It is bad enough to move Coast Guard apparatus along the level ocean shore, dragging it through the sand, but to move it back from the ocean, up and down over the uneven line of the sand dunes, is more difficult still. When the ocean is up to the foot of the dunes and is biting angrily at their bases this difficult portage has to be made.
The Vanton house was not more than a half mile east of the Lone Cove Station, so the Coast Guardsmen’s task was not as bad as it might have been in this respect. Sometimes it is necessary to drag life boats mounted on trucks, and all the other paraphernalia, for several miles.
To be able to work with such a base as this big house right at hand was an immense advantage, and to be able to work in the lee of it, more or less huddled under its eastern wall, seemed a piece of fortune hardly less great.
Everything else was about the worst it could have been in the circumstances. The darkness was absolute. The gale was of hurricane force, blowing at more than 60 miles an hour. It was early in the evening, not yet ten o’clock, and there was all the night to fight through. The barometer, as Keeper Tom Lupton well knew, was still falling, and the height of the storm had probably not been reached and would not be reached until toward morning. The chance of the sky lightening,until daybreak compelled a recession of the darkness, was almost nil. The chance of the wind abating was no better. And even should the night become a little lighter and the wind lessen, the tremendous seas which were assaulting the sand dunes and breaking over the stranded ship would not go down. It takes hours after a heavy gale for the sea it has kicked up to lessen perceptibly.
The wind, against which a man could sometimes hardly stand or keep upon his feet, was not the worst thing for those who had to make the fight to save life from the shore. It was hailing intermittently and the ice particles were fairly driven into the skin of men’s faces like a peppering of fine shot. There was little snow on the ground, which was a thing to be thankful for. More, however, would come later when the wind began to abate.
Keeper Tom marshalled his men and his machinery as close as possible to the Vanton house. Within forty minutes from the time he himself finished speaking with Richard Hand, his men and his apparatus were posted and he was ready to begin operations. In the meantime, Dick Hand had bumped against him in the blackness and shouted indistinctly:
“Tommy!... Dick! Anything you want ... help you....”
“Thanks!” the keeper had bawled back with his hands on his old friend’s shoulders.
The little cannon began booming and a thin line began whipping seaward.
Nothing was visible. What those ashore would have seen, if there had been light, was a three-masted ship which had struck the outer bar and had been driven past that until she lay on the inner bar, so far inshore that it might have been possible to wade to her at low tide in peaceful weather. The stress of her blow on the outer bar and the pounding to which she had been subjected in being driven past it, as well as the continuous assault she was now under, had battered her very badly. She had not opened up at her seams but would, and at almost any instant. Her foremast had been carried away completely—snapped off a few feet above her deck. Some of her yards—the spars carrying her sails—were gone; two of these dangled loosely, menacing the lives of any one on her decks. But there was no one on her decks. All hands had, of necessity, taken to the rigging.
They could just be glimpsed by the flare of her rocketing distress signals—little dark figures in the maintop, in the topgallant crosstrees, in the mizzen shrouds. They appeared not at all human. They seemed to be nothing but slight lumps or warts on the fine tracery of the rigging, the slender filaments of masts and yards and stays, wood, wire and rope, limned against the formidable blackness in which sky and sea met each other and were indistinguishable.
No boat, of course, could live for a moment in the sea that was raging. The only chance was in getting a line to the vessel. And in doing that every instant counted.
The first shots with the line were useless, as was to have been expected. It was necessary to determine direction and drift, and to make a heavy and exact allowance for windage. The ship lay directly south, the gale was from the southwest. The line had to be shot almost straight against the wind, which then carried it to the south. But so shot, it became evident that it was falling short. A heavier charge was used and still the line fell short.
“We can’t stay here,” bellowed Keeper Tom who, when he wanted to give an order, was under the practical necessity of bawling it separately in each man’s ear. “We’ll have to leave the lee of the house and go to windward, well to windward.”
