X"Two nights later, under a clear starry sky, we slipped through Lymoon Pass on the tail of the land breeze. Before we reached Wanchi, it fell flat calm. We shipped the long sweeps and began to row; the chattering crew, who'd never expected to see Hong Kong again, fell to work willingly. The lights of the city twinkled against the Peak, the sleeping fleet swung at anchor in the landlocked harbour; all was silence and tranquillity ... as we see it now. But that night, let me tell you, the familiar scene was invested with a poignant charm. At length we reached the bulkhead, from which we'd taken our maniac departure three days before, and settled in our berth as comfortably as if we'd just returned from a pleasure trip down the bay."No words were said as we came in. I sat against the bulwarks, almost afraid to move, like a man awakening to consciousness after a long siege of fever. A little forward of my position, Wilbur rose to his feet. He hadn't spoken or touched food since that tragic hour under the reefs two nights before; had spent most of his time below decks, locked in a tiny stateroom, and had come out only in the last few minutes, as if in response to the nearing sounds of the land. He stood at the rail, a figure wrapped in silence and immobility, watching them berth the sampan. Then, without a glance in our direction, he walked to the gangway and stepped ashore. On the bulkhead he paused for a moment irresolute, turning and gazing across the harbour. His form stood out plainly against a bright light up the street. It had lost those lines of vigour and alertness; it was the figure of a different and older man. A broken figure, that could never again be the same...."A moment later he had lurched away, vanishing suddenly in the darkness of a side street. Three days afterwards, we heard that he had taken the boat for Singapore. He hasn't been seen or heard of in this part of the world since that day."When he had gone, that night at the bulkhead Lee Fu approached me; we crossed the deck of the sampan, and stood for a long while silent at the harbour rail."'Thank you, Captain' said he at last 'As I foresaw, it has been supremely interesting. For your part, I hope you feel repaid?'"'It's quite enough to be alive, just now' I confessed without shame 'I want to see a chart of that locality, Lee Fu. I want to find out what you did'"'Oh, that? It was not much. The gods were always with us, as you must have observed. As for the rest of it, I know that region pretty well'"'Evidently.... Did theSpeedwellfetch up among those same reefs, or to leeward of them?'"'TheSpeedwell? Captain, you did not believe my little pleasantry? We were nowhere near the wreck of theSpeedwell, at any time—as Captain Wilbur should have known, had he retained his mental perspective'"I smiled feebly. 'Well, I didn't know it. Tell me another thing, Lee Fu. Were you bluffing, there at the last, or was there really no passage through the reef?'"'So far as I am aware, Captain, there was no passage. I believe we were heading for solid rock when we came into the wind'"The answer surprised me. 'Would you have piled us up' I asked 'if Wilbur hadn't given in?'"'That is a hypothetical question. I knew perfectly well that I should not be forced to do it. I was only afraid lest, in the final anguish, Captain Wilbur might lose his seaman's judgment, and so might wait too long. That, I confess, would have been unfortunate. Otherwise, there was no especial doubt or danger'"'I'm glad to hear it!' I exclaimed, with a shudder of recollection 'It wasn't apparent at the time'"'No, perhaps not. Time was very swift, just then. I will tell you now, Captain Nichols, that I myself had begun to grow alarmed. He waited very long. He was more wilful than I had fully anticipated; a strong, determined man, and an arch-criminal. But, as it chanced, this made it the more interesting'"I didn't care to argue such a subtle point. 'What did you have in mind, Lee Fu' I asked 'before the typhoon shifted? Did you expect the centre of it to catch us?'"The question seemed to amuse him. 'Captain, I had no plan' he explained in a puzzled tone 'It is dangerous to make plans, or to live according to a fixed design. There was a task to be begun; the determination of its direction and result lay with the gods. It was plain to me that I had been called upon to act; beyond that I neither saw nor cared to see. Action once begun, I seized events as they came my way.... How characteristic that you ask me for my plan! Would you have the temerity to inquire into the divine control of events? Or do you think that a man really may make a plan?'"I could believe his statement only because I'd witnessed his incredible calmness."He waved a hand toward the city. 'Come, my friend, let us sleep' said he 'We have earned our rest—and that is something not always won from life. But beware of over-confidence, and never plan. It is by straining to see the future that men exhaust themselves for present usefulness. It is by daring to make plans that men bring down on their heads the wrath of heaven. We are the instruments of the gods; through us, they put their own plans in operation. The only failure in life is not to hear when the gods command. In this case, however, there could have been no question; the design was too apparent. From the first, I was sure and happy. There were constantly too many propitious signs'"THE UNCHARTED ISLETHE UNCHARTED ISLEI"They say the man is mad" I whispered, nodding across the room "Pendleton pointed him out to me in Wellington Street this morning"Nichols gave his twisted smile. "Yes, mad, or inspired, or something very wonderful. Who is competent to judge? But I haven't seen him up this way for a long while. Another expedition must be on foot in search of the Uncharted Isle""What's that? You know him, then?""Perhaps I am the only man in the East who does know him, in the proper sense of the word. Every one else listens, laughs, and passes on. But I believe. Yes, in spite of ridicule and life's disaster, I continue to believe ... well, not so much in the fact itself, as in the man. By Jove, he's faithful—and that, you must admit, is marvel enough. And his madness isn't entirely impossible; it can be explained. Yet it strikes the world as being funny—and that's his crowning misfortune. A man in search of a lost and apparently non-existent island can't help being a little ridiculous, I suppose, until he becomes a thundering bore. For no one else, of course, is looking for such a thing, or wants to find one. We keep safely within the charted area.... But let me tell you the story, and you can form your own opinion. Don't attract his attention; he won't notice us here in the shadow"There used to be a certain tea-house in Hong Kong, the name of which was jealously guarded from touring vandals. It opened on the face of an enchanted terrace high above the harbour and the town; from the parapet the eye travelled inland over the low peninsula of Kowloon, as far as the foothills of China, the fringe of a mighty land veiled in mystery. Romance came to that terrace, filtering through lacy bamboo leaves, borne on the night breeze along with the fragrance of flowers and the music of hidden voices. The place wasn't a temple of the conventional. It isn't running now; the songs are still, the little cups no longer tinkle in the half-darkness, and no sweet, startled faces, peep out at visitors from behind the dragon-screens.Nichols and I had been sitting there some time that evening, when the man came in. Of course Nichols knew him; who with any pretentious to a history wasn't catalogued in his omnivorous files? While I waited, I listened to a rapid conversation in Chinese somewhere in the back of the establishment. Dusk had swallowed the white houses and green slopes below us; the riding lights on the harbour had begun to prick out the berths of ships; with the coming of night, voices seemed hushed among the yellow lanterns."What is madness? Who will lay down the line between madness and sanity?" demanded Nichols suddenly "They are like right and wrong, or good and evil .... much as you want to believe. If we dared for a moment to face the logic of existence, I think we should find that we're all a little mad, each in his own way. An entirely sane man would sort of puff out, like a candle. It's our madness that keeps us going, feeds the flame. The world's an illusion, anyway, of course; ergo, why aren't the maddest people the sanest? Certainly, the maddest man of all would be he who tried to define the states of the human mind."For that's beyond our province. They say, for instance, that Devereux is mad: what they mean is that they can't fathom him. His life, likewise, hasn't been charted. Well, what's the difficulty? All the lives and islands haven't been discovered yet. And there are certain bald facts, written in black-and-white records, that seem to support his claim...."A waxy Chinaman changed our tea. Nichols gazed thoughtfully into the soft darkness beyond the terrace, getting his story under way."Devereux is no longer a young man, as you see" he began slowly "I'd say he was about our own age. He was born and reared, I believe, in our own New England, though I've never heard the name of his home town. I presume he had parents there once, brothers and sisters, maybe a sweetheart. The Devereuxs, you know, are a fine family, with strains of originality cropping out here and there, which might once in a while have amounted to genius in a free atmosphere. They're a high-strung breed. I'd be willing to affirm that, even before the episode of the island, this particular Devereux was a serious and romantic soul. Look at his face, hanging in the glow of that lantern. Temperament, sensibility, melancholy.... But what he was, and what he might have been, are both sunk in the tremendous distances of a lifetime, obscured by the apparition of an island, the wraith of a tragic destiny."He went to sea, in the wake of his generation. At the age of twenty-one, he had worked up from the forecastle to a room on the port side of the forward cabin; in due time he became first mate of the shipEvening Star. I forget who was captain of her, or what was the name of the second mate who managed to reach Callao in the whaleboat. Those who survived the disaster have vanished along with those who never returned, and Devereux alone has perpetuated the event in nautical history because of a madness that descended on him out of the sky."They sailed from New York for San Francisco in a year that is likewise immaterial, and had a long and tedious passage round the Horn. It was one of those unlucky and exasperating voyages, you know—calms, and even trade winds, and unseasonable storms; so that when they finally got headed north in the Pacific, they were a disheartened ship's company. The southeast trades in the Pacific failed them completely; whatever wind they found, from 20 south up to the line, came from the east and north; and with the best course they could make, the ship was crowded over far to the westward of the regular track. Then, as they approached the line, the northeast breeze settled down in earnest, and nothing for it but to hold her on a N.N.W. course, as close to the wind as possible on the starboard tack. They managed to weather the fringe of the South Sea Islands by a few hundred miles, and drifted across the line somewhere in the neighbourhood of 135° west longitude. Provisions and water were holding out well, though one hundred and seventy-five days had passed since they'd lost sight of Sandy Hook."One evening in the early dog-watch, they noticed a few land birds flying about the ship. Devereux told me they were quite excited over the incident for an hour or two, with the quick sympathy of sailors for an unusual manifestation of life-forces. The nearest land at that time was the Marquesas, five hundred miles away to the southward. Some of the men tried to entice the birds to alight on deck or in the rigging, but they didn't seem at all weary, and scorned the blandishments of food."'Wonderful creatures—birds' said the captain, as they were discussing the occurrence on the quarter-deck 'Five hundred miles isn't a drop in the bucket to them. All the bob-o'-links at home go to Brazil and back every winter'"'They've probably run over from the Marquesas since supper' chimed in the second mate 'Half an hour from now they'll be back there, perching on some tree above an island beauty. God, I'd like to be a bird!'"But Devereux demurred to their conclusion—he knew something of the habits of birds. 