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Angel Island

I >> Inez Haynes Gillmore >> Angel Island



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M. W. P.



Angel Island



I



It was the morning after the shipwreck. The five men still lay where
they had slept. A long time had passed since anybody had spoken. A long
time had passed since anybody had moved. Indeed, it, looked almost as if
they would never speak or move again. So bruised and bloodless of skin
were they, so bleak and sharp of feature, so stark and hollow of eye, so
rigid and moveless of limb that they might have been corpses. Mentally,
too, they were almost moribund. They stared vacantly, straight out to
sea. They stared with the unwinking fixedness of those whose gaze is
caught in hypnotic trance.

It was Frank Merrill who broke the silence finally. Merrill still looked
like a man of marble and his voice still kept its unnatural tone, level,
monotonous, metallic. "If I could only forget the scream that Norton kid
gave when he saw the big wave coming. It rings in my head. And the way
his mother pressed his head down on her breast - oh, my God!"

His listeners knew that he was going to say this. They knew the very
words in which he would put it. All through the night-watches he had
said the same thing at intervals. The effect always was of a red-hot
wire drawn down the frayed ends of their nerves. But again one by one
they themselves fell into line.

"It was that old woman I remember," said Honey Smith. There were
bruises, mottled blue and black, all over Honey's body. There was a
falsetto whistling to Honey's voice. "That Irish granny! She didn't say
a word. Her mouth just opened until her jaw fell. Then the wave struck!"
He paused. He tried to control the falsetto whistling. But it got away
from him. "God, I bet she was dead before it touched her!"

"That was the awful thing about it," Pete Murphy groaned. It was as
inevitable now as an antiphonal chorus. Pete's little scarred,
scratched, bleeding body rocked back and forth." The women and children!
But it all came so quick. I was close beside 'the Newlyweds.' She put
her arms around his neck and said, 'Your face'll be the last I'll look
on in this life, dearest! 'And she stayed there looking into his eyes.
It was the last face she saw all right." Pete stopped and his brow
blackened. " While she was sick in her stateroom, he'd been looking into
a good many faces besides hers, the - "

"I don't seem to remember anything definite about it," Billy Fairfax
said. It was strange to hear that beating pulse of horror in Billy's
mild tones and to see that look of terror frozen on his mild face. "I
had the same feeling that I've had in nightmares lots of times - that it
was horrible - and - I didn't think I could stand it another moment -
but - of course it would soon end - like all nightmares and I'd wake
up."

Without reason, they fell again into silence.

They had passed through two distinct psychological changes since the sea
spewed them up. When consciousness returned, they gathered into a little
terror-stricken, gibbering group. At first they babbled. At first
inarticulate, confused, they dripped strings of mere words; expletives,
exclamations, detached phrases, broken clauses, sentences that started
with subjects and trailed, unpredicated, to stupid silence; sentences
beginning subjectless and hobbling to futile conclusion. It was as
though mentally they slavered. But every phrase, however confused and
inept, voiced their panic, voiced the long strain of their fearful
buffeting and their terrific final struggle. And every clause, whether
sentimental, sacrilegious, or profane, breathed their wonder, their
pathetic, poignant, horrified wonder, that such things could be. All
this was intensified by the anarchy of sea and air and sky, by the
incessant explosion of the waves, by the wind which seemed to sweep from
end to end of a liquefying universe, by a downpour which threatened to
beat their sodden bodies to pulp, by all the connotation of terror that
lay in the darkness and in their unguarded condition on a barbarous,
semi-tropical coast.

Then came the long, log-like stupor of their exhaustion.

With the day, vocabulary, grammar, logic returned. They still iterated
and reiterated their experiences, but with a coherence which gradually
grew to consistence. In between, however, came sudden, sinister attacks
of dumbness.

"I remember wondering," Billy Fairfax broke their last silence suddenly,
"what would become of the ship's cat."

This was typical of the astonishing fatuity which marked their comments.
Billy Fairfax had made the remark about the ship's cat a dozen times.
And a dozen times, it had elicited from the others a clamor of similar
chatter, of insignificant haphazard detail which began anywhere and
ended nowhere.

But this time it brought no comment. Perhaps it served to stir faintly
an atrophied analytic sense. No one of them had yet lost the shudder and
the thrill which lay in his own narrative. But the experiences of the
others had begun to bore and irritate.

