XIII
The 'Grace-à-Dieu' justified Wulfrey's inexperienced choice. She was an excellent sea-boat, fast, and as dry as could be expected, seeing that she was chock full to the hatches, as Jock Steele informed him, while they carried down his baggage.
But after his first four hours on board his personal interest in her character and performance lapsed for three full days. He had stood leaning over the side watching the lights of Liverpool as they dropped away astern, and then those of the Cheshire and North Welsh coasts, and felt that now indeed he had cut loose from the past and was in for a great adventure.
It gave, him a curious, mixed feeling of depression and elation. He felt at once homeless and endowed with the freedom of the universe. He had burned his boats, he said confidently to himself, and was going forth to begin a new life, to conquer a new world. And he set his teeth and hung on to the heaving bulwark with grim determination.
But the sense of elation and width of outlook dwindled with the sinking lights. The feeling of homelessness and helplessness grew steadily upon him. He had taken the precaution of stowing away a good meal before he set foot on board, and he lived on it for three days.
He had never been bodily sick in his life before, but sick as he now was he was not too far gone to note the wretched peculiarity of his sensations, and to muse upon them and the ridiculousness of the provision he had made, at the Captain's suggestion, to supplement the usual cabin fare.
He could not imagine himself ever eating again, as he lay there in his heaving bunk, with nothing to distract his mind from the unhappy vacuums above and below but the heavy tread of feet overhead at times, and the ceaseless rush and thrash of the waves a few inches from his ear, and the grinning face of the cabin-boy who came in at intervals to ask if he would like anything yet.
But by degrees his head ceased to swim if he lifted it an inch off the pillow. By further degrees he found himself crouching up and clinging like a cat while he gazed unsteadily out of the tiny round porthole at the tumbling green and white water outside. Still further determination got him somehow into his clothes, and he dared to feel hungry and empty without nausea. Then he crawled out to the deck, feeling like a soiled rag. But the brisk south-west wind cleaned and braced him, and presently he nibbled a biscuit and found himself as hungry as a starving dog.
After that he very soon found his sea-legs, and by the fourth day he was a new man, eating ravenously to make up for lost time, and keenly interested in all about him.
So far they had had favourable weather and made good way. But Captain Bain was a fervent believer in the inevitability of equinoctials, and prophesied gales ahead, and the worse for being overdue.
Wulfrey learned, from one and another, chatting at meals with the Captain or Sheumaish Macro, one or other of whom was generally on deck, or with Jock Steele the carpenter, who also acted as boatswain, that the 'Grace-à-Dieu' was French-built which, according to Steele, accounted for the fineness of her lines.
"We build stouter but we cannot touch them for cut. She's as pretty a little ship as ever I set eyes on and floats like a gull," was the character Steele gave her. And he should know, as he'd made four voyages in her since their owners in Glasgow bought her out of the Prize Court, and she'd never given them any undue trouble even in the very worst of weather.
The crew, again according to Steele, were a very mixed lot, a few good seamen, the rest just lubbers out of the crimp house.
With Captain Bain and Sheumaish Macro, the mate, he got on well enough, but found both by nature very self-contained and manifesting no inclination for more than the necessary civilities of the situation.
"And why should they?" he said to himself. "I'm an outsider and they know nothing more about me than I've told them myself. Another fifteen or twenty days and we part and are not likely ever to meet again."
He made one discovery about them, however, which disquieted him somewhat. They were both heavy drinkers, but they usually so arranged matters, by taking their full bouts at different times, as not to bring the ship into serious peril.
Wulfrey's eyes were opened to it by the fact of his not being able to sleep one night. After tossing and tumbling in his bunk for a couple of hours, and finding sleep as far off as ever, he dressed again sufficiently to go on deck for a blow. As he passed through the cabin he found Captain Bain there with his head sunk on his arms on the table, and, fearing he might be ill, he went up to him. But he needed no medical skill to tell him what was the matter. The old man was as drunk as a lord and breathing like an apoplectic hog. So he eased his neck gear and left him to sleep it off.
Macro was on deck in charge of the ship. Wulfrey simply told him he had been unable to sleep, but made no mention of the Captain's condition. And the mate said,
"Ay, we're just getting into thick of Gulf Stream and it tells on one."
Another night he found Steele in charge, and on the growl at the length of his watch, and gathered from him that both Captain and mate had on this occasion been indulging in a bit drink and were snoring in their bunks.