'That's all right in the migrating season, but these birds don't migrate' said he 'You can see that they aren't bound anywhere in particular. And land birds don't fly five hundred miles to sea for the fun of going back again. They do get tuckered, too. I think it's mighty strange'"He had the first watch. It was one of those typical Pacific nights—a velvet sky, a smooth sea, the air somehow expressing the character of an ocean illimitable and magnificent, an ocean that spreads like the floor of the universe. After the captain had gone below for the night, Devereux cast his imagination adrift to follow those birds, to see the land again. What could their visit have meant? Was there any land nearer than the Marquesas—perhaps an uninhabited island? He promised himself a careful survey of the chart when he went below at midnight.... He'd been thinking in this desultory fashion some time, lost in the dreams of night watches, when a sharp cry from forward struck him like a knife flying through the darkness."You know those single cries on shipboard, in the dead of night—cries of warning, of apprehension, of impending danger. The heart stops for a moment at the sound. Then a thousand possibilities crowd into the mind at once, a thousand processes of thought leap into action. There can be no indecision; moments are priceless. And there must be no mistake."The cry met him a second time as he passed the mizzen rigging, running forward. 'Breakers ahead!' Instinctively, he shouted the order over his shoulder as he ran."'Put the helm down!Hard down! Hard down!'"But it was too late to save her. He told me that he paused at the break of the poop, listening, and in a sudden hush that went over the ship, heard distinctly a low sucking sound under the bows—the horrible gasping of water over rocks awash. He clung to the rail, cowed by the only fear a sailor knows. At that moment, she struck heavily, and stood still. She had been making about five knots, enough to give her plenty of momentum. The shock was terrific: some of the top-hamper crashed to the deck, and the voices of men suddenly broke out in screams of terror. The ship rose a little by the head, seemed to draw back, and surged forward again with a dull, rending, sickening plunge."But what's the need to rehearse the details of that oldest tragedy of the sea? There was time enough for them to get out the boats, time enough, even, to fully provision them—and that's more than some have been allowed. But the ship was dead and done for. Her whole bow must have been stove in under water. Five minutes after they pushed clear of her, she slumped like a rock, and they lost her in the darkness. A whirlpool of foam showed for a while on the surface of the black water. Then that, too, faded; and the wide, open Pacific received them in their three boats as frail as cockle-shells, and the velvet night covered it all."The captain commanded the longboat, the second mate and Devereux had a whaleboat apiece. Devereux's was the smallest; his crew consisted of six men besides himself. The boats drew together on the quiet water for a consultation. A deep stillness invested the place, the stillness of a lofty cavern, of an empty world; and somewhere off in the gloom that awful sucking sound went on, now loud, now dying out to a faint echo, like a demon chuckling over human disaster."All night they played hide-and-seek with that demon in the darkness. The breeze fell off, and after a while it grew flat calm. At times the voice of the reef was hoarse and low and languid; at times it purred and bubbled energetically; at times it would be silent so long that they'd lean over the gunwale to listen, thinking they had lost it—when unexpectedly it would snarl out again, close at hand. In the middle of the night they did seem to be really losing the sound, and were afraid they'd drifted from the vicinity; they bent to the oars rather aimlessly, for no one could judge the exact direction, and before they knew it were almost running afoul of the hideous thing. Some of the men swore that the sound moved on the water; this seemed plausible, for it was to be supposed that the reef extended a considerable distance, yet the notion nevertheless gave rise to a vague superstitious fear. Either it moved, or they were surrounded by a nest of reefs—one was about as bad as the other. Devereux said it was a night to drive a nervous man crazy, a night that they began to think would never end."When dawn came at last, they looked about them and saw nothing at all—nothing but an unbroken horizon, a boundless ocean, a few spars floating idly in the midst of a great calm, and a little dark dot like a pimple on the face of the waters, just in front of the rising sun."They rowed toward this pimple on the surface. It opened and closed with the sucking motion of a loose mouth, and between the monstrous flickering lips of water a point of rock protruded, black and swollen like the tongue of a drowned man. It seemed impossible that this solitary rock had made all the commotion of the night, had invested them as if with an army of breakers; yet there was absolutely nothing else in sight—the rest had been imagination."They rowed across the south face of the rock, where the ship had struck, and found the water there deep past all knowing. The rock wasn't coral, and no coral formation surrounded it. In the clear blue water beneath them huge banners of kelp waved and winnowed like lifeless hands. Not a vestige of theEvening Starremained; she had disappeared in the unfathomable gulfs of the Pacific. It was a mere crag that had caught her, a needle-point piercing the floor of an otherwise unobstructed ocean, the topmost spire of some mighty mountain sunk in the bowels of the world. It may never before have been seen by mortal man; it certainly wasn't indicated on the best charts of that day. She would have had to seek a thousand years to touch it. A ship's length either side would have cleared her...."They waited beside the rock till noon, to get an observation. Then they rowed away to the northward, bound for the Sandwich Islands. The dark spot on the water dwindled and disappeared in their wake. Devereux told me that, quite unaccountably, he felt his heart sinking as they lost sight of it; after all, it was their only link with a remote and perhaps unattainable world."The first night after the disaster, a heavy squall separated the boats. They couldn't find each other, and never came together again. The second mate reached Callao after a terrible journey, the first to report the loss of theEvening Star. He had been nearly swamped in that first squall. For two days he had hunted frantically for the other boats. Then, not being a good navigator, and having a very imperfect chart of the Pacific Islands, he had changed his course and steered due east, knowing that he would strike the American continent if he could keep on going. The fact of his arrival in Callao, its date, and his reported date of the disaster, are beyond dispute; for my own satisfaction, I have looked these matters up in the official records."The captain, in the longboat, was never heard of again. Him and his crew the Pacific took for toll."Devereux was picked up at sea, alive, well, and alone in theEvening Star'ssmall whaleboat,exactly one year and three months after the ship went down""Easy, Nichols!" I remonstrated "Say that again, please. You can't expect me to swallow it whole at the first try""Those are the facts, I tell you" said Nichols calmly "I have also verified this latter statement, through correspondence with the captain who picked him up. It really happened—and the dates were as I said. He was picked up just north of the equator in the Pacific Ocean by the shipVanguard, and brought in to San Francisco. I was informed by the captain of theVanguardthat he had been driven out of his course by meeting the northeast trade winds too far south, and had sighted Devereux adrift one morning in about 135° west and 2° north. The man was nearly dead from thirst, and was quite mad when they took him aboard; raved about an island nearby, said he'd been blown away from it, and begged them to cruise in search of it before they left the ground. There was no island in that vicinity, of course, nearer than the Marquesas. 'I was sorry for the poor fellow' the captain of theVanguardwrote me 'but we couldn't waste time in indulging his fancy. He quieted down after a day or two, and seemed to settle into a sort of dull melancholy'"This castaway, giving his name as Devereux, claimed to have been mate of theEvening Star, lost in that same quarter of the Pacific the year before. The people on theVanguardhad heard nothing of this disaster; in fact, the first report of it, brought in by the second mate, had just reached San Francisco from Callao when they got in. To corroborate the story, however, the whaleboat in which Devereux had been picked up had presented a battered and weather-beaten appearance, her paint peeling off and her bottom badly scarred, as if she'd been used a good while on the beach; and on her stern they had been able to decipher the letters—ENI-G —AR. Devereux claimed that his ship had touched a needle of rock and had sunk immediately; but no danger of that nature was laid down on theVanguard'schart. A year later, as a result of these conflicting and sensational tales, the United States Government sent a gunboat to look for the rock, perhaps with secret instructions to keep a weather eye open for Devereux's island; but nothing was to be found. Devereux couldn't remember theEvening Star'sexact latitude and longitude on the day before the disaster; his records and instruments had vanished along with his crew in the heart of a deep mystery. And the second mate, who alone came in in regular order, was a poor navigator, you'll remember, and may easily have made an error about the place of his departure. At any rate, nothing was to be found. On the charts of the Hydrographic Office to-day you'll see, in that position, a dotted circle, marked Evening Star Rock, with an interrogation point after the name."Devereux's story was a nine days' wonder in San Francisco, confirmed in substance as it was by the recent authentic report from Callao. The newspapers made good copy of it. Many believed him outright; a man doesn't float about in the Pacific for over a year and emerge from the experience in robust health, without there being some simple and practical explanation. Yet sensational publicity quickly prejudiced the case, as it invariably does. After the first flush of pleasurable excitement, public interest began to put him down either as a hoax or a madman, and then promptly