This was that they might not have to shoot the line squarely in the teeth of the gale when the wind, getting under it, lifted it high in the air and seriously shortened the horizontal distance it travelled—like a “pop” fly in a baseball game or a golf ball driven straight into the wind.
Leaving the lee of the Vanton house was just another hardship added to those they were already enduring. All the apparatus was moved and a post was taken on a dune well to the west. From this site betterresults were got almost immediately. The gale still carried the line to the eastward but this could be allowed for and the lateral journey of the line was not materially lessened. After a few shots to get the wind allowance the line was dropped squarely over the wreck.
Inside the house Mary Vanton, having assured herself that there would be plenty to eat and drink when it was wanted, having approved the work of her sons in building roaring wood fires in the fireplaces, went upstairs and began to overhaul bedding. In this she had the help of the governess while Keturah and the servant remained active in the kitchen. There was a great deal of bedding in the house and Mary got it all out. Some of it she carried down to one of the living rooms, requisitioning John and Guy to struggle with the mattresses.
Then she went to her medicine closet and looked that over. Most of the rough-and-ready remedies were there in reasonable quantities. Alcohol, peroxide of hydrogen, iodine, camphor, and so on. There was some prepared bandaging and, of course, linen could be torn up in strips. She bethought herself of stimulants and was relieved to recall a half-dozen bottles of brandy in the cellar.
Was there plenty of hot water?
What next?
Something new occurred to her always before shecompleted the task in hand. At length she went through the house, upstairs and down. Everything, she decided, was as nearly ready for the emergency as it could be. The fires burned brightly in the living rooms and the smell of coffee filled the place. In one of the living rooms four mattresses were ranged on the floor and had been made up with sheets, pillows, and coverlets. In the other the large table had been cleared of books and papers. A cloth covered it and it was heaped high with piles of plates, with hardtack, with some cold meat, with what bread there was, with cups. In the centre stood several pots of coffee. In the kitchen the servant was frying bacon, Keturah slicing it for her. The governess had run upstairs to assure herself that Mermaid, the youngest, had not been wakened by all the bustle, or to quiet her if she had. The two boys were replenishing the fires and between times darting to the windows, now the south and now the west windows. But they could see little or nothing from either.
Mary completed her inspection and stepped to the south window. It was at that instant that the lifeline reached the wreck.
The line passed close to the mainmast and a stiffened arm reached out and caught it, drew it inboard at the maintop, some thirty feet or so above the wave-washeddeck. There followed an interval of minutes—they did not seem like hours but they seemed tragically long—in which the two or three men gathered in the maintop, which is a small semi-circular platform with barely standing room for three, made various movements making fast the line; and having guarded against losing it they began slowly to pull its length in toward them.
The light line for firing carried to them a stouter rope, bent to the end of it, and a block and tackle. Eventually the block reached them and the people on shore prepared for the running out of the breeches buoy.
And all this dark and sightless while the distress of the motionless figures lashed in the mizzen rigging was something palpable, acute, and sensed without the need of a single gesture, a single sign, a moment’s glimpse. How were these unfortunates to avail themselves of the breeches buoy even when it reached the ship? To get to it they would have to unlash themselves, descend, and cross the deck between the mizzenmast and the mainmast and ascend to the maintop. To cross the deck would be impossible. As well try to walk fifty feet on the surface of the Atlantic.
It was not certain, furthermore, that those in the mizzen retained any power of physical movement. They did not shift their positions. Although they had lashed themselves in pairs close together they did not strike each other about the head, shoulders, and body,as they should be doing if they had any vigour left, in the imperative effort to keep from freezing.
Slowly, with a painful slowness, the line was got ready for the running of the breeches buoy. And then it was that Keeper Tom Lupton manifested his intention of being hauled out in the buoy to the vessel.