There came after this one remark another half-hour of stupid and
readjusting silence.

The storm, which had seemed to worry the whole universe in its grip, had
died finally but it had died hard. On a quieted earth, the sea alone
showed signs of revolution. The waves, monstrous, towering, swollen,
were still marching on to the beach with a machine-like regularity that
was swift and ponderous at the same time. One on one, another on
another, they came, not an instant between. When they crested,
involuntarily the five men braced themselves as for a shock. When they
crashed, involuntarily the five men started as if a bomb had struck.
Beyond the wave-line, under a cover of foam, the jaded sea lay feebly
palpitant like an old man asleep. Not far off, sucked close to a ragged
reef, stretched the black bulk that had once been the Brian Boru.
Continually it leaped out of the water, threw itself like a live
creature, breast-forward on the rock, clawed furiously at it, retreated
a little more shattered, settled back in the trough, brooded an instant,
then with the courage of the tortured and the strength of the dying,
reared and sprang at the rock again.

Up and down the beach stretched an unbroken line of wreckage. Here and
there, things, humanly shaped, lay prone or supine or twisted into crazy
attitudes. Some had been flung far up the slope beyond the water-line.
Others, rolling back in the torrent of the tide, engaged in a ceaseless,
grotesque frolic with the foamy waters. Out of a mass of wood caught
between rocks and rising shoulder-high above it, a woman's head, livid,
rigid, stared with a fixed gaze out of her dead eyes straight at their
group. Her blonde hair had already dried; it hung in stiff, salt-clogged
masses that beat wildly about her face. Beyond something rocking between
two wedged sea-chests, but concealed by them, constantly kicked a sodden
foot into the air. Straight ahead, the naked body of a child flashed to
the crest of each wave.

All this destruction ran from north to south between two reefs of black
rock. It edged a broad bow-shaped expanse of sand, snowy, powdery,
hummocky, netted with wefts of black seaweed that had dried to a
rattling stiffness. To the east, this silvery crescent merged finally
with a furry band of vegetation which screened the whole foreground of
the island.

The day was perfect and the scene beautiful. They had watched the sun
come up over the trees at their back. And it was as if they had seen a
sunrise for the first time in their life. To them, it was neither
beautiful nor familiar; it was sinister and strange. A chill, that was
not of the dawn but of death itself, lay over everything. The morning
wind was the breath of the tomb, the smells that came to them from the
island bore the taint of mortality, the very sunshine seemed icy. They
suffered - the five survivors of the night's tragedy - with a scarifying
sense of disillusion with Nature. It was as though a beautiful, tender,
and fondly loved mother had turned murderously on her children, had
wounded them nearly to death, had then tried to woo them to her breast
again. The loveliness of her, the mindless, heartless, soulless
loveliness, as of a maniac tamed, mocked at their agonies, mocked with
her gentle indifference, mocked with her self-satisfied placidity,
mocked with her serenity and her peace. For them she was dead - dead
like those whom we no longer trust.

The sun was racing up a sky smooth and clear as gray glass. It dropped
on the torn green sea a shimmer that was almost dazzling; but ere was
something incongruous about that - as though Nature had covered her
victim with a spangled scarf. It brought out millions of sparkles in the
white sand; and there seemed something calculating about that - as
though she were bribing them with jewels to forget.

"Say, let's cut out this business of going, over and over it," said
Ralph Addington with a sudden burst of irritability. "I guess I could
give up the ship's cat in exchange for a girl or two." Addington's face
was livid; a muscular contraction kept pulling his lips away from his
white teeth; he had the look of a man who grins satanically at regular
intervals.

By a titanic mental effort, the others connected this explosion with
Billy Fairfax's last remark. It was the first expression of an emotion
so small as ill-humor. It was, moreover, the first excursion out of the
beaten path of their egotisms. It cleared the atmosphere a little of
that murky cloud of horror which blurred the sunlight. Three of the
other four men - Honey Smith, Frank Merrill, Pete Murphy - actually
turned and looked at Ralph Addington. Perhaps that movement served to
break the hideous, hypnotic spell of the sea.

"Right-o!" Honey Smith agreed weakly. It was audible in his voice, the
effort to talk sanely of sane things, and in the slang of every day.
"Addington's on. Let's can it! Here we are and here we're likely to stay
for a few days. In the meantime we've got to live. How are we going to
pull it off?"