forgot him. One of the papers tried to start a subscription for a schooner, so that he might search for his island, but it met with little response. The return wave of prosaic life rolled over him, left him submerged and helpless. For a while he went about seeking sympathy and assistance, but his melancholy tale soon came to be a nuisance, doors were shut in his face, and men avoided him."At length he had the good sense to go away. He wandered to the East, moved about from place to place. The story followed him, distorted in the passage of time. And so we meet him here, a man with a strange hallucination—an interesting case, and romantic, but unquestionably mad"IINichols leaned toward me, his eyes kindling. "Let me take you back to the morning after the squall that separated the boats" said he "The sun rose in a clear sky; the quick tropical storm had entirely disappeared. Devereux looked about him, and saw no sign of the others. One hardly realizes, until one has experienced the fact, how easy it is for boats to become separated in the night, especially under severe conditions of weather, or how rapidly a dozen miles may spring up between them. And a dozen might as well be as many hundreds, for all chances of their coming together again. The wind had died to a baffling breeze that seemed to be trying to blow from all directions at once. Devereux had no chronometer—nothing but a pocket watch, a sextant, a compass, and an old general chart of the Pacific. After an hour's study of his situation, he came to a quick decision. The chart and the pocket watch couldn't be trusted to get him to the Sandwich Islands; like the second mate, somewhere within a radius of twenty-five miles from him at that moment, he changed the boat's course and steered due east in search of a continent."While they were getting up the sail to catch a wandering air that seemed to have settled in the west, a man forward shouted in tones of horror that the water cask was empty. A frantic investigation verified the fact. An oar carelessly thrown down had loosened the plug in the head of the cask, and their precious supply of water was washing around in the bottom of the boat. They tasted it, but found it too salt to drink; the boat, fresh from the top of the forward house, was leaking quite a little."Then began the nightmare of heat and thirst. The sun that day was pitiless. They had no luck with the wind, which soon fell flat calm; the exertion of rowing added to the misery. Not a drop of rain fell. By noon, the horror of the first day's thirst had begun to grip them; by nightfall it had them cowed and broken, whining for water. It's that first day which is always the worst, you know—until the end. Devereux still hoped that he might pick up one of the other boats, and all hands kept a sharp lookout; but the hope died as the hours wore on. The sheer loneliness of the vast Pacific under a brilliant sun oppressed them like a foretaste of death, like a vista of eternity. They made little progress that day."A night passed, between sleeping and waking; dawn once more showed them a deserted sea. After a couple of hours' rowing, they threw down the oars in despair. What was the use of making little dabs with a wooden blade at an ocean beyond span or circumference? Devereux says that he, too, was completely disheartened. They rested all that forenoon, waiting for a breeze. By this time the thirst had eaten into their vitals. Spots were dancing before their eyes, and frequently one of the men would insist that he saw a boat on the horizon; but after a while they learned to accept the cruelty of this delusion."Some time a little after noon, Devereux was in the stern sheets steering; he had persuaded the men to take up the oars again. He was gazing off on the port quarter, in an aimless state of misery, when all at once he thought his mind must be breaking with the thirst. A vision swam before him—a vision of a peaceful island, fringed with palm trees, crowned by a low green hill, all shimmering with heat and inverted in the sky. He says he gazed at it a long time without daring to speak; he was afraid the others wouldn't be able to see it, afraid it wasn't real. Finally he could stand the suspense no longer."'Look!' he cried, pointing 'Is anything there?'"And they saw it, too. For it was nothing but the mirage of an actual island, an indeterminate distance away. It hung in the sky like a mysterious apparition. They regarded it fixedly, with glances almost hostile, as if questioning its integrity; but the vision persisted. Then they turned the boat, and rowed like madmen throughout the afternoon. The mirage had faded in the course of an hour; but Devereux urged them on by arguments and promises, explaining the nature of the phenomenon and enlarging on their chances of deliverance. Hadn't they all seen it? It couldn't be far off; it must lie somewhere along the line of the compass bearing that he had taken."That night they rowed by watches, Devereux himself taking stroke oar with either crew. And when morning dawned, the real island lay right side up a couple of miles ahead, fair and alluring on the steel-blue rim of the sea. You can imagine the hoarse shout that went up from parched throats! Weak and wild, they struggled painfully at the oars; and shortly after sunrise the boat entered a little cove that split the front of the island, where the ground swell at once dropped off under the shelter of a curving point of land. A few strokes more, and the surf caught them. A long roller flung them high up the beach—a lucky thing, for God knows they wouldn't have had the strength to save themselves. The roller went out, leaving them planted upright on a white coral strand; in the silence before the coming of another wave, they heard the drip of a little stream running down the hillside at the head of the cove. Water! They left the boat as she was, the oars cock-billed in the rowlocks, the sail, which they'd hoisted just before dawn and had been too weak or excited to take in, flapping loose across the gunwale, and ran with the last strength in their bodies toward the sound. The rivulet had cut a shallow channel in the coral, from the jungle to the water's edge; they threw themselves face downward, buried their mouths in the stream, and drank like animals."For some time afterwards they lay as they had fallen, saturated like so many sponges, feeling the water sink into their blood. Then Devereux, who had exercised his will power and drunk as sparingly as possible, got to his feet and turned toward the jungle. A second time he thought his eyes were deceiving him. A woman stood there in the half-shadow, still grasping the branches she had parted as she stepped out on the beach. She didn't appear frightened, but gazed at him frankly in wonder and admiration. He thought she was the most beautiful creature he had ever seen. His heart went out to her in that astonishing moment of their meeting, went out freely, without restraint or volition ... and she's held it ever since, and always will. One can hardly imagine, to see him sitting over there so dejectedly, that off on the floor of the Pacific, years ago, and utterly unseen of the world of men, he lived such a transcendent moment, that such a romance came to him under the sun that we all know. It takes one back to the days of Sinbad and Urashima and Oisin."He advanced toward her, making signs of friendliness—of affection, it's to be supposed. Their hearts were free as the air, and they went naturally, like God's children, into each other's arms. She remained unafraid ... so he discovered that she loved him, too. Their meeting at the head of the beach had been unobserved; they melted together into the jungle like creatures of the light, and the boughs that she'd parted as if opening the door of life silently closed behind them."A little later he returned to the beach and aroused his crew; the men had fallen into a sort of stupor as they lay in the hot sun. The girl led them inland to the main village of her people, where they were received like gods dropped from the sky"Nichols leaned back in his chair, smiling crookedly. "The story of the advance of civilization" said he grimly "is the story of how savages have had to learn that white men aren't gods. It's an old story now—old and threadbare. It's been pretty nearly completely learned.... These people among whom Devereux and his party had fallen had never seen a white man before. The story was all new and fresh to them. But owing to the wholly exceptional circumstances, its ending didn't run according to the usual distressful formula. In fact, it resulted in a real victory."The white men were very few, to begin with; and they couldn't call on their governments, at the head of the organized world, to support and further with mechanical engines of destruction their various lusts and designs. Happily, three of them died within a week after they had landed, from the effects of that first drink of water and the intemperate eating that followed. The other three, however, rapidly recovered strength and peccancy, and began casting their eyes on the women of the village. You know the ripe, luxuriant beauty of the Marquesan women: these people were of the same root stock. It wasn't many days before a number of violent outrages had been committed, which rang around the island—a couple of husbands murdered, maidens violated, and wives put to shame."Now, these people were moral, of course, after the wise and simple code of nature; and the chief of the village was a man of character and decision. He didn't waste time in parley; when the crimes were brought home beyond peradventure, and it was seen that the gods had turned to clay, he had the offending sailors taken into custody, and himself dispatched all three of them with the same club. Later their best parts were eaten at a feast of fairly legitimate rejoicing. Devereux was spared because he had behaved himself, and because of the love of the girl, who, it appears, was the chief's daughter."We've all dreamed of a life of truth and freedom; but few of us have both won it and lost it, in the brief span of a year. You should see Devereux's eyes kindle, while he tells you of it, while he's trying to convince you that he isn't mad. The people of this island had no traditions of their origin, no legends of visits from the outside world. It happens, through the fact of prevailing winds in the Pacific, that no sailing ship route passed near this region; steamers, also, gave it a wide berth, for it didn't lie between anywhere and anywhere. It was a place apart, visited by human agency only on the remotest chance. It may well be that during a period of many years the only two vessels to wander down those particular miles of waters were the ship that left Devereux floating on the ocean and the ship that picked him up in the same spot over a year later. Thus it was that the island had remained undiscovered, peopled by a race without knowledge of the world. They were honest and lovable children—much as God intended all of us to be, I suppose, much as we might have been if we hadn't found a way temporarily to surmount our destiny."The island itself was an emerald anchored in a field of cobalt, a jewel floating on the broad bosom of the sea. The rustling palm trees waved day and night before the steady trade winds; the air hung cool in the shadows, the white surf broke on the reefs in constant thunder, and the tropical sunlight surrounded the gem like a halo of misty gold. Devereux lived there a year, and the love that came to him partook of the nature of the place—fresh, divine, alluring, rich