Book 3. The Retrieve - Night 20. One Man Escapes

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_ BOOK III. THE RETRIEVE
NIGHT THE TWENTIETH. ONE MAN ESCAPES

Before continuing Foe's story, I should warn you not to be surprised that hereabouts it takes on a somewhat different tone. I am trying to give you the tale as he told it: and so much of it as related to Santa, he told bravely and frankly, here and there with a thrill somewhere deep beneath his voice, and exaltation on his face. He was, in short, the Jack Foe of old days, opening out his heart to me; and all the more the same because he was different. By this I mean that never in life had I heard him speak in just that way, simply because never in life had he brought me this kind of emotion, to confess it; but, granted the woman and the love, here (I felt) was the old Jack opening his heart to me. It rejuvenated his whole figure, too, and, in a way, ennobled it. I forgot--or rather, I no longer saw--the change in him which had given me that secondary shock when he walked into the room.

I cannot tell you the precise point at which his tone altered, and grew hard, defiant, careless and--now and then at its worst--even flippant. But it was here or hereabouts, and you will guess the reason towards the end.

Another thing I must mention. You have already guessed that the tale was not told at one sitting. Between the start and the point where I broke off last night, we had lunched, taken a stroll Piccadilly-wards, done some shopping, and chatted on the way about various friends and what had happened to them in this while--Jack questioning, of course, while I did almost all the talking. It was in the emptying Park, as we sat and watched the carriages go by, that he told me of Santa's burial and what followed it, so far as you have heard. I broke off last time at the point where he broke off, stood up, and said he would tell me the end of it all over dinner at the Cafe Royal, where we had called, on the way, to reserve our old table.

I saw afterwards why he had arranged it so: as you will see. But for the present it only needs remembering that what follows was told in a brilliant, rather noisy room--at an isolated table, but with a throng of diners all around us.

I had ordered wild duck as part of the dinner: and when it came to be served he looked hard at his plate, and, without lifting his eyes, slid from casual talk into his narrative again:

[Foe's Narrative Concluded]

"Wild duck--? good! Yes, we used to have wild duck on the island. . . . There were lagoons on the east side, fairly teeming with them, and we fixed up a decoy. I don't pretend that we fixed up an orange salad like this, with curacao: but in the beginning we practised with limes, and later on I invented one of sliced bananas, with a sort of spirit I brewed from the fruit. Also we found bait in the pools, not so much unlike the whitebait we've been eating--I used to frizzle it in palm oil. And once I achieved turtle soup. . . . He was the only fellow that, in two years, we ever managed to collar and lay on his back; and the soup, after all was no great success. But turtle's eggs. . . . I can tell you all about turtle's eggs. That dog had a nose for them like a pig's for truffles.

"Don't be afraid, Roddy. In this sophisticated den of high living and moderate thinking I'm not going to give you the Swiss Family Robinson; though I could double no trumps and risk it on the author of that yarn--whoever he may have been--if he had only dealt from a single pack, which he didn't. Farrell and I didn't build a house in a tree, because we didn't need to; and we didn't ride on emus, because we didn't want to, and moreover there weren't any. But we did pretty well there for two years, Roddy: and could say as Gonzalo--was it Gonzalo?--said of another island, that here was everything advantageous to life. And we found the means to live, too.

"I may say that I took the role of Mrs. Beeton: hunted for fruits, fished, told Farrell (of my small botanical knowledge) what to eat, drink, and avoid, and attended to the high cuisine. Farrell, reverting to his old journeyman skill, sawed planks and knocked up a hut. When one hut became intolerable for the pair of us--for in all that time we never ceased hating--he knocked up a second and better one for my habitation. He was my hewer of wood and drawer of water. Also it was he who--since I professed no eagerness to get away--did the conventional thing that castaways do: erected a flag-staff, and hauled piles of brushwood up to the topmost lip of our volcano, for a bonfire to be lit if any ship should be sighted, lest it might pass in the night. I had resigned the binoculars to him, but he never brought report of a sail.