Everybody considered his brief harangue; for an instant, it looked as
though this consideration was taking them all back into aimless
meditation. Then, "That's right," Billy Fairfax took it up heroically.
"Say, Merrill," he added in almost a conversational tone, "what are our
chances? I mean how soon do we get off?"

This was the first question anybody had asked. It added its
infinitesimal weight to the wave of normality which was settling over
them all. Everybody visibly concentrated, listening for the answer.

It came after an instant, although Frank Merrill palpably pulled himself
together to attack the problem. "I was talking that matter over with
Miner just yesterday," he said. "Miner said God, I wonder where he is
now - and a dependent blind mother in Nebraska."

"Cut that out," Honey Smith ordered crisply.

"We - we - were trying to figure our chances in case of a wreck," Frank
Merrill continued slowly. "You see, we're out of the beaten path - way
out. Those days of drifting cooked our goose. You can never tell, of
course, what will happen in the Pacific where there are so many tramp
craft. On the other hand - " he paused and hesitated. It was evident,
now that he had something to expound, that Merrill had himself almost
under command, that his hesitation arose from another cause. "Well,
we're all men. I guess it's up to me to tell you the truth. The sooner
you all know the worst, the sooner you'll pull yourselves together. I
shouldn't be surprised if we didn't see a ship for several weeks -
perhaps months."

Another of their mute intervals fell upon them. Dozens of waves flashed
and crashed their way up the beach; but now they trailed an iridescent
network of foam over the lilac-gray sand. The sun raced high; but now it
poured a flood of light on the green-gray water. The air grew bright and
brighter. The earth grew warm and warmer. Blue came into the sky,
deepened - and the sea reflected it, Suddenly the world was one huge
glittering bubble, half of which was the brilliant azure sky and half
the burnished azure sea. None of the five men looked at the sea and sky
now. The other four were considering Frank Merrill's words and he was
considering the other four.

"Lord, God!" Ralph Addington exclaimed suddenly. "Think of being in a
place like this six months or a year without a woman round! Why, we'll
be savages at the end of three months." He snarled his words. It was as
if a new aspect of the situation - an aspect more crucially alarming
than any other - had just struck him.

"Yes," said Frank Merrill. And for a moment, so much had he recovered
himself, he reverted to his academic type. "Aside from the regret and
horror and shame that I feel to have survived when every woman drowned,
I confess to that feeling too. Women keep up the standards of life. It
would have made a great difference with us if there were only one or two
women here."

"If there'd been five, you mean," Ralph Addington amended. A feeble,
white-toothed smile gleamed out of his dark beard. He, too, had pulled
himself together; this smile was not muscular contraction. "One or two,
and the fat would be in the fire."

Nobody added anything to this. But now the other three considered Ralph
Addington's words with the same effort towards concentration that they
had brought to Frank Merrill's. Somehow his smile - that flashing smile
which showed so many teeth against a background of dark beard - pointed
his words uncomfortably.

Of them all, Ralph Addington was perhaps, the least popular. This was
strange; for he was a thorough sport, a man of a wide experience. He was
salesman for a business concern that manufactured a white shoe-polish,
and he made the rounds of the Oriental countries every year. He was a
careful and intelligent observer both of men and things. He was widely
if not deeply read. He was an interesting talker. He could, for or
instance, meet each of the other four on some point of mental contact. A
superficial knowledge of sociology and a practical experience with many
races brought him and Frank Merrill into frequent discussion. His
interest in all athletic sports and his firsthand information in regard
to them made common ground between him and Billy Fairfax. With Honey
Smith, he talked business, adventure, and romance; with Pete Murphy,
German opera, French literature, American muckraking, and Japanese art.
The flaw which made him alien was not of personality but of character.

He presented the anomaly of a man scrupulously honorable in regard to
his own sex, and absolutely codeless in regard to the other. He was what
modern nomenclature calls a "contemporaneous varietist." He was, in
brief, an offensive type of libertine. Woman, first and foremost, was
his game. Every woman attracted him. No woman held him. Any new woman,
however plain, immediately eclipsed her predecessor, however beautiful.
The fact that amorous interests took precedence over all others was
quite enough to make him vaguely unpopular with men. But as in addition,
he was a physical type which many women find interesting, it is likely
that an instinctive sex-jealousy, unformulated but inevitable, biassed
their judgment. He was a typical business man; but in appearance he
represented the conventional idea of an artist. Tall, muscular,
graceful, hair thick and a little wavy, beard pointed and golden-brown,
eyes liquid and long-lashed, women called him "interesting." There was,
moreover, always a slight touch of the picturesque in his clothes; he
was master of the small amatory ruses which delight flirtatious women.