He could only hope that Captain Bain's prognosticated equinoctials, which were now considerably overdue, would not come upon them when both their chiefs were incapacitated. And his only consolation was the thought that this was not an exceptional occurrence but probably their usual habit when well afloat, and that so far no disaster had befallen them.
So, day after day, they sped along west-south-west, making good way and sighting none but an occasional distant sail. Then they ran into mists and clammy weather, and sometimes had a wind and drove along with the swirling fog or across it, and sometimes lay rocking idly and making no way at all.
Wulfrey gathered, from occasional words they let fall between themselves, and from their answers to his own questions, that this was all usual and to be expected. They were getting towards Newfoundland where the Northern currents met the Southern, hence the fog, and it was too early for icebergs, so there was no danger in pressing on whenever the wind permitted.
Their seventeenth day out was the dullest they had had, heavy and windless, with a shrouded sky and a close gray horizon and, to Wulfrey's thinking, a sense of something impending. It was as though Nature had gone into the sulks and was brooding gloomily over some grievance.
Captain Bain stripped the ship of her canvas, and sent down the topmasts and yards, and made all snug for anything that might turn up. All day and all night they lay wallowing in vast discomfort, and Wulfrey lost all relish for his food again.
"What do you make of it, Bo's'un?" he asked, as he clawed his way up to Steele on the after deck, where he was temporarily in charge again.
"Someth'n's comin', sir," said Steele portentously, "but what it is beats me, unless it's one o' them e-quy-noctials the skipper's bin looking for."
In the night the fog closed down on them as thick as cotton wool; and, without a breath of wind, the long seas came rolling in upon them out of the thick white bank on one side and out into the thick white bank on the other, till their scuppers dipped deep and worked backwards, shooting up long hissing white jets over the deck, and making everything wet and uncomfortable. Every single joint and timber in the ship seemed to creak and groan as if in pain, and Wulfrey, as he listened in the dark to the strident jerkings and grindings and general complainings of the gear, and pictured the wild sweeps and swoops of the masts away up in the fog there, wondered how long it could all stand the strain, and how soon it would come clattering down on top of them. Once, when a bigger roll than usual flung him against the mainmast and he clung to it for a moment's safety, the rending groans that came up through it from the depths below sent a creepy chill down his spine. It sounded so terribly as though the very heart of the ship were coming up by the roots.
Sleep was out of the question. His cabin was unbearable. Its dolorous creakings seemed to threaten collapse and burial at any moment. If they had to go down he would sooner be drowned in the open than like a rat in its hole. And so he had crawled up on deck to see what was towards.
The only comfort he found—and that of a very mixed character—was in the sight of Captain Bain and the mate, sitting one on each side of the cabin table with their legs curled knowingly round its stout wooden supports, which were bolted to the floor, and which they used alternately as fender and anchor to the rolling of the ship.
They had made all possible provision against contingencies. They could do no more, and it was no good worrying, so now they sat smoking philosophically and drinking now and again from a bottle of rum which hung by the neck between them from a string attached to the beam above their heads.
Wulfrey stood the discomforts of the deck till he was chilled to the marrow, then he tumbled into the cabin, and annexed a third leg of the table and sat with the philosophers and waited events.
"It's hard on the ship, Captain," he said, by way of being companionable. But the Captain only grunted and deftly tipped some rum into his tin pannikin as the bottle swung towards him on its way towards the roof. And the mate looked at him wearily as much as to say, "Man! don't bother us with your babytalk," and it seemed to him that they had both got a fairly full cargo aboard.
However, he decided it was not for him to judge or condemn. They knew their own business better than he did. There was no wind, no way on the ship, and all they could do was to lie and wallow and wait for better times. And the fact that they took it so calmly reassured him somewhat.
The cabin was so full of fog and tobacco-smoke that the light from the swinging oil-lamp could barely penetrate beyond the table. It made a dull ghastly smudge of yellow light through which the bottle swung to and fro like an uncouth pendulum, and he sat and watched it. Now it was up above his head between him and the mate; now it was sweeping gracefully over the table; now it was up above the Captain, who reached out and tipped some more rum into his pannikin.