with colour and meaning, pure as the light, true as the unchanging wind. A son was born to them. Nothing crossed their lives of sorrow or evil. They had forgotten time and its desperate occasions. The new day was but a repetition of the old."But I can't begin to show you half of the peace and beauty of that year. Ask me what the heart of man desires, and I'll answer that every element of it existed there on the island—conquest, honour, joy, creative impulse, love—enough for a dreamer or a doer, the wise design of nature with her uneasy and aspiring offsprings. Devereux grew to love the people; and because he seemed so different, yet conformed naturally to the island proprieties, they exalted him. And, marvellous to relate, he knew the worth of what he had found; he fulfilled the opportunity, he appreciated the honour, he was worthy of the romantic choice"Nichols struck the table sharply with his fist. "Beware of too much happiness!" he growled "That's another lesson of a jaundiced civilization. It isn't expedient to embrace truth too hard.... Who could have conceived an existence safer than Devereux's, or one more likely to last? The broadest ocean in the world guarded him; the place of his retreat had never been discovered. The people adored him, the arms of a great love enfolded him; and he was glad to stay. What better ramparts could life have built for his defence? But fate, the old destroyer, willed it otherwise; and he was sent back to us, to an unbelieving world—to point some obscure moral, I suppose, perhaps in an attempt to show up all the hollowness and unreality ... if we only had the eyes to see."They had saved the whaleboat, of course; Devereux used to cruise about the island in her, catching wonderful fish, for he was a sailor at heart, and couldn't keep off the water. One day something led him far off shore—a speck on the horizon, which he'd no sooner seen than he wished to investigate. It looked like a piece of wreckage, or a boat; he became suddenly excited to think of finding traces of his fellow-men. Thus the devil with a memory lured him to destruction. The object was farther away than he had at first realized; it continued for a long while to look like a boat with a man's figure propped up in one end. But when he finally came up to it, he found nothing more interesting than a tree floating half submerged with a huge root that indeed resembled, even at close range, the fancy his mind had created."About this time it fell flat calm; he noticed a heavy squall gathering on the eastern horizon. He took down the sail and started to row with two short oars which he carried for an emergency. But four or five miles lay between him and the island; before he'd covered a third of the distance, the squall met him head on."It was one of those savage arch-squalls that occur on the fringe of the trade winds once or twice in the course of a year. The island lay to windward of him; he didn't set the sail, of course, for he would have been unable to do anything but run before it. In fact, there was nothing left but to try to keep her head in the wind with the two short oars. The squall became more violent; a short choppy sea sprang up as if by magic, and spray flew from the wave-tops in blinding sheets. At last he had to give it up. He managed to save the oars; with one of them in his hand he scrambled aft. The boat sped around like a chip as his weight settled in the stern. Then she gathered headway, and he began to steer, running away from the island. Darkness was falling; he couldn't see how fast he was dropping the land. But his sailor's instinct told him all about it. As night closed in, he realized the worst; he and the whaleboat were being blown to sea."It seemed as if the squall would never end. The gale rushed at him for hours, a veritable hurricane of wind, accompanied by a deluge of warm rain. He was badly frightened, not so much for his physical safety as on account of his imagination. He says that during those long hours of tumult and darkness, a premonition of doom became as real to his fancy as if an actual spirit, an embodiment of disaster, had settled down out of the night to keep him company. He didn't feel alone—fate sailed with him."In the morning, the island had, of course, disappeared. The squall had at length passed over; the sea grew calm, and the hot sun burned down on the water. It remained calm all day, so that he couldn't use the sail. He rowed the heavy boat until his hands could barely touch the oars, steering as best he knew how by the sun. He had no compass, and his idea of the direction of the island was vague; the squall, he thought, had struck him from about E.S.E., but he couldn't be certain. It might have veered a point or two in the night, blowing him off at a new angle. And what did it matter?—for he couldn't pick out the points of the compass with the wind gone and the sun directly overhead. A horrible fear oppressed him that with all his frantic pulling he was shaping a course past the island. But which side—which side? As the day wore on, with no land appearing, this fear became a certainty."The second night was terrible; he had begun to comprehend the immensity of the ocean. He was lost on the Pacific. Nothing but a miracle of miracles would lead him back to the island. In his mind's eyes he saw a chart of the region; a dot marked the island, a smaller dot his present position—the rest was a waste of waters. Thousands of lines radiated from the smaller dot; these were the possible directions in which he might steer. Only three or four of them approached the island; the rest led nowhere."He remembered that he was far from the track of vessels. Not that he wanted to return to the world, but a vessel might help him to find the island. He was too full of life to want to die.... Scenes of the island crossed his mind with poignant intensity. They would be searching for him in their frail dug-out canoes. The women would be wailing behind the village. Would his love believe that he had left her? No, he felt her faith, across the silence. In fancy, he saw her standing at the head of the beach, where she had first appeared to him. But her face now was drawn in wild sorrow, her streaming eyes ranged the horizon as if she would pierce the veil of death. He cried out to her; but the vast cavern of the sky swallowed his words."It would have been merciful to kill him there in the boat; hunger and thirst of the body are nothing, are soon over with. But think of the surpassing cruelty of saving him! Great pains were taken to that end; winds were manipulated, a ship was selected and driven from her course; it was as if the elements had conspired together and the whole machinery of the universe had paused a moment for the consummation of the act. On a certain morning he was sighted from the quarter-deck of theVanguard; an hour later he was picked up, half dead from thirst, and babbling of an island—as mad as a hatter, of course, since the nearest land was the Marquesas, five hundred miles away"III"I've often tried to imagine Devereux's outlook on life, as he begged the captain of theVanguardthat morning to turn his ship about and institute a search for an uncharted island. How the refusal must have stunned him, with the reality still a living presence in his heart. By Jove, you know, the smell of the land lingered in his nostrils as if he'd just that moment left it; he could hear the voices, could feel the touch of lips that were barely parted from his.... But they were rough and practical on board theVanguard; they had to be, for weren't they sailing in the employment of a strictly ordered enterprise? They laughed at him, and held their course. It was then that he began to hate a world that wouldn't listen. He's used to it now; like the savages, he has learned his lesson. And his interpretation of it is accepted only as a further indication of his madness. He says simply that we have lost our souls."On the top of this, came the experience in San Francisco. To have his hopes raised so high, only to be shattered overnight when public interest threw down the new plaything, was the final stroke of disillusionment. He went back to the sea; this was his only means of livelihood, and in spite of the romantic hallucination he remained a good sailor. The ship on which he sailed from San Francisco took him south through the Pacific, along the route of homeward bound vessels. This, of all Pacific sailing routes, strikes nearest to the region where Devereux had been lost and found. But it doesn't run quite far enough to the westward actually to cross it. Devereux went to the captain, told him straight-forwardly the inwardness of his trouble and adventure, and begged him to shift the course a little—just to run to leeward, so that they might strike the longitude of the place. He didn't ask to waste any time in search. But the captain, who'd heard about his mate before he shipped him, saw nothing in this but a mild outcropping of the madness, and of course couldn't listen to the appeal. Running a ship to leeward was a matter of dollars and cents.... So they drew near the island, passed it a few hundred miles away, and left it astern as they picked up the southeast trades."This was the first of many voyages; he remained in the San Francisco trade for several years. Half a dozen times he passed the island, always leaving it far to leeward; and the memory didn't grow cold. Rather, it burned warmer and higher under this harrowing tantalization, a flame fed by hope and clarified by love. Some time, if he waited patiently, the elements would be propitious, the right chance would come."But he, too, became practical about it, recognizing that until he was his own master he wouldn't be free to seize a chance if it came his way. He saved his money, and worked hard to advance his reputation. In due time he was rewarded with the command of a little barque. For a number of voyages his owners sent him to the China Sea; it was at this time that I first met him, to fall under the spell of his romantic destiny. At last, however, he arrived in Singapore one voyage to learn that he'd been chartered to carry coals from Newcastle, New South Wales, to San Francisco. He felt a wonderful elation at the news. It looked like his long-awaited opportunity."In the natural order of things, you know, on the passage from Newcastle to California, he would cross the Pacific in the westerlies below the southeast trades, strike north through the trade winds close hauled on the starboard tack, fetch within a reasonable distance of the coast of Mexico, pick up the northeast trades there, and take a weatherly departure for the last stage of the journey. By crossing the equator in 135° west longitude he would be thrown to leeward heavily on that last stage. But he must chance it; no one would know, and he could make his easting in the North Pacific, above the trades. Chance it?