In brief, men were always divided in their own minds in regard to Ralph
Addington. They knew that, constantly, he broke every canon of that
mysterious flexible, half-developed code which governs their relations
with women. But no law of that code compelled them to punish him for
ungenerous treatment of somebody's else wife or sister. Had he been
dishonorable with them, had he once borrowed without paying, had he once
cheated at cards, they would have ostracized him forever. He had done
none of these things, of course.

"By jiminy!" exclaimed Honey Smith, "how I hate the unfamiliar air of
everything. I'd like to put my lamps on something I know. A ranch and a
round-up would look pretty good to me at this moment. Or a New England
farmhouse with the cows coming home. That would set me up quicker than a
highball."

"The University campus would seem like heaven to me," Frank Merrill
confessed drearily, "and I'd got so the very sight of it nearly drove me
insane."

"The Great White Way for mine," said Pete Murphy, "at night - all the
corset and whisky signs flashing, the streets jammed with
benzine-buggies, the sidewalks crowded with boobs, and every lobster
palace filled to the roof with chorus girls."

"Say," Billy Fairfax burst out suddenly; and for the first time since
the shipwreck a voice among them carried a clear business-like note of
curiosity. "You fellows troubled with your eyes? As sure as shooting,
I'm seeing things. Out in the west there - black spots - any of the rest
of you get them?"

One or two of the group glanced cursorily backwards. A pair of
perfunctory "Noes!" greeted Billy's inquiry.

"Well, I'm daffy then," Billy decided. He went on with a sudden abnormal
volubility. "Queer thing about it is I've been seeing them the whole
morning. I've just got back to that Point where I realized there was
something wrong. I've always had a remarkably far sight." He rushed on
at the same speed; but now he had the air of one who is trying to
reconcile puzzling phenomena with natural laws. "And it seems as if -
but there are no birds large enough - wish it would stop, though.
Perhaps you get a different angle of vision down in these parts. Did any
of you ever hear of that Russian peasant who could see the four moons of
Jupiter without a glass? The astronomers tell about him."

Nobody answered his question. But it seemed suddenly to bring them back
to the normal.

"See here, boys," Frank Merrill said, an unexpected note of authority in
his voice, "we can't sit here all the morning like this. We ought to rig
up a signal, in case any ship -. Moreover, we've got to get together and
save as much as we can. We'll be hungry in a little while. We can't lie
down on that job too long."

Honey Smith jumped to his feet. "Well, Lord knows, I want to get busy. I
don't want to do any more thinking, thank you. How I ache! Every muscle
in my body is raising particular Hades at this moment."

The others pulled themselves up, groaned, stretched, eased protesting
muscles. Suddenly Honey Smith pounded Billy Fairfax on the shoulder,
"You're it, Billy," he said and ran down the beach. In another instant
they were all playing tag. This changed after five minutes to baseball
with a lemon for a ball and a chair-leg for a bat. A mood of wild
exhilaration caught them. The inevitable psychological reaction had set
in. Their morbid horror of Nature vanished in its vitalizing flood like
a cobweb in a flame. Never had sea or sky or earth seemed more lovely,
more lusciously, voluptuously lovely. The sparkle of the salt wind
tingled through their bodies like an electric current. The warmth in the
air lapped them like a hot bath. Joy-in-life flared up in them to such a
height that it kept them running and leaping meaninglessly. They shouted
wild phrases to each other. They burst into song. At times they yelled
scraps of verse.

"We'll come across something to eat soon," said Frank Merrill, breathing
hard. "Then we'll be all right."

"I feel - better - for that run - already," panted Billy Fairfax.
"Haven't seen a black spot for five minutes."

Nobody paid any attention to him, and in a few minutes he was paying no
attention to himself. Their expedition was offering too many shocks of
horror and pathos. Fortunately the change in their mood held. It was,
indeed, as unnatural as their torpor, and must inevitably bring its own
reaction. But after each of these tragic encounters, they recovered
buoyancy, recovered it with a resiliency that had something almost
light-headed about it.