"On two points--which served us again and again for furious quarrels--the fool was quite obstinate. He would not budge from our first encampment--that is to say, out of sight of Santa's grave; and he flatly refused to fit new planks to the ruinated boat which now lay, a thing of ribs, high and dry as we had hauled her close underneath the fern-brake beside the cascade. Again and again I pointed out to him that, patched up, she would serve me for fishing. To this he answered, truly enough, that we had a plenty of fish in the rock-pools and a plenty of oysters on the shore. Then I urged that, if we sighted a ship--though it didn't matter to me--we might need a boat to get out to her. He retorted that, though it mattered to him, he would never set foot again in that cursed craft or help me to set foot in her. Finally, one day when I was absent on an expedition after food, he broke her remains to shreds.

"Upon this we had an insane quarrel--the more insane because it all turned on my dwelling on the detriment to his chances of escape and his reminding me of my indifference. We argued like two babies. But I had now another grievance: though it was the devil to me to be falling back on grievances.

"I still held the whip-hand over him in this--I could always thong him by a threat to part company and live by myself on the east side of the island. He mortally feared to be left, even with the dog for company.

"The dog remained a mystery. Although, as time went on, we explored the island pretty thoroughly, we never found his owner, nor any sign of human habitation. The conies which bred and multiplied on the hills were our only assurance that man had ever landed here before us--that is, until we discovered the strange boat: and it was through the dog that we discovered it."

"During the first three months we made no lengthy excursions, being occupied in cutting and sawing timber for the two living-huts and a store-hut; in making a small net (this was my task), and in sun-drying the fish I caught in it--for, knowing little about these latitudes, I feared that at any moment the heavenly weather might break, and we be held prisoners by torrential rains, traces of which I read in some of the seaward-running gullies. Also Farrell refused to budge until he had built his bonfire. When this was done we had another pretty fierce quarrel because, tired of waiting, I took a humour to punish him by making him wait in his turn while I did some tailoring. . . . No: we didn't dress in goatskins. There were no goats. But I had visions of piecing up a rabbit-skin coat and, in the meantime, of cutting up the boat's sail into drawers and jumpers, our clothes by this time being worse than a disgrace. But I believe that I held out chiefly to annoy him; and, having annoyed him sufficiently, I gave way to his final argument--that our boots were wearing out fast and, if we didn't make the expedition at once, likely enough we never should.

"So we started on what proved to be a two days' tramp, and thereby came pretty near to wrecking ourselves.

"The third cone, which--in that clear atmosphere--seemed to stand close behind the second, turned out to be separated from it by a good five miles as the crow flies. But on the north-western shore the sea had breached the reefs and swept in to form a salt lagoon in the great hollow, so that we had to fetch a circuit of at least seven miles to the southward, avoiding a tangle of forest in which the lagoon ended, and clambering along a volcanic ridge with the sea often sheer on our right. It was in this lagoon, by the way, that we afterwards learned to take our wild duck, scores of which paddled about quite tamely on its surface, their tameness promising poorly for human hospitality on the farther side of the hill.

"We gained the side of the great cone at length and, rounding it, beheld all the northern part of the island spread at our feet--in form a narrow strip of land curving around a delicious bay and ending in a small pinnacle of high tumbled cliff and wood. Quite obviously this bay was the one anchorage in the island for any ship of burden; and no ship could have asked for a better: for it made almost three parts of a circle, and, while not completely land-locked, held recesses in which any gale might be ridden out.

"Here, if anywhere, as I told Farrell, we should come upon human life or the traces of it: here, if anywhere, if vessel ever made this island, to water, she would drop hook. 'Fools we have been, to waste months pitching camp on the other side, when this is the place of places, and this hill gives the citadel prospect of all!'

"Farrell sat down on a rock and broke into curses. 'Damn you,' he moaned, 'for bringing me so far! I wish I had never seen it. Wasn't it comfortable enough where we were? . . . And now I can't go back!'

"I had taken the binoculars and, engaged with the view, for a moment paid no heed. I was accustomed to his explosions of fury, as he to mine. But, turning about for a while, I saw that he had unlaced his left boot and was holding it out. . . . The sole had broken loose in our scramble over the tufa rocks, and hung parted from its upper.

"'That's bad,' said I. 'Well, I stuck a ship's needle in the tool-bag here before we started--_you_ never think of anything! When we get down to the shore we'll see what can be done: that is, if we don't find a cobbler.'