There was emphatic dissent. The men pleaded with him in shouts, shrieking arguments that the wind tore from their lips and the great thunder of the ocean drowned. These were not circumstances under which he should feel impelled to go aboard; the risk of travel either way was too serious for a single unnecessary journey in the buoy to be undertaken; the line might not have been made fast properly, in which event he would be the first man lost; in the conditions that existed he could do nothing when he got aboard, and he would become merely one more man to be hauled ashore.
These pleas were without avail. Keeper Tom admitted that he “didn’t know what he could do till he got there. The thing,” he added, “is to get there.”
“Dick,” he shouted in Richard Hand’s ear, “in any case, I can’t do much alone. I can’t ask any of my men to risk their lives by coming out on the next trip out of the buoy. I’m not asking you to. But men——”
The racket of the storm made the end of the sentence inaudible. Dick Hand did not need it. He flung hisarm about Tom Lupton and bellowed: “I’ll be there. Next trip out.”
Keeper Tom communicated the order to his men. It was not until Tom Lupton was in the buoy and moving over the boiling surf at the foot of the sand dunes that Richard Hand thought, with a shock, of Mary Vanton. Three men in the world were charged, in varying degrees, with some responsibility to stand by her and aid her. One had disappeared and the other two were about to jeopard their lives.
He felt he must see Mary for a moment and speak to her. He left the cluster of men on the dune and hurried to the house.
He found her on the rug in the east living room. One or two of the crew were warming their hands and swallowing hot coffee in the other large room. The men came over, not more than two at a time, at intervals, to get thawed out.
“Tom,” he said, “has gone off in the buoy.”
“I know,” she answered. “I saw someone being hauled out and I knew it must be he.”
He hesitated, then told her.
“The worst of it is, I must go on the next trip. He practically asked me to. And I said I would.”
At that for the first time in all her life, so far as he could remember, she seemed panicky and likely,for an instant, to collapse. He stepped hurriedly toward her but she had got hold of herself and made a gesture to keep him away.
“No, no! I’m all right.” But she let John, who had approached them, bring her a chair and she leaned on it. The boy kept near them, regarding them silently. His gray eyes were inscrutable but the look he gave his mother was one of sympathy, and Dick Hand thought that there was confidence in the glance that was directed at himself. It somehow came over Dick that this boy was a big factor in all their lives, potentially at least. If Tommy and himself did not come back——
Mary Vanton was calm and self-reliant again. She motioned to Richard Hand that he had better drink some coffee. He took the hand she offered him, waved to John, and hurried into the other room, impatiently swallowing the coffee and going out the door with the two other men.
The buoy had travelled out safely and the half-frozen workers ashore had seen the Keeper disengage himself and clamber into the maintop. They had also seen him help one of the crew into the buoy and had received the signal—jerks on the rope—to haul away.
Hauling away with a will they brought to the top of the dune, half-drowned by the upleaping surf as he was borne shoreward, a sailor, one of the forecastle crowd.Two men picked him up and carried him to the house.
As they cleared the buoy for the trip out Dick Hand came forward to take his place in it. He put himself in, first one leg then the other, and shouted: “All fast!”
They began hauling him out.
Out he went, not rapidly, out over the dark and frightful tangle of waters that flooded the smooth beach below him. He was facing shoreward. The moment his feet left the edge of the dune he was, to all intents and purposes, in the midst of an immense void, a bottomless region of water and blackness and cutting, stinging wind without landmark or landfall, terrible, thunderous, and empty of anything but sound. Beneath him the stout strength of the buoy bore him up. That, at least, was tangible. It was as if he rode slowly through chaos on an invisible steed, winged, at home in the air.
A little way and then a great wall of water coming unseen out of the darkness rose and curved and fell upon him. One instant he sensed its black, glittering height at his back, the next he was in the midst of it, as submerged as though he had been a thousand fathoms below the immense Atlantic; an instant later he was free of the barrier, drenched, drowning, water running off him in streams—riding slowly seaward, riding slowly on.