—he couldn't have failed to accept the opening, his whole life was centred on the play. God knows, he'd waited long enough, devotedly enough, for deliverance from this protracted anguish, for the resumption of happiness, for another glimpse of the form of love and beauty, for a sight of the island that more and more appeared to him in the nature of a vivid dream."And, by Jove, when he got there, he couldn't find it! It didn't seem, to be in existence any longer; at least, it wasn't to be discovered in the region where he had expected to come across it. He couldn't remember the exact latitude and longitude, you'll remember, although he had an approximate position which ought to have served the purpose. He cruised in the locality for over a week, backward and forward, around and around, combing every square mile of its waters; but he saw no sign of land. He had a terrible feeling that he might have passed it by night, that if the night could have been turned to day he might have caught a glimpse of it on the distant horizon. It was at night, he says, that the sense of its nearness was most acute, an ethereal presence lying all about him in the soft, impenetrable obscurity. At times he could almost smell the land. He felt that she, too, had remembered, and had remained faithful to him; that the pain and longing in her heart hung in mysterious vibrations about the island, to guide him to her if ever he came that way. But, as of old, he couldn't tell the direction; it was always his bitter fate to lack a compass at the crises of life. He didn't find either the island or the rock that had split theEvening Star; and in the end he had to go away."He tried again, some years later, but with the same lack of success. I have an idea that his latitude and longitude were away off; yet the place where he had been picked up was exact enough. Or perhaps ... But what's the use of speculating on a hypothesis without tangible grounds? He couldn't find the island.Heis the story—as you see him over there."By this time a hopeless melancholy had settled on him; yet he persisted in what he conceived to be the main business of life. His faith, indeed, was unquestioning; he apparently couldn't have done otherwise, and all his days and designs arranged themselves around this central purpose as naturally as mists rise to the sun. He left the sea, and went into the pearl fishing enterprise down on the north coast of Australia. He wanted to make money—and he made it. As soon as he possessed the means, he bought a schooner, fitted her up for a year's cruise, and disappeared over the eastern rim of the Pacific. It was well over a year, in fact, before he turned up again."I happened to be in Singapore when he arrived from that first cruise. Going down the Jetty late one afternoon to lake my sampan, I met him wandering in the opposite direction. One look at his face told me that he'd failed again. He had come in at noon, wasn't going anywhere, didn't know what he wanted to do. I took him aboard with me to supper, and we had a long evening on deck under the awning."'Devereux, has it ever occurred to you that the island may have sunk in a volcanic disturbance?' I suggested, after he'd gone over the affair for the twentieth time."The idea gave him comfort, strange as it may seem; he could contemplate the entire destruction of his beloved as an event of minor importance. It offered something to fall back on, in his mental agony; a practical explanation to dull the edge of the frantic feeling that all the while the island existed, if he could only find it. When I noted how he devoured the suggestion, I enlarged on its possibility."'You see, you haven't been able to find the rock, either' I pointed out 'And I remember you told me there wasn't any coral formation in the neighbourhood of that rock. A sure sign of recent volcanic activity. I'd be willing to bet that it hadn't been on the surface very long; it had been poked up recently for your especial benefit. And where volcanic action is busy poking things up, it's just as liable to sink them down again'"'But the island had been there a long while' he objected 'It had a coral reef all the way round; our boat crossed it by a miracle that morning. And the people, Nichols—people don't rise full grown from the sea, or drop down out of the air'"I wondered whether they didn't, in this case. 'Never mind, this was the way of it' said I 'The rock was an indication of volcanic action that hadn't yet extended to the island. But the whole area was in danger, and the next outbreak, which happened to be one of depression, dragged down the island, too'"We left the question pending, and went our various ways. Now and then I'd run into him, wandering about the world, as the years went by. He's never wholly given up the search. The singular thing about it is that material fortune has fairly pursued him. He's made a lot of money, and sunk it all in fruitless expeditions. Too bad it is that he didn't possess a scientific bent; he knows all there is to know of the Pacific islands on their practical side—that is, on the side that isn't worth knowing"Nichols struck the table again. "Well, what do you think of it?" he demanded "There he goes, now—alone, always alone. Why was he sent back to us? What's his obscure moral? Do you get any hint?""Nichols, do you yourself believe in the reality of this island?" I asked.He glanced at me keenly. "Isn't that wholly beside the point?" said he "I don't believe the island exists to-day, if that is what you mean. But there's a year in an open boat, back at the beginning of the record, to be explained. The point is that he believes in the island. By Jove, he remembers it—do you understand? See that droop in his back, as he stands absently looking out of the door? He's growing old, and the woman would be past middle age to-day, and the boy would be a man; but they have a trick of remaining young in his memory. Oh, he faces the fact, of course, in his practical moments; wonders what they have come to, whether the boy ever matured, whether the woman waited, or gave him up for lost and married another man. He can speak about these things, because he's quite determined to believe that the island is sunk under the ocean, that they're all dead. But when the moon's out, and he gets to dreaming, they come back to him just as he left them, a young and beautiful woman with a child at her breast, both of them perfectly alive. How can you ask me ... whether I believe in the island?"
X
"Two nights later, under a clear starry sky, we slipped through Lymoon Pass on the tail of the land breeze. Before we reached Wanchi, it fell flat calm. We shipped the long sweeps and began to row; the chattering crew, who'd never expected to see Hong Kong again, fell to work willingly. The lights of the city twinkled against the Peak, the sleeping fleet swung at anchor in the landlocked harbour; all was silence and tranquillity ... as we see it now. But that night, let me tell you, the familiar scene was invested with a poignant charm. At length we reached the bulkhead, from which we'd taken our maniac departure three days before, and settled in our berth as comfortably as if we'd just returned from a pleasure trip down the bay.
"No words were said as we came in. I sat against the bulwarks, almost afraid to move, like a man awakening to consciousness after a long siege of fever. A little forward of my position, Wilbur rose to his feet. He hadn't spoken or touched food since that tragic hour under the reefs two nights before; had spent most of his time below decks, locked in a tiny stateroom, and had come out only in the last few minutes, as if in response to the nearing sounds of the land. He stood at the rail, a figure wrapped in silence and immobility, watching them berth the sampan. Then, without a glance in our direction, he walked to the gangway and stepped ashore. On the bulkhead he paused for a moment irresolute, turning and gazing across the harbour. His form stood out plainly against a bright light up the street. It had lost those lines of vigour and alertness; it was the figure of a different and older man. A broken figure, that could never again be the same....
"A moment later he had lurched away, vanishing suddenly in the darkness of a side street. Three days afterwards, we heard that he had taken the boat for Singapore. He hasn't been seen or heard of in this part of the world since that day.
"When he had gone, that night at the bulkhead Lee Fu approached me; we crossed the deck of the sampan, and stood for a long while silent at the harbour rail.
"'Thank you, Captain' said he at last 'As I foresaw, it has been supremely interesting. For your part, I hope you feel repaid?'
"'It's quite enough to be alive, just now' I confessed without shame 'I want to see a chart of that locality, Lee Fu. I want to find out what you did'
"'Oh, that? It was not much. The gods were always with us, as you must have observed. As for the rest of it, I know that region pretty well'
"'Evidently.... Did theSpeedwellfetch up among those same reefs, or to leeward of them?'
"'TheSpeedwell? Captain, you did not believe my little pleasantry? We were nowhere near the wreck of theSpeedwell, at any time—as Captain Wilbur should have known, had he retained his mental perspective'
"I smiled feebly. 'Well, I didn't know it. Tell me another thing, Lee Fu. Were you bluffing, there at the last, or was there really no passage through the reef?'
"'So far as I am aware, Captain, there was no passage. I believe we were heading for solid rock when we came into the wind'
"The answer surprised me. 'Would you have piled us up' I asked 'if Wilbur hadn't given in?'
"'That is a hypothetical question. I knew perfectly well that I should not be forced to do it. I was only afraid lest, in the final anguish, Captain Wilbur might lose his seaman's judgment, and so might wait too long. That, I confess, would have been unfortunate. Otherwise, there was no especial doubt or danger'
"'I'm glad to hear it!' I exclaimed, with a shudder of recollection 'It wasn't apparent at the time'
"'No, perhaps not. Time was very swift, just then. I will tell you now, Captain Nichols, that I myself had begun to grow alarmed. He waited very long. He was more wilful than I had fully anticipated; a strong, determined man, and an arch-criminal. But, as it chanced, this made it the more interesting'
"I didn't care to argue such a subtle point. 'What did you have in mind, Lee Fu' I asked 'before the typhoon shifted? Did you expect the centre of it to catch us?'
"The question seemed to amuse him. 'Captain, I had no plan' he explained in a puzzled tone 'It is dangerous to make plans, or to live according to a fixed design. There was a task to be begun; the determination of its direction and result lay with the gods. It was plain to me that I had been called upon to act; beyond that I neither saw nor cared to see. Action once begun, I seized events as they came my way.... How characteristic that you ask me for my plan! Would you have the temerity to inquire into the divine control of events? Or do you think that a man really may make a plan?'
"I could believe his statement only because I'd witnessed his incredible calmness.
"He waved a hand toward the city. 'Come, my friend, let us sleep' said he 'We have earned our rest—and that is something not always won from life. But beware of over-confidence, and never plan. It is by straining to see the future that men exhaust themselves for present usefulness. It is by daring to make plans that men bring down on their heads the wrath of heaven. We are the instruments of the gods; through us, they put their own plans in operation. The only failure in life is not to hear when the gods command. In this case, however, there could have been no question; the design was too apparent. From the first, I was sure and happy. There were constantly too many propitious signs'"
THE UNCHARTED ISLE
THE UNCHARTED ISLE
I
"They say the man is mad" I whispered, nodding across the room "Pendleton pointed him out to me in Wellington Street this morning"
Nichols gave his twisted smile. "Yes, mad, or inspired, or something very wonderful. Who is competent to judge? But I haven't seen him up this way for a long while. Another expedition must be on foot in search of the Uncharted Isle"
"What's that? You know him, then?"