"'Cobbler? you funny ass!--' he began.

"'Look here,'--I stopped him. 'If you won't attend to me, attend to Rover. What's up with that dog of yours?'--for the dog which had been following all day pretty obediently, except for a wild dash down to the lagoon to scatter the wild duck, had of a sudden picked up bearings and was running forward, halting, returning, wagging his tail, running forward again, turning, asking dumbly to be understood, in the way all dogs have who invite you to follow a trail.

"'Here's business,' said I, and hurried after him, leaving Farrell to limp down the hill-side in our wake. For once the dog recognised me as more intelligent or, at any rate, prompter than his master, and gave his whole attention to me. . . . I tumbled down the hill after him in a haste that fairly set my temples throbbing. Once sure of me, he played no more at backwards-and-forwards, but bounded down the slope towards the innermost southern corner of the bay, where a grove of coco-trees almost overhung the beach. A curtain of creepers bunched over the low cliff at their feet and into this he plunged and disappeared.

"But his barking still led me on; and presently, as I avoided the undergrowth and creepers to follow the foreshore, sounded back to me across a low spit of rock. I climbed this and came all unexpectedly upon a diminutive creek.

"It was really but a fissure between the rocks, with deep water between them and an abrupt, dolls'-house-beach of sand and shells above it, terminating in a flat, overhanging ledge. And on this ledge rested a white-painted boat, high and dry! From the stern-sheets the dog barked at me joyously, wagging his tail, with his fore-feet on the edge of the stern-board.

"I ran to it. Within the stern-board, in cut letters from which the cheap paint had scaled, was a name plain to read--_Two Brothers_. Two paddles lay in her, neatly disposed: a short mast and sail tightly wrapped and traced up in its cordage; her rudder, with tiller-stick, two rusty rowlocks of galvanised iron, and a tin baler, all trimly bestowed under the stern-sheets--and that was her inventory, save a pig of iron ballast, much rusted. How long she had rested there, clean and tidied, half protected from the sun's rays, there was no guessing. But her seams gaped so that I could push my little finger some way between her strakes. She had no anchor; and her painter had been cut short at the ring, sharply. Only the knot remained.

"I was examining this when Farrell overtook me. He came over the rocks, limping; halted; and let out a cry at sight of the boat. Then, as by chance, he peered into the cleft at his feet, into the fathom-deep water past which I had run; and, with that, let out a sharper cry, commanding me to him.

"Down in the transparent water, inert but seeming to move as the ripple ran over it, lay the body of a man, face down, with a trail of weed awash over its shoulders. Peering down through the weed, I saw that a cord knotted about its right ankle ended in another pig of ballast, three-parts covered by the prismatic sand.

"'My God!' said Farrell, and shivered.

"'Well, he's no use to us, even if we do fish him up,' said I, pretty grimly. 'Here's the dog's owner, and that's as far as we get. Since a dog--even so intelligent a pup as Rover here--can't very well attach a weight to his master's ankle and cast him overboard--let alone pulling his boat above high water and stowing sail--we'll conclude that this fellow deliberately made away with himself. As I make it out, the dog, thus marooned, struck pretty frantically for the high ground. Lost dogs--and lost children, for that matter-- always make up hill, dark or daylight. I suppose it's the primitive instinct to search for a view. . . . But anyway, here's a boat. She's unseaworthy, as she lies: but her timbers look sound enough if we can staunch her, and the first thing is to get her down to the water and see how fast she fills. We've a baler, to cope with the leak . . . and when we have her more or less staunch, here's the way around to our camp. Hurry up your wits!' I added sharply.

"'If we launch her here,' he twittered, 'she'll settle down on _that_!'

"'Then run,' said I, 'and, with all the knowledge you ever picked up in Tottenham Court Road, fetch every grass and fibre you can collect, to stuff her seams. I'll do the sailing while the wind's fair offshore, as it is at present. When it heads us, I'll do the pulling. Man alive! think of your burst boot! For my part, I'm willing enough to stay here as anywhere: or you can stay, and I'll start back for camp, and we'll share this island like two kings, you keeping this imperial anchorage.'