He watched it till it began to exert a mesmeric influence on, him and his head began to feel light and swimmy. He knew something about Mesmer and his experiments from his reading at home. He experienced a detached interest in his own condition and wondered vaguely if the bottle would succeed in putting him to sleep. He tried to keep his eyes on it, but they kept wandering off to the Captain, on whom it had already done its business, though in a different way.
He was dead tired. It was, he reckoned, quite six-and-thirty hours since he had had any sleep. What time of night or morning it was he had no idea. This awful rolling and groaning and creaking seemed to have been going on for an incalculable time.
What with the heavy unwholesomeness of the atmosphere, and the monotonous swing of the bottle, and the lethargic impassivity of his companions, he fell at last into a condition of dull stupidity, which might have ended in sleep but for the necessity of alternately hanging on to and fending off the table, as the roll of the ship flung him away from it or at it. And how long this went on he never knew.
He was jerked back to life by a sudden clatter of feet overhead and a shout. Then he was flung bodily on to the table, and found himself lying over it and looking down at Captain Bain, who had tumbled backwards in a heap into a corner. The rum-bottle banged against the roof and rained its fragments down on him. The lamp leaned up at a preposterous angle and stopped there.
"We're done," thought Wulfrey dazedly, and became aware of fearsome sounds outside,—a wild howling shriek as of all the fiends out of the pit,—thunderous blows as of mighty hammers under which the little ship reeled and staggered,—then grisly crackings and rendings and crashes on deck, mingled with the feeble shouts of men.
Then, shuddering and trembling, the ship slowly righted herself and Wulfrey breathed again. Outside, the howling shriek was as loud as ever, the banging and buffeting worse than before.
Macro unhooked his long legs from the table and made for the door. The Captain gathered himself up dazedly and rolled after him, and Wulfrey followed as best he could.
But he could see very little. The fog was gone. The fierce rush of the gale drove the breath back into his throat and came near to choking him. Huge green seas topped with snarling white came leaping up over the side of the ship near him. A man with an axe was chopping furiously at the shrouds of the fallen main-mast amid a wild tangle of ropes and spars. As they parted, the ship swung free and went labouring off before the gale under somewhat easier conditions, and Wulfrey hung tight in the cabin doorway and breathed still more hopefully. He had thought the end was come, but they were still afloat, though sadly shorn and battered. What their chances of ultimate safety might be was beyond him, but while there was life there was hope.
XIV
For three days life to Wulfrey was a grim experience made up of damp discomfort, lack of food and rest, and growing hopelessness.
Both their masts had gone like carrots, leaving only their ragged stumps sticking up out of the deck. "An' if they hadn't we'd bin gone ourselves," growled the carpenter to him one day. Where they fell the sides of the ship were smashed and torn, and the hungry waves came yapping up through the gaps, most horribly close and threatening.
Three men had been washed overboard in that first fierce onrush. The rest crouched miserably in the forecastle, and no man on board could remember what it felt like to be dry and warm and full.
Meals there were none. When any man's hunger forced him to eat, he wolfed sodden biscuit and a chunk of raw pork, and washed it down with rum.
So ghastly did the discomfort become, as the wretched days succeeded the still more miserable nights, that at last Wulfrey, for one, was prepared to welcome even the end as a change for the better.
Observations were out of the question. In these four days they never once saw sun or moon or star, nothing but a close black sky, gray with flying spume. The great seas came roaring out of it behind them and rushed roaring into it in front of them, and where they were getting to, beyond the fact that they were driving continuously more or less west-by-north, no man knew.
Captain Bain and the mate and the carpenter had done all that could be done since the catastrophe, but that was very little. An attempt was made to rig a jury mast on the stump of the foremast, but the gale ripped it away with a jeering howl and would have none of it. With some planking torn from the inside of the ship they barricaded the seas out of the forecastle as well as they could. It was the carpenter's idea to fix these planks upright, so that their ends stood up somewhat above the top of the forecastle, and so great was the grip of the gale that that slight projection sufficed to keep their head straight before it and afforded them slight steerage way.
So they staggered along, dismantled and discomfited, and waited for the gale to blow itself out or them to perdition, and were worn so low at last that they did not much care which, so only an end to their misery.
And the end came as unexpectedly as the beginning. From sheer weariness they slept at times, in chill discomfort and dankest wretchedness, just where they sat or lay. And Wulfrey was lying so, in a stupor of misery, caring neither for life nor death, when the final catastrophe came.
