sensuous, her eyes darkly mysterious and brooding, her hair as black as the raven's wing.

When she smiled her face became strikingly alive, radiant, transforming her into a jolly, good-natured, wholesome girl in whom not the faintest trace of the carnal was left. Every move, every thought, every impulse was feminine; her imagination was feminine; she cast the spell of her femininity over all with whom she came in contact. Primitively sensuous, she was also primitively wary,--and so she was ineffably feminine.

Prior to the time of her dramatic encounter with the American, she had favoured him with no more than a glance or two of curiosity. He was a stowaway; for a brief while he was suspected of being involved in the plot to blow up the ship. That was enough for her. Twice she had seen Miss Clinton talking with him, and once, just before the storm set in, she had paused to watch the young American girl renew the bandages on his hands after dressing the burns. Half an hour after he had apologized for speaking so roughly to her, she decided that it was her duty to hunt him up and minister to him. The ship was rolling terribly, the din of the elements was deafening, but Olga Obosky was not a faint-hearted person. She went forth boldly, confidently. Terrified, clinging observers marvelled at her sure-footedness, at the graceful way in which her sinuous body bent itself to the perilous heavings of the vessel.

She found him in the reading-room, seated in a corner. Miss Clinton was readjusting the bandage on one of his hands. Half a dozen people were in the room, manfully defying the turmoil that had sent nearly every one else to bed in terror and distress. Without hesitation the dancer joined the couple in the corner. Her smile was engaging; a faint line between her eyebrows signified the concern she felt for him.

WEST WIND DRIFT

Miss Clinton looked up from her work. Her smile was politely accusative,--and brief.

"It is all my fault," began Madame Obosky, standing before them, her feet wide apart, her knees bent slightly to meet the varying slants and lurches of the vessel. She spoke the English language confidently and well. Her accent, which was scarcely noticeable, betrayed the fact that she had mastered French long before attempting English. There was a piquant boldness in the occasional misplacing of words and in the haphazard construction of sentences. She was unafraid.

"I have subject him to much pain and discomfort," she went on, addressing the girl. "Those poor hand! It is I who should kiss them, Mademoiselle, not you."

"Kiss them?" gasped Miss Clinton.