"Perhaps I am the only man in the East who does know him, in the proper sense of the word. Every one else listens, laughs, and passes on. But I believe. Yes, in spite of ridicule and life's disaster, I continue to believe ... well, not so much in the fact itself, as in the man. By Jove, he's faithful—and that, you must admit, is marvel enough. And his madness isn't entirely impossible; it can be explained. Yet it strikes the world as being funny—and that's his crowning misfortune. A man in search of a lost and apparently non-existent island can't help being a little ridiculous, I suppose, until he becomes a thundering bore. For no one else, of course, is looking for such a thing, or wants to find one. We keep safely within the charted area.... But let me tell you the story, and you can form your own opinion. Don't attract his attention; he won't notice us here in the shadow"
There used to be a certain tea-house in Hong Kong, the name of which was jealously guarded from touring vandals. It opened on the face of an enchanted terrace high above the harbour and the town; from the parapet the eye travelled inland over the low peninsula of Kowloon, as far as the foothills of China, the fringe of a mighty land veiled in mystery. Romance came to that terrace, filtering through lacy bamboo leaves, borne on the night breeze along with the fragrance of flowers and the music of hidden voices. The place wasn't a temple of the conventional. It isn't running now; the songs are still, the little cups no longer tinkle in the half-darkness, and no sweet, startled faces, peep out at visitors from behind the dragon-screens.
Nichols and I had been sitting there some time that evening, when the man came in. Of course Nichols knew him; who with any pretentious to a history wasn't catalogued in his omnivorous files? While I waited, I listened to a rapid conversation in Chinese somewhere in the back of the establishment. Dusk had swallowed the white houses and green slopes below us; the riding lights on the harbour had begun to prick out the berths of ships; with the coming of night, voices seemed hushed among the yellow lanterns.
"What is madness? Who will lay down the line between madness and sanity?" demanded Nichols suddenly "They are like right and wrong, or good and evil .... much as you want to believe. If we dared for a moment to face the logic of existence, I think we should find that we're all a little mad, each in his own way. An entirely sane man would sort of puff out, like a candle. It's our madness that keeps us going, feeds the flame. The world's an illusion, anyway, of course; ergo, why aren't the maddest people the sanest? Certainly, the maddest man of all would be he who tried to define the states of the human mind.
"For that's beyond our province. They say, for instance, that Devereux is mad: what they mean is that they can't fathom him. His life, likewise, hasn't been charted. Well, what's the difficulty? All the lives and islands haven't been discovered yet. And there are certain bald facts, written in black-and-white records, that seem to support his claim...."
A waxy Chinaman changed our tea. Nichols gazed thoughtfully into the soft darkness beyond the terrace, getting his story under way.
"Devereux is no longer a young man, as you see" he began slowly "I'd say he was about our own age. He was born and reared, I believe, in our own New England, though I've never heard the name of his home town. I presume he had parents there once, brothers and sisters, maybe a sweetheart. The Devereuxs, you know, are a fine family, with strains of originality cropping out here and there, which might once in a while have amounted to genius in a free atmosphere. They're a high-strung breed. I'd be willing to affirm that, even before the episode of the island, this particular Devereux was a serious and romantic soul. Look at his face, hanging in the glow of that lantern. Temperament, sensibility, melancholy.... But what he was, and what he might have been, are both sunk in the tremendous distances of a lifetime, obscured by the apparition of an island, the wraith of a tragic destiny.
"He went to sea, in the wake of his generation. At the age of twenty-one, he had worked up from the forecastle to a room on the port side of the forward cabin; in due time he became first mate of the shipEvening Star. I forget who was captain of her, or what was the name of the second mate who managed to reach Callao in the whaleboat. Those who survived the disaster have vanished along with those who never returned, and Devereux alone has perpetuated the event in nautical history because of a madness that descended on him out of the sky.
"They sailed from New York for San Francisco in a year that is likewise immaterial, and had a long and tedious passage round the Horn. It was one of those unlucky and exasperating voyages, you know—calms, and even trade winds, and unseasonable storms; so that when they finally got headed north in the Pacific, they were a disheartened ship's company. The southeast trades in the Pacific failed them completely; whatever wind they found, from 20 south up to the line, came from the east and north; and with the best course they could make, the ship was crowded over far to the westward of the regular track. Then, as they approached the line, the northeast breeze settled down in earnest, and nothing for it but to hold her on a N.N.W. course, as close to the wind as possible on the starboard tack. They managed to weather the fringe of the South Sea Islands by a few hundred miles, and drifted across the line somewhere in the neighbourhood of 135° west longitude. Provisions and water were holding out well, though one hundred and seventy-five days had passed since they'd lost sight of Sandy Hook.
"One evening in the early dog-watch, they noticed a few land birds flying about the ship. Devereux told me they were quite excited over the incident for an hour or two, with the quick sympathy of sailors for an unusual manifestation of life-forces. The nearest land at that time was the Marquesas, five hundred miles away to the southward. Some of the men tried to entice the birds to alight on deck or in the rigging, but they didn't seem at all weary, and scorned the blandishments of food.
"'Wonderful creatures—birds' said the captain, as they were discussing the occurrence on the quarter-deck 'Five hundred miles isn't a drop in the bucket to them. All the bob-o'-links at home go to Brazil and back every winter'
"'They've probably run over from the Marquesas since supper' chimed in the second mate 'Half an hour from now they'll be back there, perching on some tree above an island beauty. God, I'd like to be a bird!'
"But Devereux demurred to their conclusion—he knew something of the habits of birds. 'That's all right in the migrating season, but these birds don't migrate' said he 'You can see that they aren't bound anywhere in particular. And land birds don't fly five hundred miles to sea for the fun of going back again. They do get tuckered, too. I think it's mighty strange'
"He had the first watch. It was one of those typical Pacific nights—a velvet sky, a smooth sea, the air somehow expressing the character of an ocean illimitable and magnificent, an ocean that spreads like the floor of the universe. After the captain had gone below for the night, Devereux cast his imagination adrift to follow those birds, to see the land again. What could their visit have meant? Was there any land nearer than the Marquesas—perhaps an uninhabited island? He promised himself a careful survey of the chart when he went below at midnight.... He'd been thinking in this desultory fashion some time, lost in the dreams of night watches, when a sharp cry from forward struck him like a knife flying through the darkness.
"You know those single cries on shipboard, in the dead of night—cries of warning, of apprehension, of impending danger. The heart stops for a moment at the sound. Then a thousand possibilities crowd into the mind at once, a thousand processes of thought leap into action. There can be no indecision; moments are priceless. And there must be no mistake.
"The cry met him a second time as he passed the mizzen rigging, running forward. 'Breakers ahead!' Instinctively, he shouted the order over his shoulder as he ran.
"'Put the helm down!Hard down! Hard down!'
"But it was too late to save her. He told me that he paused at the break of the poop, listening, and in a sudden hush that went over the ship, heard distinctly a low sucking sound under the bows—the horrible gasping of water over rocks awash. He clung to the rail, cowed by the only fear a sailor knows. At that moment, she struck heavily, and stood still. She had been making about five knots, enough to give her plenty of momentum. The shock was terrific: some of the top-hamper crashed to the deck, and the voices of men suddenly broke out in screams of terror. The ship rose a little by the head, seemed to draw back, and surged forward again with a dull, rending, sickening plunge.
"But what's the need to rehearse the details of that oldest tragedy of the sea? There was time enough for them to get out the boats, time enough, even, to fully provision them—and that's more than some have been allowed. But the ship was dead and done for. Her whole bow must have been stove in under water. Five minutes after they pushed clear of her, she slumped like a rock, and they lost her in the darkness. A whirlpool of foam showed for a while on the surface of the black water. Then that, too, faded; and the wide, open Pacific received them in their three boats as frail as cockle-shells, and the velvet night covered it all.
"The captain commanded the longboat, the second mate and Devereux had a whaleboat apiece. Devereux's was the smallest; his crew consisted of six men besides himself. The boats drew together on the quiet water for a consultation. A deep stillness invested the place, the stillness of a lofty cavern, of an empty world; and somewhere off in the gloom that awful sucking sound went on, now loud, now dying out to a faint echo, like a demon chuckling over human disaster.
"All night they played hide-and-seek with that demon in the darkness. The breeze fell off, and after a while it grew flat calm. At times the voice of the reef was hoarse and low and languid; at times it purred and bubbled energetically; at times it would be silent so long that they'd lean over the gunwale to listen, thinking they had lost it—when unexpectedly it would snarl out again, close at hand. In the middle of the night they did seem to be really losing the sound, and were afraid they'd drifted from the vicinity; they bent to the oars rather aimlessly, for no one could judge the exact direction, and before they knew it were almost running afoul of the hideous thing. Some of the men swore that the sound moved on the water; this seemed plausible, for it was to be supposed that the reef extended a considerable distance, yet the notion nevertheless gave rise to a vague superstitious fear. Either it moved, or they were surrounded by a nest of reefs—one was about as bad as the other. Devereux said it was a night to drive a nervous man crazy, a night that they began to think would never end.
"When dawn came at last, they looked about them and saw nothing at all—nothing but an unbroken horizon, a boundless ocean, a few spars floating idly in the midst of a great calm, and a little dark dot like a pimple on the face of the waters, just in front of the rising sun.