Without any warning the ship struck something with a horrible shock that flung everything inside it ajee. Then she heeled over on her starboard side, baring her breast to the enemy.
The great green waves leaped at her like wolves on a foundered deer. They had been chasing her for three days past and now they had got her. She was down and they proceeded to worry her to pieces. No ship ever built could stand against their fury. The 'Grace-à-Dieu' melted into fragments as though she had been built of cardboard.
Wulfrey, jerked violently out of the corner where he had been lying, rolled down towards the door of the cabin as the ship heeled over. As he clawed himself up to look out, a green mountain of water caught him up and carried him high over the port bulwarks which towered like a house above him, and swept him along on its broken crest.
He could swim, but no swimmer could hope to save himself by swimming in such a sea, and he was weak and worn with the miseries of the last three days.
He had no hope of deliverance, but yet struck out mechanically to keep his head above water, and his thrashing arm struck wood. He gripped it with the grip of a drowning man and clung for dear life.
It was a large square structure, planking braced with cross-pieces, almost a raft. He hung to the edge while the water ran out of his mouth and wits, and then, inch by inch, hauled himself cautiously further aboard, and, lying flat, looked anxiously about for signs of his shipmates, but with little hope.
He could see but a yard or two on either side, and then only the threatening welter of the monstrous green seas, terrifyingly close and swelling with menace.
Nothing? ... Stay!—a white gleam under the green, like a scrap of paper in a whirlpool, and a desperate face emerged a yard or so away and a wildly-seeking hand.
The anguished eyes besought him, and, not knowing what else to do, he gripped two of the cross-pieces of his raft and launched his legs out towards the drowning man. They were seized as in a vice, and presently, inch by inch, the gripping hands crept up his body till the other could lay hold of the raft for himself. And Wulfrey, turning, saw that it was the mate, Sheumaish Macro, whose life he had saved.
They drew themselves cautiously up into such further safety as the frail ark offered and lay there spent. And Wulfrey, for one, wondered if the quicker end had not been the greater gain.
XV
Sleeping and eating anyhow and at any time, they had lost all count of time this last day or two. It was, however, daylight of a kind, but so gray and murky and mixed with flying spume that they could see but little.
Neither man had spoken since they crawled up on to the raft. Death was so close that speech seemed futile. They both lay flat on their stomachs, gripping tight, and peering hopelessly through nearly closed eyes, expectant of nothing, doubting the wisdom of their choice of the longer death.
"God!" cried Macro of a sudden, as they swung up the back of a wave. "Where in —— ha' we got to?"
And Wulfrey got a glimpse of most amazing surroundings.
Right ahead of them the sea was all abristle with what, to his quick amazed glance, looked like the bones and ribs of multitudinous ships, the ruins of a veritable Armada.
Now it was all hidden, as they sank into a weltering green valley with tumbling green walls all about them. Then the solid green bottom of their valley was ripped into furious white foam, and stark black baulks of timber came lunging up through it, all crusted with barnacles, festooned with hanging weeds, and laced with streaming white. They looked like grisly arms of deep-sea monsters reaching up out of the depths to lay hold of them. They seemed intent on impaling the frail raft. They seemed to change places, to dart hither and thither as though to head it off, to lie in wait for it, to spring up in its course. It was frightful and unnerving. Wulfrey shut his eyes tight and set his teeth, and waited for the inevitable crash and the end.
A great wave lifted them high above the venomous black timbers and, swinging on its course, dropped them as deftly as a crane could have done it, into the inside of a mighty cage.
Wave after wave did its best to lift them out and speed them on. Their raft rose and fell and banged rudely against the ribs of their prison. Up and down they swung, and round and round, bumping and grinding till they feared the raft would go to pieces. But the tide had passed its highest and the storm was blowing itself out, and they had come to the end of the voyage.
"We're in hell," gasped the mate, as he clung to the jerking cross-pieces to keep himself from being flung off, and to Wulfrey's storm-broken senses it seemed that he was right.
XVI
All that night they swung and bumped inside their cage, with somewhat less of bodily discomfort as the wind fell and the sea went down, but with only such small relief to their minds as postponement of immediate death might offer.
Wulfrey lay prone on the raft, grimping to it mechanically, utterly worn out with all he had gone through these last four days. He sank into a stupor again and lay heedless of everything.