The line carrying the breeches buoy was as taut as itwas possible to make it but inevitably it sagged in the middle, especially when the buoy was bearing a man’s weight. For a part of his journey Dick was under water almost continuously. He had to hold his breath and draw breath as cautiously as a swimmer in a heavy sea. The impact of waves bruised and shook him, the roar of the water deafened him. He could see neither ship nor shore. He grew doubtful, almost, of his own existence. Still he rode on.
As he neared the ship he was lifted above the angry flood that seethed about the vessel. Now he went forward more slowly, for he had to be hauled not only out but upward. Eventually he found himself hard upon the ship’s maintop, her torn rigging, singing deep bass notes in the wind, all about him. A little farther, a little farther, yet a little more and he was able to reach out his hand and clutch a ratline. A moment more and he was struggling to get his feet on the tiny platform of the top, Tom’s hand was under his shoulders, and Tom’s voice was in his ear.
“Fine work! Good boy! You’re just....” That much Tom’s voice managed to get to him above the awful noise.
Mary did not see Richard Hand’s trip out in the buoy. She was busy ministering to the first man ashore, the sailor whom two of the Lone Cove crew had brought tothe house. One of the men hurried back to help haul the buoy; the other stayed and, aided by John, stripped the sailor of his wet clothing and got him into night clothes and a bathrobe. He was unconscious.
Mary, arriving with a bottle of brandy, poured out a drink and they managed to get it down his throat as he revived.
He sat up and looked about him stupidly and pathetically. He was a big fellow with blond hair and blue eyes, a Scandinavian, apparently. After he had swallowed a little more brandy they put him in one of the beds in the living room which Mary had converted for hospital purposes. He did not appear to be frostbitten and, closing his eyes, he fell into a slumber that was not much lighter than the unconscious state in which he had reached the land.
Mary stood for a moment regarding the first—and it might be the only—life wrested from the clutch of the sea. He was handsome in a way and evidently not very old. A mere, overgrown boy, she thought to herself, but he might not be so young as he looked with his light hair and fair skin, almost beardless. He came of a seafaring race, whether Norwegian, Swedish, or Dane; he would not think very deeply of his adventure. She wondered for a moment what he thought about the sea, how he felt about it, how he would feel about it now; but she reflected that his escape would probably present itself to him as a piece of luck, nothing more, as something allin the day’s—or the year’s—work—nothing romantic about it.
Mutely, working together on the slight foothold that the maintop afforded them, the few boards beneath their feet shaking to the tremendous violence of waves breaking over the decks below, Tom Lupton and Richard Hand got first one and then the other of the two men on the maintop with them into the breeches buoy and sent them ashore. In the rigging above, close to the topgallant crosstrees, were two other figures. But even as they worked, getting their second man into the buoy, one of these black huddles that was a man dropped past them and struck the deck with a noise distinct and apart from the noise of the general tumult. In the spectacle of that hopeless black clump falling down past them, in the sound of that blow as it struck the deck, in the quickness with which the shape was swallowed up by the glassy black of the ocean, raging with frothing crests, there was something to make the bravest soul momentarily faint and turn the body sick.
“I’m going after the other,” said Keeper Tom by gesture. And by gesture Dick inquired if he should go, too. Tom Lupton shook his head. “Stay here,” he ordered, and started up the ratlines.
From below, fearful and anxious to aid him but feeling the obligation to obey orders, Dick Hand watched.
The keeper went up slowly, the wind flattening him against the weather rigging. Dick saw him gain the crosstrees and moving toward the lashed man begin work with a sheath knife. After some moments the keeper got the man free. The fellow was so little able to help or move about that the keeper abandoned an evident intention to carry him down the weather rigging on his back. He slashed about with his sheath knife, and Dick could make out that he had cut some sail rope. This he proceeded to tie about the man, fastening it under his shoulders and knotting a bowline. Very slowly, very cautiously, working on the weather side, the keeper began to lower the man to the maintop. It was a perilous enterprise and was only managed by turns of the rope around a shroud; and it took minutes. But it was accomplished and Dick received the man safely.
He contrived to get the fellow in the buoy and away while Tom was climbing carefully down.