"But of course this had him beaten. He helped me launch the boat and ran to collect stuffing for her seams, while I sat in her and baled, baled, baled. . . . It was pretty eerie to sit there alone--for the dog had gone with Farrell--fighting the water, and feel her settling, if for five minutes I gave up the struggle, down nearer and nearer upon the shoulders of that drowned corpse with the hidden face. By sunset Farrell returned with an armful of sun-dried fibre. We hauled the boat high again and he began caulking her lower seams, that already had started to close.

"'She'll keep afloat now for a few hundred yards,' he announced after a while. 'Let's launch her again and run her round the point and beach her. I left a bundle of bark there that, early to-morrow, we'll cut in strips and tack over the seams, and she'll do fine to carry us home.'

"'Home?' echoed I grimly.

"'You know what I mean, you blighter!' he snarled. 'Oh, for God's sake, no--we mustn't start bickering alongside of _that_!' He forced his eyes to look down again at the corpse, and shuddered. 'The tide's going down, too.'

"'It won't go down far enough to uncover _him_: and that you ought to have sense to know," said I.

"'But the farther it goes down the nearer he'll come up, or seem to,' he argued.

"'Well, night's coming on, and you won't see him,' I suggested, playing on his nerves.

"'D'you think I'll sit here in the dark, alongside of--oh, hurry, you devil! Hurry!'

"I chuckled at this. It came into my mind to refuse, and declare I would sit out the night here by the boat. I knew that the shore beyond, though it curved for two good miles, would not be wide enough to contain his agony through the night hours. . . . But I had pushed him far enough for the time. So we launched the boat again and paddled her around and beached her on shelving sand: and soon after, night fell.

"Farrell slept poorly. Three or four times I heard him start up, to pace to and fro under the starlight: and each time the dog awoke and trotted with him. . . .

"But he was up, brisk and early, with dawn; and he made quite a good job of tacking bark over the boat's seams, while I sat and cobbled up his boot with sailmaker's needle and twine. He made, indeed, and though swift with the work, so good a job that, inspecting the boat when he had done, I judged she would stand the strain of sailing-- whereas I had looked forward to a grilling pull in a craft that leaked like a basket.

"At a quarter to ten, by my watch, we pushed off, stepped mast and hoisted sail--a small balance-lug. We carried a brisk offshore wind--a soldier's wind--which southerned as the day wore on, and again flew and broke off-shore as we neared home. I steered: Farrell, for the most part, dozed after his labours. He had not, I may say, one single faculty of a seaman in his whole make-up. He could mend a boat or make an imitation Sheraton wardrobe; but, when the both were made, he'd have sailed the one about as well as the other.

"He dozed uneasily, with many twitchings. Once he woke up and said, 'I thank God he lay so as we couldn't see his face. Would it have been swollen much, think you? . . . Bleached, I make no doubt. . . .'

"'What about worse?' I answered. 'I noticed a crab or two.'

"He put up his hands to his face. 'How the devil can you talk so!' he stammered.

"'It was you who started questions,' said I.

"'Suicide, you think?' he asked, after half an hour's silence, during which his mind had plainly been tugging away from the horrible subject only to find it irresistible.

"'All pointed to it,' I answered. 'As for the motive, we can only guess.'

"'Where's the guesswork?' he demanded fiercely. 'Cast here, in this awful loneliness--' I saw him look around on sea and cliff with a shiver.

"'He had the dog,' said I. 'You find Rover here a companion, don't you? I had a notion, Farrell, that you were fond of dogs. . . . I used to be.'

"We downed sail hereabouts, and pulled in for the cleft and the anchorage we called home. The sea under the smoothing land-wind ran through the passage as calmly as through a miller's leat: and I will own it was happier to be by that shore where my cross still stood over Santa than by the other, where that other body lay, face-down, with the weight whipped to its ankle. "'Wonder who he was?' said Farrell late that evening, as we parted to go to our quarters. 'A missionary, I shouldn't be surprised.'

"'If so,' said I, 'he tumbled on a sinecure. Since your mind runs on him and you want to sleep, make it out that he was a bishop, and home-sickened for the Athenaeum.'"