The tide fell to its lowest and was rising again when dawn came, and though the huge green waves still rolled through their cage, and swung them to and fro, and sent them rasping against its massive bars, they were as nothing compared with the waves of yesterday.
It was the sound of Macro cracking shell-fish and eating them that roused Wulfrey. He raised his heavy head and looked round. The mate hacked off a bunch of huge blue-black mussels from the post they were grinding against at the moment, opened several of them and put them under his nose. Without a word he began eating and felt the better for them.
Presently he sat up and looked about him in amazement, and rubbed the salt out of his smarting eyes and looked again.
"Where in heaven's name are we?" he gasped.
And well he might, for stranger sight no man ever set eyes on.
"Last night I thocht we were in hell," said Macro grimly. "An' seems to me we're not far from it. We're in the belly of a dead ship an' there's nought but dead ships round us."
Their immediate harbourage, into which the friendly wave had dropped them, was composed of huge baulks of timber like those that had tried to end them the night before, sea-sodden and crusted thick with shell-fish, and as Wulfrey's eyes wandered along them he saw that the mate was right. They were undoubtedly the mighty weather-worn ribs of some great ship, canting up naked and forlorn out of the depths and reaching far above their heads. There in front was the great curving stem-piece, and yon stiff straight piece behind was the stern-post.
But when his eyes travelled out beyond these things his jaw dropped with sheer amazement.
Everywhere about them, wherever he looked, and as far as his sight could reach, lay dead ships and parts of ships. Some, like their own, entire gaunt skeletons, but more still in grisly fragments. Close alongside them a great once-white, now weather-gray and ghostly figurehead representing an angel gazed forlornly at them out of sightless eyes. From the position of its broken arms and the round fragment of wood still in its mouth, it had probably once blown a trumpet, but the storm-fiends would have no music but their own and had long since made an end of that.
Close beside it jutted up a piece of a huge mast, with part of the square top still on and ragged ropes trailing from it. Alongside it a bowsprit stuck straight up to heaven, defiant of fate, and more forlornly, a smaller ship's whole mast with yards and broken gear still hanging to it all tangled and askew. And beyond, whichever way he looked—always the same, dead ships and the limbs and fragments of them.
"It's a graveyard," he gasped.
"Juist that," said the mate dourly, "an' we're the only living things in it."
And presently, brooding upon it, he said, "There'll be sand down below an' they're bedded in it. When tide goes down again maybe we can get out."
"Where to?"
"Deil kens! ... But it cann't be worse than stopping here."
The slow tide lifted them higher and higher within their cage, hiding some of the baleful sights but giving them wider view over the whole grim field. They sat, and by way of change stood and lay, on their cramped platform. They knocked off shell-fish and ate them. So far, so water-sodden had they been of late, they had not suffered from thirst, but the dread of it was with them.
Then, slowly, the waters sank, and all the bristling bones of ships came up again.
"Can you swim?" asked Macro abruptly at last.
"I can. But I feel very weak. I can't go far I'm afraid."
"We can't stop on here."
"Where shall we go?"
"Over yonder. They're thickest there and they stand out more. Mebbe it's shallower that way."
"I'll do my best to follow you. If I can't, you go on."
"Nay. You gave me a hand last night. We'll stick together, and sooner we start the better.... Stay ... mebbe we can——" and he began pounding at the end planks of their raft with his foot to start them from the cross-pieces.
"'Twas the roof of the galley," he explained, "and none too well made. It got stove in last voyage and we rigged this one up ourselves. My wonder is it held together in the night."
He managed at last with much stamping to loosen four boards.
"One under each arm will help," he said, "An' we can paddle along an' not get tired."
He let himself down into the water, shipped a board under each arm, and struck out between two of the gaunt ribs, and Wulfrey followed him, somewhat doubtful as to what might come of it.
But the mate had taken his bearings and was following a reasoned course. Over yonder the wrecks lay thick. There might be one on which they could find shelter—even food. But that he hardly dared to hope for. As far as he had been able to judge, at that distance, they were all wrecks of long ago and mostly only bare ribs and stumps.
To Wulfrey, from water-level, the sea ahead seemed all abristle with shipping, as thick, he thought to himself, as the docks at Liverpool. But there all was life and bustling activity, and here was only death,—-dead ships and pieces of ships, and maybe dead men. The feeling of it was upon them both, and they splashed slowly along with as little noise as possible, as though they feared to rouse the sleepers who had once peopled all these gruesome ruins.