"They rowed toward this pimple on the surface. It opened and closed with the sucking motion of a loose mouth, and between the monstrous flickering lips of water a point of rock protruded, black and swollen like the tongue of a drowned man. It seemed impossible that this solitary rock had made all the commotion of the night, had invested them as if with an army of breakers; yet there was absolutely nothing else in sight—the rest had been imagination.
"They rowed across the south face of the rock, where the ship had struck, and found the water there deep past all knowing. The rock wasn't coral, and no coral formation surrounded it. In the clear blue water beneath them huge banners of kelp waved and winnowed like lifeless hands. Not a vestige of theEvening Starremained; she had disappeared in the unfathomable gulfs of the Pacific. It was a mere crag that had caught her, a needle-point piercing the floor of an otherwise unobstructed ocean, the topmost spire of some mighty mountain sunk in the bowels of the world. It may never before have been seen by mortal man; it certainly wasn't indicated on the best charts of that day. She would have had to seek a thousand years to touch it. A ship's length either side would have cleared her....
"They waited beside the rock till noon, to get an observation. Then they rowed away to the northward, bound for the Sandwich Islands. The dark spot on the water dwindled and disappeared in their wake. Devereux told me that, quite unaccountably, he felt his heart sinking as they lost sight of it; after all, it was their only link with a remote and perhaps unattainable world.
"The first night after the disaster, a heavy squall separated the boats. They couldn't find each other, and never came together again. The second mate reached Callao after a terrible journey, the first to report the loss of theEvening Star. He had been nearly swamped in that first squall. For two days he had hunted frantically for the other boats. Then, not being a good navigator, and having a very imperfect chart of the Pacific Islands, he had changed his course and steered due east, knowing that he would strike the American continent if he could keep on going. The fact of his arrival in Callao, its date, and his reported date of the disaster, are beyond dispute; for my own satisfaction, I have looked these matters up in the official records.
"The captain, in the longboat, was never heard of again. Him and his crew the Pacific took for toll.
"Devereux was picked up at sea, alive, well, and alone in theEvening Star'ssmall whaleboat,exactly one year and three months after the ship went down"
"Easy, Nichols!" I remonstrated "Say that again, please. You can't expect me to swallow it whole at the first try"
"Those are the facts, I tell you" said Nichols calmly "I have also verified this latter statement, through correspondence with the captain who picked him up. It really happened—and the dates were as I said. He was picked up just north of the equator in the Pacific Ocean by the shipVanguard, and brought in to San Francisco. I was informed by the captain of theVanguardthat he had been driven out of his course by meeting the northeast trade winds too far south, and had sighted Devereux adrift one morning in about 135° west and 2° north. The man was nearly dead from thirst, and was quite mad when they took him aboard; raved about an island nearby, said he'd been blown away from it, and begged them to cruise in search of it before they left the ground. There was no island in that vicinity, of course, nearer than the Marquesas. 'I was sorry for the poor fellow' the captain of theVanguardwrote me 'but we couldn't waste time in indulging his fancy. He quieted down after a day or two, and seemed to settle into a sort of dull melancholy'
"This castaway, giving his name as Devereux, claimed to have been mate of theEvening Star, lost in that same quarter of the Pacific the year before. The people on theVanguardhad heard nothing of this disaster; in fact, the first report of it, brought in by the second mate, had just reached San Francisco from Callao when they got in. To corroborate the story, however, the whaleboat in which Devereux had been picked up had presented a battered and weather-beaten appearance, her paint peeling off and her bottom badly scarred, as if she'd been used a good while on the beach; and on her stern they had been able to decipher the letters—ENI-G —AR. Devereux claimed that his ship had touched a needle of rock and had sunk immediately; but no danger of that nature was laid down on theVanguard'schart. A year later, as a result of these conflicting and sensational tales, the United States Government sent a gunboat to look for the rock, perhaps with secret instructions to keep a weather eye open for Devereux's island; but nothing was to be found. Devereux couldn't remember theEvening Star'sexact latitude and longitude on the day before the disaster; his records and instruments had vanished along with his crew in the heart of a deep mystery. And the second mate, who alone came in in regular order, was a poor navigator, you'll remember, and may easily have made an error about the place of his departure. At any rate, nothing was to be found. On the charts of the Hydrographic Office to-day you'll see, in that position, a dotted circle, marked Evening Star Rock, with an interrogation point after the name.
"Devereux's story was a nine days' wonder in San Francisco, confirmed in substance as it was by the recent authentic report from Callao. The newspapers made good copy of it. Many believed him outright; a man doesn't float about in the Pacific for over a year and emerge from the experience in robust health, without there being some simple and practical explanation. Yet sensational publicity quickly prejudiced the case, as it invariably does. After the first flush of pleasurable excitement, public interest began to put him down either as a hoax or a madman, and then promptly forgot him. One of the papers tried to start a subscription for a schooner, so that he might search for his island, but it met with little response. The return wave of prosaic life rolled over him, left him submerged and helpless. For a while he went about seeking sympathy and assistance, but his melancholy tale soon came to be a nuisance, doors were shut in his face, and men avoided him.
"At length he had the good sense to go away. He wandered to the East, moved about from place to place. The story followed him, distorted in the passage of time. And so we meet him here, a man with a strange hallucination—an interesting case, and romantic, but unquestionably mad"
II
Nichols leaned toward me, his eyes kindling. "Let me take you back to the morning after the squall that separated the boats" said he "The sun rose in a clear sky; the quick tropical storm had entirely disappeared. Devereux looked about him, and saw no sign of the others. One hardly realizes, until one has experienced the fact, how easy it is for boats to become separated in the night, especially under severe conditions of weather, or how rapidly a dozen miles may spring up between them. And a dozen might as well be as many hundreds, for all chances of their coming together again. The wind had died to a baffling breeze that seemed to be trying to blow from all directions at once. Devereux had no chronometer—nothing but a pocket watch, a sextant, a compass, and an old general chart of the Pacific. After an hour's study of his situation, he came to a quick decision. The chart and the pocket watch couldn't be trusted to get him to the Sandwich Islands; like the second mate, somewhere within a radius of twenty-five miles from him at that moment, he changed the boat's course and steered due east in search of a continent.
"While they were getting up the sail to catch a wandering air that seemed to have settled in the west, a man forward shouted in tones of horror that the water cask was empty. A frantic investigation verified the fact. An oar carelessly thrown down had loosened the plug in the head of the cask, and their precious supply of water was washing around in the bottom of the boat. They tasted it, but found it too salt to drink; the boat, fresh from the top of the forward house, was leaking quite a little.
"Then began the nightmare of heat and thirst. The sun that day was pitiless. They had no luck with the wind, which soon fell flat calm; the exertion of rowing added to the misery. Not a drop of rain fell. By noon, the horror of the first day's thirst had begun to grip them; by nightfall it had them cowed and broken, whining for water. It's that first day which is always the worst, you know—until the end. Devereux still hoped that he might pick up one of the other boats, and all hands kept a sharp lookout; but the hope died as the hours wore on. The sheer loneliness of the vast Pacific under a brilliant sun oppressed them like a foretaste of death, like a vista of eternity. They made little progress that day.
"A night passed, between sleeping and waking; dawn once more showed them a deserted sea. After a couple of hours' rowing, they threw down the oars in despair. What was the use of making little dabs with a wooden blade at an ocean beyond span or circumference? Devereux says that he, too, was completely disheartened. They rested all that forenoon, waiting for a breeze. By this time the thirst had eaten into their vitals. Spots were dancing before their eyes, and frequently one of the men would insist that he saw a boat on the horizon; but after a while they learned to accept the cruelty of this delusion.
"Some time a little after noon, Devereux was in the stern sheets steering; he had persuaded the men to take up the oars again. He was gazing off on the port quarter, in an aimless state of misery, when all at once he thought his mind must be breaking with the thirst. A vision swam before him—a vision of a peaceful island, fringed with palm trees, crowned by a low green hill, all shimmering with heat and inverted in the sky. He says he gazed at it a long time without daring to speak; he was afraid the others wouldn't be able to see it, afraid it wasn't real. Finally he could stand the suspense no longer.
"'Look!' he cried, pointing 'Is anything there?'
"And they saw it, too. For it was nothing but the mirage of an actual island, an indeterminate distance away. It hung in the sky like a mysterious apparition. They regarded it fixedly, with glances almost hostile, as if questioning its integrity; but the vision persisted. Then they turned the boat, and rowed like madmen throughout the afternoon. The mirage had faded in the course of an hour; but Devereux urged them on by arguments and promises, explaining the nature of the phenomenon and enlarging on their chances of deliverance. Hadn't they all seen it? It couldn't be far off; it must lie somewhere along the line of the compass bearing that he had taken.
"That night they rowed by watches, Devereux himself taking stroke oar with either crew. And when morning dawned, the real island lay right side up a couple of miles ahead, fair and alluring on the steel-blue rim of the sea. You can imagine the hoarse shout that went up from parched throats! Weak and wild, they struggled painfully at the oars; and shortly after sunrise the boat entered a little cove that split the front of the island, where the ground swell at once dropped off under the shelter of a curving point of land. A few strokes more, and the surf caught them. A long roller flung them high up the beach—a lucky thing, for God knows they wouldn't have had the strength to save themselves. The roller went out, leaving them planted upright on a white coral strand; in the silence before the coming of another wave, they heard the drip of a little stream running down the hillside at the head of the cove. Water! They left the boat as she was, the oars cock-billed in the rowlocks, the sail, which they'd hoisted just before dawn and had been too weak or excited to take in, flapping loose across the gunwale, and ran with the last strength in their bodies toward the sound. The rivulet had cut a shallow channel in the coral, from the jungle to the water's edge; they threw themselves face downward, buried their mouths in the stream, and drank like animals.