"I'm coming to the end, Roddy; and you shall have it sharp and quick, as it happened. . . . As I've said, we stuck it out on that island for two years, and a little over, hating one another as two lonely men will come to hate, on island or lighthouse, even when they don't start on a sworn enmity. Oh, you must have been through it to understand! . . . We even quarrelled--and came almost to blows--over the day of the month; though God knows what it helped either to be right or wrong, and, as it happened, we were both wrong by a fortnight or so."

"And then Farrell took ill.

"It was a kind of fever he caught while duck-snaring in the lagoon. He'd start off there for a long day with his dog, the two practising cleverness at the sport. I always felt somehow that, when his grief came, it would come through the dog. . . . Well, he took a fever which I couldn't well diagnose, to say whether it was rheumatic or malarial. It ran to sweats and it ran to dry skin with shivering-fits, the deuce of a temperature, and wild delirium.

"I nursed him, of course, and doctored him, keeping the fever at bay as well as I could with decoctions of bark--quassia for the most part--and fresh juice of limes. But it was the vigour of his frame that pulled him through--as I believe all the skill in London could not have availed to do in the days of his prosperity when he was fat and fleshy. Hard life on the island had thinned him down and tautened and toughened him so that I wondered sometimes, washing his body, if this was indeed the man with whom I had vowed my quarrel.

"His ravings in delirium, however, left no doubt on that score! I tell you I had to listen to some fairly obscene descriptions of myself and his feelings for me--all in the best Houndsditch. . . . Yet here again was a queer thing--again and again this gutter-flow would check itself, drop its Cockney as if down a sink, and, bubbling up again, start flowing to the language of an educated man. . . . The first time this happened it gave me a shock, less the abruptness of the break than by its sudden assault upon my memory. All insensibly, and unmarked by me, Farrell's accent and way of speech had been nearing those of decent folk. They were by no means perfect, but they had amazingly improved. . . . Now, when his delirium plunged him back to Houndsditch, though it gave me a jerk, I could account for it as reversion to an old habit that had been put off before ever we met. What beat me was, that his second style, accent and choice of words--though still fluent in cursing--far surpassed in purity any speech I had heard from him in health.

"And there was something else about it. . . . While the gutter ran Houndsditch, the man was a cur, cowering and yelping out terror under strokes of a whip-lash. When it shifted accent, he lost all this and started to _threaten_. Something like this it would run: 'Gawd! Oh, Gawd, he's after me again. . . . See his rosy eyes follerin' like rosy naphthas. . . . Oh, Gawd, hide me from this blighter. . . . Look here, damn you! I'll trouble you to know who's master here. You will halt where you are, you Foe, and not wag a tail until I give you leave. That's better! Now, if you will kindly state your business at that distance I'll state mine. . . . Is that all? Quite so: and now you'll listen to me, and maybe reconsider yourself . . .' That, or something like that, is the way it would go.

"I had a sense all the while, Roddy, that he was almost slipping through my fingers, and I fairly dug in my nails to hold him to life. On that point my conscience is clear, anyhow. No man ever had a doctor to battle harder for him, or a more devoted nurse.

"Well, I pulled him through, and nursed him to convalescence. I thought I knew something of the peevishness of convalescents: but Farrell beat anything I had ever seen, or heard, or read of. By this time I was worn weak as a rat with night-watching and day-watching: but of this he made no account whatever. He started by using his greater weakness for strength, and he went on to dissemble his growing strength, hiding it, increasing it, still trading it as weakness upon my exhaustion. He came back to life with a permanent sneering smile, and a trick of wearing it for hours at a stretch as he leaned back on the cushions I had painfully made for him of plaited flax and stuffed with aromatic leaves, daily renewed. . . . Yes, Roddy, as a doctor I played full professional service on him, and piled it up with every extra kindness one castaway man could render another. . . . And the devil, as he recovered, lay watching me, under half-closed eyes, with never a sign of gratitude, but, for all my reward, this shifty sneer.

"There came a day when his new insolence broke out with his old hate. 'You Foe,' said he, 'I reckon you're priding yourself on your bedside manner, eh? . . . I can't keep much account of time, lying here. But, when I get about again, I'll have things in this camp a bit more shipshape, I promise you. . . . I've been thinking it out, lying here: and my conclusion is, you're too much of the boss without doing your job. . . . How long is it since you've strolled up to the look-out?'