"See yon!" whispered Macro hoarsely, as he slowed up and waited for Wulfrey to come alongside, and following the jerk of his head Wulf saw the figure of a man grotesquely spread-eagled in a vast tangle of cordage that hung like a net from a broken mast.
"We had better see," said Wulfrey, and kicked along towards it, the mate following with visible reluctance.
It was the body of Jock Steele, the carpenter, livid and sodden, and many hours dead.
"I would we hadna seen him," growled Macro.
"He'll do us no harm. He was a decent man. I'm sorry he's gone. Is there any chance of any of the others being alive?"
"Deil a chance!"
"Still, we are——"
"You had the deil's own luck and it's only by you I'm here. Let's get on," and they splashed on again.
Past wreck after wreck, grim and gaunt and grisly, mostly of very ancient date, all swept bare to the bone by the fury of the seas, all with the water washing coldly through them. Now and again Macro growled terse comments,—
"A warship,—from the size of her. See those ribs, they'll last another hundred years. And yon's a Dutchman. They build stout too. Mostly British though, bound to be, hereabouts."
"Have you any idea where we are, then?"
"An idea—ay! I've heard tell o' this place, but I never met anyone had been here. They mostly never come back. They call it what you called it a while ago—'The Graveyard.'"
"And where is it?"
"Sable Island, if I'm right,—'bout one hundred miles off Nova Scotia."
"And is there any island?"
"Ay,—on the chart, but I never met any man had been there. We're looking for it. There's no depth here or all them ribs wouldn't be sticking up like that. They're stuck in the sand below. Must be over yonder where they lie so thick.... An' a fearsome place when we get there, with the spirits of all them dead men all about it—hundreds of 'em,—thousands, mebbe."
"Do ships ever call there?"
"Not if they can help it, I trow. It's Death brings 'em and he holds 'em tight.... Hearken to that now!"—and he stopped as though in doubt about going further.
And Wulfrey, listening intently, caught a faint thin sound of wailing far away in the distance. It rose and fell, shrill and piercing and very discomforting, though very far away.
"What is it?" he jerked.
"Spirits," breathed Macro, and his face was more scared and haggard even than before.
"Nonsense!" said Wulfrey, with an assumption of brusqueness for his own reassurance, for this dismal progress through the graveyard was telling sorely on him also, and the sounds that came wavering across the water were as like the shrieking of souls in torment as anything he could imagine. "There are no such things. Don't be a fool, man!"
"Man alive!—no spirits? The Islands are full o' them, an' this place fuller still. Yes, indeed!"
But it was obviously impossible to float about there for ever. The water was not nearly so cold as Wulfrey had expected, but the strain of the night and of the preceding days of semi-starvation had told on him, and he was feeling that he could not stand much more. He set off doggedly again towards the thickest agglomeration of dead shipping in front, and the mate followed him with a face full of foreboding.
They went in silence, paying no heed now to the things they passed on the way, though the apparently endless succession of dead ships and the parts of them was not without its effect on their already broken spirits.
"Gosh!" cried Macro of a sudden. "I touched ground or I'm a Dutchman! Ay—sand it is," and Wulfrey sinking his feet found firm bottom.
"Better keep the floats," suggested the mate. "Mebbe it's only the side of a bank we're on."
They waded on, breast-deep, and presently were out of their depth again. But the feel of something below them, and the certainty that it was still not very far away, were cheering. In a few minutes they were walking again, having evidently crossed a channel between two banks. And so, alternately walking and swimming, they drew at last towards the jungle of wreckage; and all the time, from somewhere beyond it, rose those piercing, wailing screams which Macro in his heart was certain came from the spirits of the dead.
Here the water was no more than up to their knees and shoaling still, and they came now upon more than the bones of ships,—chaotic masses of masts and spars and rigging piled high and wide in fantastic confusion, and in among them, tangled beyond even the power of the seas to chase them further, barrels and boxes and crates, some still whole, mostly broken; rotting bales, and pitiful and ridiculous fragments of their contents worked in among them as if by impish hands.
"Gosh, what wastry!" said Macro at the sight. "There's many a thousand pounds of goods piled here,—ay, hunderds of thousands, webbe."
"I'd give it all for a crust of bread," said Wulfrey hungrily.