There remained now the great problem of the people on the mizzenmast. The deck was impassable. Not only that, but the ship was beginning to break up. Her bow had been bitten off raggedly by the sea. It was impossible to tell where she would split or when. She might break in twain amidships. In that case the mainmast would almost certainly go by the board, Dick and Tom would both be lost, the connection with the shore would be broken, and in all likelihood not another soul would reach the beach alive.
They had rescued four. There were three on the mizzenmast. A full half of the crew had certainly been drowned, some, perhaps, going down when the foremast had broken off.
Something like a miracle happened as Dick Hand and Keeper Tom stood together again in the maintop, having sent four men ashore.
A wave of unusual height rose up, shone inkily against the blackness of the sky, curled, and burst, burying the poop deck completely and falling with all its might against the base of the mizzenmast. There was a noise of splitting wood and of rending stays that rose above the loud song of the wind in the rigging, and with a tremendous crash the mizzenmast fell. By some freak of circumstance it fell straight to windward, and the wind and some resisting fibres of wood at the point of fracture retarded its fall. It came down slowly, tearing through the outer main rigging to windward, the mizzen topmast shearing things down. For the moment the mizzenmast rested squarely on the main upper topsail yard halfway out, then as the ship rolled slightly it came inboard and close to the mast. Dick and Tom, watching anxiously and in terror, waited to see what it would do. But it had done what it had to do. There it rested, close to the mainmast, supported by the main upper topsail yard; there it seemed destined to stay for no one knew just how long—perhaps ten seconds, perhaps ten minutes, perhaps an hour.
But the inexplicable chance which had broken off the mizzenmast and laid it carelessly, like a match, diagonally against the mainmast and close to the maintop had shaken from their lashings two of the three human figures that had been visible on it and had brought the third, and only remaining one, almost within arm’s reach of the two rescuers.
There was no trouble getting him free and into the maintop where the buoy was waiting, empty, ready to give someone a ride to the shore.
He was immovable and partly frozen, lifeless or nearly so. One would not have judged that there could be much chance of saving him even if he were got ashore; but that was not a question to take into consideration.
The wind howled, the sea made an indescribable noise. The two could just manage to strap the man to the buoy and give the signal to haul away.
Ashore, in the house, Mary Vanton’s foresight and careful preparation were being vindicated, and the facilities that she had at her disposal were being taxed to the limit.
Four men had been brought ashore in the buoy. All four of them had to be stripped of their clothing and partially reclothed in dry apparel. All four needed brandy, coffee, food, none of them was in a condition to receive. Of these and of the Coast Guardsmensome were frostbitten and had to be rubbed with snow, others had cuts and bruises that required attention. Two were delirious, and for these she found some sedative; no one, herself included, ever could remember afterward what it was. One long living room did really resemble a hospital ward. The other living room resembled a free-lunch counter in unusual disarray. Food was beginning to play out, but of hot coffee there remained a plenty for all.
Keturah and the servant tended to the food and drink, except that Mary herself kept charge of the brandy. The governess was busy with bandages and liniments; John stood watch over the patients and ministered to them as best he could, helping his mother. Young Guy, exhausted from the excitement, had been carried at last, half asleep, to his bed and simply dropped upon it with his clothes on. Through all the excitement the youngest child, Mermaid, had slept without waking. It was now two o’clock in the morning.
The door opened, for the one hundred and thirty-first time, perhaps, that night, and two Coast Guardsmen stumbled in carrying the lifeless body of Guy Vanton. Mary Vanton looked upon it without a tremor, kept control of herself absolutely until it was certain that he was dead. Then she had him carried into her room upstairs and herself covered his face. She came out quietly and turned the key in the door, slipped it into her pocket, and started downstairs.
Something in her expression sent terror striking right through the heart of her first-born. John was beside her, had kept beside her from the moment when his father’s body was brought in. His arm went about her.
“Mother!”