"We won't touch any of them now," Frank Merrill ordered peremptorily.
"We can attend to them later. They'll keep coming back. What we've got
to do is to think of the future. Get everything out of the water that
looks useful - immediately useful," he corrected himself. "Don't bother
about anything above high-water mark - that's there to stay. And work
like hell every one of you!"

Work they did for three hours, worked with a kind of frenzied delight in
action and pricked on by a ravenous hunger. In and out of the combers
they dashed, playing a desperate game of chance with Death.
Helter-skelter, hit-or-miss, in a blind orgy of rescue, at first they
pulled out everything they could reach. Repeatedly, Frank Merrill
stopped to lecture them on the foolish risks they were taking, on the
stupidity of such a waste of energy. "Save what we need!' he iterated
and reiterated, bellowing to make himself heard. "What we can use now -
canned stuff, tools, clothes! This lumber'll come back on the next
tide."

He seemed to keep a supervising eye on all of them; for his voice,
shouting individual orders, boomed constantly over the crash of the
waves. Realizing finally that he was the man of the hour, the others
ended by following his instructions blindly.

Merrill, himself, was no shirk. His strength seemed prodigious. When any
of the others attempted to land something too big to handle alone, he
was always near to help; and yet, unaided, he accomplished twice as much
as the busiest.

Frank Merrill, professor of a small university in the Middle West, was
the scholar of the group, a sociologist traveling in the Orient to study
conditions. He was not especially popular with his companions, although
they admired him and deferred to him. On the other hand, he was not
unpopular; it was more that they stood a little in awe of him.

On his mental side, he was a typical academic product. Normally his
conversation, both in subject-matter and in verbal form, bore towards
pedantry. It was one curious effect of this crisis that he had reverted
to the crisp Anglo-Saxon of his farm-nurtured youth.

On his moral side, he was a typical reformer, a man of impeccable
private character, solitary, a little austere. He had never married; he
had never sought the company of women, and in fact he knew nothing about
them. Women had had no more bearing on his life than the fourth
dimension.

On his physical side he was a wonder.

Six feet four in height, two hundred and fifty pounds in weight, he
looked the viking. He had carried to the verge of middle age the habits
of an athletic youth. It was said that half his popularity in his
university world was due to the respect he commanded from the students
because of his extraordinary feats in walking and lifting. He was
impressive, almost handsome. For what of his face his ragged, rusty
beard left uncovered was regularly if coldly featured. He was ascetic in
type. Moreover, the look of the born disciplinarian lay on him. His blue
eyes carried a glacial gleam. Even through his thick mustache, the lines
of his mouth showed iron.

After a while, Honey Smith came across a water-tight tin of matches.
"Great Scott, fellows!" he exclaimed. "I'm hungry enough to drop. Let's
knock off for a while and feed our faces. How about mock turtle, chicken
livers, and red-headed duck?"

They built a fire, opened cans of soup and vegetables.

"The Waldorf has nothing on that," Pete Murphy said when they stopped,
gorged.

"Say, remember to look for smokes, all of you," Ralph Addington
admonished them suddenly.

"You betchu!" groaned Honey Smith, and his look became lugubrious. But
his instinct to turn to the humorous side of things immediately crumpled
his brown face into its attractive smile. "Say, aren't we going to be
the immaculate little lads? I can't think of a single bad habit we can
acquire in this place. No smokes, no drinks, few if any eats - and not a
chorister in sight. Let's organize the Robinson Crusoe Purity League,
Parlor Number One."

"Oh, gee!" Pete Murphy burst out. "It's just struck me. The Wilmington
'Blue,' is lost forever - it must have gone down with everything else."

Nobody spoke. It was an interesting indication of how their sense of
values had already shifted that the loss to the world of one of its
biggest diamonds seemed the least of their minor disasters.

"Perhaps that's what hoodooed us," Pete went on. "You know they say the
Wilmington 'Blue' brought bad luck to everybody who owned it. Anyway,
battle, murder, adultery, rape, rapine, and sudden death have followed
it right along the line down through history. Oh, it's been a busy cake
of ice - take it from muh! Hope the mermaids fight shy of it."

"The Wilmington 'Blue' isn't alone in that," Ralph Addington said. "All
big diamonds have raised hell. You ought to hear some of the stories
they tell in India about the rajahs' treasures. Some of those briolettes
- you listen long enough and you come to the conclusion that the sooner
all the big stones are cut up, the better."

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