"An' mebbe there's that too. If any o' them casks has flour in 'em we needn' starve. It cakes round the sides wi' the wet, but the core's all right."
Then, beyond the gigantic barrier of wastry, rose again that shrill screaming and shrieking, louder than ever, and Macro said "Gosh!" and looked like bolting back into the sea.
Wulfrey, determined to fathom it, hauled himself painfully up a tangle of ropes and clambered to the top of the pile and saw, about a mile away, a narrow yellow spit of sand, and all about it a dense cloud of sea-birds, myriads of them, circling, diving, swooping, quarrelling.
One moment the vast gray cloud of them drooped to the sea and seemed to settle there, the next it was whirling aloft like a writhing water-spout, every component drop of which was a venomous bundle of feathers shrieking and screaming its hardest in the bitter fight for food. And the harsh and raucous clamour of them, each intent on its own, had in it something fiendishly inhuman and chilling to the blood.
"It's only sea-birds, man," he cried to Macro. "Come up and see for yourself," and the mate, with new life at the word, hauled himself up alongside and stood staring.
"My Gosh! ... I never saw the like o' that before," he said at last. "There's millions of 'em. They're fighting ... over our shipmates mebbe.... We needn' starve if we can get at 'em," a sentiment which somehow, in all the circumstances of the case, did not greatly appeal to Wulfrey, hungry as he was.
"If they all set on a man he wouldn't have much chance," he said, with a shiver. "They could pick him clean before he knew where he was."
"It's only dead men they feed on," said Macro, quite himself again, since it was only birds they had to deal with and not disembodied spirits. "There's land. Let's get ashore," and they crawled precariously along over the wreckage, which sagged and dipped beneath them in places, and in places towered high and had to be scaled as best they could, and at times they had to wade or swim from pile to pile.
Amazing things they chanced upon in their course, but were too intent on reaching land to give them more than a passing glance or a shudder. More than once they came on bones of men, jammed in tight among the raffle, and slowly picked by the sea and the things that lived in it till they gleamed white and polished and clean. And their grinning teeth, set in the awful fixed smile of the fleshless, seemed to welcome them as future recruits to their company.
"Ah—ah! So you've come at last!" they seemed to say, as they laughed up at them out of holes and corners. "We've been waiting for you all these years and here you are at last."
There were, too, bales and boxes of what had been rich cloths and silks and satins and coarser stuffs, worried open by the fret of the sea and reduced to sodden slimy punk, and casks and barrels beyond the counting.
"Wastry! Wastry!" panted Macro. "We'll come back sometime, mebbe."
But, for the moment, their only craving was for dry land, to savour the solid safety of it, and get something to eat if they could, and a long long rest.
With desperate determination they dragged their sodden and weary bodies through the shallows beyond, and blind fury filled them with spasmodic vigour as they saw what the sea-birds were feeding on.
Over each poor body the carrion crew settled like flies, and tore and screamed and quarrelled. The two living men dashed at them with angry shouts, and the birds rose in a shrieking host amazed at their interference. But only for a moment. They came swooping down again in a gray-white cloud, with raucous cries and eyes like fiery beads, and beat at them with their wings, and menaced them with already reddened beaks. And they looked so murderously intentioned that the men were fain to bow their heads and run, with flailing arms to keep them off.
And so at last to dry land, and grateful they were for the feel of it, even though it seemed no more than a waste of sand but a few feet above tide-level. That last tussle with the birds had drained their strength completely. They dropped spent on the beach and lay panting.
Their flight had set their chilled blood coursing again, a merciful sun had come up above the clouds that lay along the horizon, and in spite of their hunger and the fact that their very bones felt soaked with salt water, they both fell asleep where they lay.
XVII
Wulfrey was wakened by a sharp stab in the neck, and when he sat up with a start a huge cormorant squawked affrightedly at the dead man coming to life again, and flapped away, gibbering curses and leaving a most atrocious stink behind him.
The mate was still sleeping soundly, and Wulfrey, for the time being more painfully cognisant of the gnawing emptiness within than of the miracle that permitted him any sensation whatever, sat gazing anxiously about and revolving the primary problem of food.