She stopped uncertainly on the staircase and looked at him. Her lips moved a little but she did not say anything. Her foot slipped on the step, but she caught herself by the handrail and then stood there in absolute quiet. The boy looked at her steadily. Their eyes met. She reached out her hand, with a weary effort, and drew him close to her.
Dick Hand did his best to compel Torn Lupton to get in the buoy, but could not. Tom, who had muscles of iron, held back and at the same time gripped Dick with a grip that meant business and thrust him forward, yelling against the side of his face: “Skipper last! I’m skipper here ... all there is.... Get in. Wonderful work ... thanks....”
So Dick got in and was hauled back to land. He made all haste to the house and got there to find Mary Vanton at the foot of the staircase, her boy beside her.
At the sight of him she lifted her eyes, and they showed some of their usual brilliance in the joy at seeing him standing safely before her. She made a gesture upthe stairs, took the key of her room from her pocket, and handed it to him.
Dick went up, not knowing what he should find. He took a long look at the face of what had been Guy Vanton, left the room, quietly relocking the door, and came downstairs. Without pausing for warmth or coffee he hurried out into the storm. He must be on hand when Tommy landed.
He gained the top of the dune and looked seaward. It was still two hours or more to faintest daybreak. Out of the blackness beyond the signal to haul away had been received. The men began hauling.
Just what happened is a matter of conjecture. Whether the whole ship dissolved in pieces all at once or whether the mainmast, weighted by the fallen mizzen carried away and fell, it can never matter. Of a sudden the line bearing the buoy collapsed into the water. With shrieks, yells, prayers, and frantic effort the men of the crew, Dick helping them, hauled away as for their lives—it was, most certainly, for one of their lives, the best, the worthiest. But the falling line had become entangled in floating wreckage; there was no light to see what had taken place; after a succession of mighty efforts the line snapped and they hauled inshore nothing but a frayed end of rope. Tommy Lupton, who had been keeper of the Lone Cove Coast Guard Station, who had risked his life to save a few poor sailors, Tommy, forever a boy, forever dreaming of doing someact of bravery, simple, devoted, courageous Tommy, had fulfilled his hope and gained his desire.
There is something priceless in the world. He possessed it.
There was no more to do that night, although some of the crew remained always on the dune until day, dawning, showed no trace of a vessel, but only traces of where a vessel had been, pieces of wreckage floating about. The wind had gone down; the sea was still high but would soon begin to lessen in violence. Already snow was commencing to fall. It fell all day, mantling the dunes, covering all the external marks of the night’s horrors, a great winding sheet laid upon the trampled ground. Only where it struck the black and restless sea did the white blanket fail to disguise what had taken place—that which would take place again and again, from generation to generation, as long as the sea rolled and men sailed.
But even the snow did not go on falling, stopping at dusk, and the next day it was fair. The sun shone and the air was warm—the weather might have been that of late spring. And on the day following it was equally warm and pleasant; and this was Christmas.
Richard Hand remained with the Vantons for two weeks after Christmas. At length Mary Vanton decided to close the beach house and spend the rest ofthe winter in Blue Port. Richard Hand saw her settled there and then, with her reluctant assent, took John back to school.
He had postponed his own work, let it drop, let it wait, let it go! Work could not matter just then.
But after he had left John at school he returned to New York and pitched in as hard as he could. It was some time before he could get away to run down to Blue Port, but at last he managed it.
Mary Vanton met him at the little station, smiling. All the way to the house he was conscious of nothing but her presence beside him. When they stood together in the house, alone, facing each other, something dynamic swept over him. He could hardly see, and tears sprang to his eyes. He felt himself suffocating, drowning in a sea of feeling. The Mermaid of immortal youth who lived on in Mary Vanton was folded in his eager arms.
THE COUNTRY LIFE PRESSGARDEN CITY, N. Y.
TRANSCRIBER’S NOTE:Obvious typographical errors have been corrected.
TRANSCRIBER’S NOTE:
Obvious typographical errors have been corrected.