"'About a fortnight,' said I.

"'And that's a pretty sort of watch, eh?' he continued irritably: '--when you know that I never missed a day. . . . I tell you, Foe, that, after this, we'll have to come to a reckoning. One or other has to be master on this island, and it isn't going to be _you_!

"I went up the hill obediently with the binoculars. I went up thoughtfully. . . ."

"I came back some fifty minutes later, and said, 'You're too weak to walk; too weak even to crawl.'

"'What's the use to tell me that?' he asked, still keeping his air of insolence. 'Drop your bedside manner, and present your report.'

"'I will,' said I. 'One of us two has to be master on this island? So you said, and you shall be he; sole master, Farrell, with your damned dog. . . . There's a schooner at this moment making an offing from the anchorage where, as I've always told you, we'd been wiser to pitch our camp. I guess she put in to water, and I've missed her whilst I was busy curing your body. . . . Well, better late than never! She's hauling to north'ard, well wide: so you'll understand I'm in something of a hurry. . . . You're on the way to recovery, Farrell, and this makes twice that I've saved your life: but as yet you can neither walk nor crawl, and I give you joy of your bonfire, up yonder. In five minutes I push off, alone.'

"He raised himself slowly, staring, and fell forward grovelling, attempting vainly to catch me by the ankles.

"'You won't--you can't! Oh, for God's pity say you don't mean it! Say it's a joke, and I'll forgive you, though it's a cruel one.' Then, as I broke away from the door--'Have mercy on me, Foe--have mercy and don't leave me! _I can't do without you!_'"

"These were his last words that I heard as I plunged down the sand and pulled in the boat's shoreline handover-fist. I had just time to jump in and thrust off before the dog came bounding after me, barking furiously. The brute was puzzled, but knew something to be wrong. He even swam a few strokes, but turned back as I hit at him with a paddle. He made around the curve of the shore, still barking. But I had sculled through the narrows of the passage before he could reach it. I had a sight, over my shoulder, of Farrell, who had crawled to the doorway: and with that I was through the strait and sculling for open water, while the baffled dog raced to and fro on the spits and ledges astern, pausing only to bark after me as though he would cough his heart out.

"In the open water I hoisted sail, with the wind dead aft, and soon, beyond the point, caught sight of the schooner. After running out almost three miles, she had hauled close to the wind and was now heading almost due north. . . . She could not miss me, and yet I had made almost two miles before she got her head-sheets to windward and stood by for me.

"As I drew close, a thin-faced man with a pointed beard hailed me from her after-deck.

"'Ahoy, there! And who might _you_ be, mistaking the Pacific for Broadway, New York?'

"'I'm from the island,' I answered.

"'What ship's boat is that you've gotten hold of?' he bawled.

"The _Two Brothers_.'

"'Lordy! I _thought_ I reckernised her. . . . Then you're old Buck Vliet's missionary, that he marooned.' . . . Shall I go on, Roddy?"

I dropped my cigar into the ash-tray. "You may stop at that," I answered, unable (that's the queer part of it) to lift my eyes and look him in the face, although I knew very well that he was leaning back in his chair, eyeing me steadily, challenging the verdict. "Yes," said I, slowly turning the cigar-stump around in its ash, "I'm sorry, Jack . . . but I don't want to hear any more."

"I knew you would take it so," said Jack quietly, with a sort of sigh.

"Well," said I, "how else? Of course I know you'd had a damnable provocation, to start with. And I'm no man to judge you, not having been through the like or the beginnings of it. . . . You were rescued, for here you are. That's enough. But--damn it all!--you left the man!"

"--And the dog. While we are about it, don't let us forget the dog," said Jack wearily. "Shall we toss who pays the bill? Here--waiter!"

We parted under the porch-cover, in the traffic of Regent Street. I have told you that, in our best of days, Jack and I never shook hands, meeting or parting. It saved awkwardness now. _

Read next: Book 4. The Counterchase: Night 21. The Yellow Dog

Read previous: Book 3. The Retrieve: Night 19. The Castaways

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