Out there among all that mass of wreckage it would be strange if they could not find something eatable,—cores of flour barrels, perhaps pickled pork, rum almost certainly; and the clammy void inside him craved these things most ardently. But he could not, as yet, imagine himself venturing out there again to get them. Later on perhaps, but for the present the land, such as it was, must provide, for him at all events. He felt that he simply had not the heart or the strength to make the attempt.
Let me say at once that the trying of these men, which came upon them presently, was not in the matter of ways and means. It was of the spirit, not of the flesh. But yet it is necessary to show you how they came through these lesser trials of the flesh only to meet the greater trials of the spirit later on. And even these smaller matters are not entirely devoid of interest.
Many birds came circling round expectantly, and swooped down towards the dark figures lying in the sand, and went off in shrill amazement when they were denied. And Macro at last stretched and yawned and sat up, staring dazedly at Wulfrey.
"Gosh, but I'm hungered," he said at last, as that paramount claim emphasised itself. "Anything to eat?"
"I'm wondering. Plenty of birds, and very bad they smell. I've seen nothing else."
The mate got up heavily and found himself sore and stiff. He stood looking thoughtfully about him.
"What about all that stuff?" and he jerked his head towards the graveyard wreckage.
"I couldn't go again yet."
"Nor me either.... Ground's higher over yonder," he said. "Let's go and see," and they set off slowly over the sand.
The level of high water was thickly strewn with seaweed and small wreckage. The slope of the shore was so long and gentle that no large object could come in unless it were first broken into fragments outside.
The mate kicked over the sea-weed and found some which he put into his mouth.
"Any good?" asked Wulfrey anxiously, hungrier than ever at sight of the other's working jaws.
"Better'n nothing," and he rooted up another piece and handed it over. Wulfrey found it tough and pungent of the sea and, after much chewing, capable of being swallowed, but the most he also could say for it was that it was just that much better than nothing.
They each picked up a piece of wood with which to root in the tangle, and, bending and picking and munching, made their way slowly towards the hummocks in front.
These were a low range of sandhills, some of them as much as thirty feet high, and on the seaward side, which they climbed, they were sparsely clothed with coarse slate-green wire-grass about a foot in height, which bristled up like porcupines' quills and helped to keep the loose soft sand together. They pulled some up to see if the roots looked edible, and found them spreading far and wide below ground in a matted tangle of white succulent-looking tendrils, which proved as tough and unsatisfying as the sea-weed, but had the advantage of a different flavour.
Grubbing along, they climbed heavily through the yielding sand to the top of the nearest hummock. Macro, arriving there first, jerked a gratified "Gosh!" and floundered down the other side whirling his stick, and Wulfrey was just in time to catch the amazing sight of the whole surface of the little valley beyond in violent motion.
He thought at first that something had gone wrong with his eyes, for everywhere he looked the sand seemed to be jumping and skipping and burying itself in itself. And then from the innumerable little flecks of white, bobbing spasmodically all over the place, he perceived that these were rabbits, and the mate was in among them, knocking them on the head as fast as his stick could whirl. By the time Wulfrey reached him he was sitting in the sand, skinning one with his knife, and half a dozen more lay round him.
"Better than roots and seaweed," he said, as he hacked the first in pieces and stuffed some into his mouth and handed some to Wulfrey. "There's millions of 'em. We won't starve," and he started skinning another.
Raw meat was a novelty, to Wulfrey at all events but baby-rabbit flesh is eatable, even raw, and it put new life into them both.
The little valley in which they sat was like an oasis in the sandy desert outside. For here, among the wire-grass grew innumerable small creeping-plants and that so sturdily though so modestly that, in spite of the vast horde of rabbits, the whole place was carpeted with green, and right in the centre, where the ground was lowest and the undergrowth thickest and darkest, was a considerable pool of rainwater, which they found brackish but drinkable.
"All we want now is shelter and fire, and we'll live like kings and fighting-cocks," said Macro, when he had time for anything but rabbit-flesh, and lay back comfortably distent.
"And where shall we find shelter and fire in this place?"
"Man! There's more'n we'll ever need in all our lives, over yonder. But it'll keep.... I'm not for going back there this day anyway. To-morrow, mebbe,——" he said drowsily, and presently they were both fast asleep again. And the rabbits came out at sunset and hopped about them, and sniffed them with quivering noses and disrelish, and the heavy dew fell on them, but they never woke. For Nature had now got all she needed for the reparation of the previous waste, and she was busily at work making good while they slept.