"For some time afterwards they lay as they had fallen, saturated like so many sponges, feeling the water sink into their blood. Then Devereux, who had exercised his will power and drunk as sparingly as possible, got to his feet and turned toward the jungle. A second time he thought his eyes were deceiving him. A woman stood there in the half-shadow, still grasping the branches she had parted as she stepped out on the beach. She didn't appear frightened, but gazed at him frankly in wonder and admiration. He thought she was the most beautiful creature he had ever seen. His heart went out to her in that astonishing moment of their meeting, went out freely, without restraint or volition ... and she's held it ever since, and always will. One can hardly imagine, to see him sitting over there so dejectedly, that off on the floor of the Pacific, years ago, and utterly unseen of the world of men, he lived such a transcendent moment, that such a romance came to him under the sun that we all know. It takes one back to the days of Sinbad and Urashima and Oisin.
"He advanced toward her, making signs of friendliness—of affection, it's to be supposed. Their hearts were free as the air, and they went naturally, like God's children, into each other's arms. She remained unafraid ... so he discovered that she loved him, too. Their meeting at the head of the beach had been unobserved; they melted together into the jungle like creatures of the light, and the boughs that she'd parted as if opening the door of life silently closed behind them.
"A little later he returned to the beach and aroused his crew; the men had fallen into a sort of stupor as they lay in the hot sun. The girl led them inland to the main village of her people, where they were received like gods dropped from the sky"
Nichols leaned back in his chair, smiling crookedly. "The story of the advance of civilization" said he grimly "is the story of how savages have had to learn that white men aren't gods. It's an old story now—old and threadbare. It's been pretty nearly completely learned.... These people among whom Devereux and his party had fallen had never seen a white man before. The story was all new and fresh to them. But owing to the wholly exceptional circumstances, its ending didn't run according to the usual distressful formula. In fact, it resulted in a real victory.
"The white men were very few, to begin with; and they couldn't call on their governments, at the head of the organized world, to support and further with mechanical engines of destruction their various lusts and designs. Happily, three of them died within a week after they had landed, from the effects of that first drink of water and the intemperate eating that followed. The other three, however, rapidly recovered strength and peccancy, and began casting their eyes on the women of the village. You know the ripe, luxuriant beauty of the Marquesan women: these people were of the same root stock. It wasn't many days before a number of violent outrages had been committed, which rang around the island—a couple of husbands murdered, maidens violated, and wives put to shame.
"Now, these people were moral, of course, after the wise and simple code of nature; and the chief of the village was a man of character and decision. He didn't waste time in parley; when the crimes were brought home beyond peradventure, and it was seen that the gods had turned to clay, he had the offending sailors taken into custody, and himself dispatched all three of them with the same club. Later their best parts were eaten at a feast of fairly legitimate rejoicing. Devereux was spared because he had behaved himself, and because of the love of the girl, who, it appears, was the chief's daughter.
"We've all dreamed of a life of truth and freedom; but few of us have both won it and lost it, in the brief span of a year. You should see Devereux's eyes kindle, while he tells you of it, while he's trying to convince you that he isn't mad. The people of this island had no traditions of their origin, no legends of visits from the outside world. It happens, through the fact of prevailing winds in the Pacific, that no sailing ship route passed near this region; steamers, also, gave it a wide berth, for it didn't lie between anywhere and anywhere. It was a place apart, visited by human agency only on the remotest chance. It may well be that during a period of many years the only two vessels to wander down those particular miles of waters were the ship that left Devereux floating on the ocean and the ship that picked him up in the same spot over a year later. Thus it was that the island had remained undiscovered, peopled by a race without knowledge of the world. They were honest and lovable children—much as God intended all of us to be, I suppose, much as we might have been if we hadn't found a way temporarily to surmount our destiny.
"The island itself was an emerald anchored in a field of cobalt, a jewel floating on the broad bosom of the sea. The rustling palm trees waved day and night before the steady trade winds; the air hung cool in the shadows, the white surf broke on the reefs in constant thunder, and the tropical sunlight surrounded the gem like a halo of misty gold. Devereux lived there a year, and the love that came to him partook of the nature of the place—fresh, divine, alluring, rich with colour and meaning, pure as the light, true as the unchanging wind. A son was born to them. Nothing crossed their lives of sorrow or evil. They had forgotten time and its desperate occasions. The new day was but a repetition of the old.
"But I can't begin to show you half of the peace and beauty of that year. Ask me what the heart of man desires, and I'll answer that every element of it existed there on the island—conquest, honour, joy, creative impulse, love—enough for a dreamer or a doer, the wise design of nature with her uneasy and aspiring offsprings. Devereux grew to love the people; and because he seemed so different, yet conformed naturally to the island proprieties, they exalted him. And, marvellous to relate, he knew the worth of what he had found; he fulfilled the opportunity, he appreciated the honour, he was worthy of the romantic choice"
Nichols struck the table sharply with his fist. "Beware of too much happiness!" he growled "That's another lesson of a jaundiced civilization. It isn't expedient to embrace truth too hard.... Who could have conceived an existence safer than Devereux's, or one more likely to last? The broadest ocean in the world guarded him; the place of his retreat had never been discovered. The people adored him, the arms of a great love enfolded him; and he was glad to stay. What better ramparts could life have built for his defence? But fate, the old destroyer, willed it otherwise; and he was sent back to us, to an unbelieving world—to point some obscure moral, I suppose, perhaps in an attempt to show up all the hollowness and unreality ... if we only had the eyes to see.
"They had saved the whaleboat, of course; Devereux used to cruise about the island in her, catching wonderful fish, for he was a sailor at heart, and couldn't keep off the water. One day something led him far off shore—a speck on the horizon, which he'd no sooner seen than he wished to investigate. It looked like a piece of wreckage, or a boat; he became suddenly excited to think of finding traces of his fellow-men. Thus the devil with a memory lured him to destruction. The object was farther away than he had at first realized; it continued for a long while to look like a boat with a man's figure propped up in one end. But when he finally came up to it, he found nothing more interesting than a tree floating half submerged with a huge root that indeed resembled, even at close range, the fancy his mind had created.
"About this time it fell flat calm; he noticed a heavy squall gathering on the eastern horizon. He took down the sail and started to row with two short oars which he carried for an emergency. But four or five miles lay between him and the island; before he'd covered a third of the distance, the squall met him head on.
"It was one of those savage arch-squalls that occur on the fringe of the trade winds once or twice in the course of a year. The island lay to windward of him; he didn't set the sail, of course, for he would have been unable to do anything but run before it. In fact, there was nothing left but to try to keep her head in the wind with the two short oars. The squall became more violent; a short choppy sea sprang up as if by magic, and spray flew from the wave-tops in blinding sheets. At last he had to give it up. He managed to save the oars; with one of them in his hand he scrambled aft. The boat sped around like a chip as his weight settled in the stern. Then she gathered headway, and he began to steer, running away from the island. Darkness was falling; he couldn't see how fast he was dropping the land. But his sailor's instinct told him all about it. As night closed in, he realized the worst; he and the whaleboat were being blown to sea.
"It seemed as if the squall would never end. The gale rushed at him for hours, a veritable hurricane of wind, accompanied by a deluge of warm rain. He was badly frightened, not so much for his physical safety as on account of his imagination. He says that during those long hours of tumult and darkness, a premonition of doom became as real to his fancy as if an actual spirit, an embodiment of disaster, had settled down out of the night to keep him company. He didn't feel alone—fate sailed with him.
"In the morning, the island had, of course, disappeared. The squall had at length passed over; the sea grew calm, and the hot sun burned down on the water. It remained calm all day, so that he couldn't use the sail. He rowed the heavy boat until his hands could barely touch the oars, steering as best he knew how by the sun. He had no compass, and his idea of the direction of the island was vague; the squall, he thought, had struck him from about E.S.E., but he couldn't be certain. It might have veered a point or two in the night, blowing him off at a new angle. And what did it matter?—for he couldn't pick out the points of the compass with the wind gone and the sun directly overhead. A horrible fear oppressed him that with all his frantic pulling he was shaping a course past the island. But which side—which side? As the day wore on, with no land appearing, this fear became a certainty.
"The second night was terrible; he had begun to comprehend the immensity of the ocean. He was lost on the Pacific. Nothing but a miracle of miracles would lead him back to the island. In his mind's eyes he saw a chart of the region; a dot marked the island, a smaller dot his present position—the rest was a waste of waters. Thousands of lines radiated from the smaller dot; these were the possible directions in which he might steer. Only three or four of them approached the island; the rest led nowhere.
"He remembered that he was far from the track of vessels. Not that he wanted to return to the world, but a vessel might help him to find the island. He was too full of life to want to die.... Scenes of the island crossed his mind with poignant intensity. They would be searching for him in their frail dug-out canoes. The women would be wailing behind the village. Would his love believe that he had left her? No, he felt her faith, across the silence. In fancy, he saw her standing at the head of the beach, where she had first appeared to him. But her face now was drawn in wild sorrow, her streaming eyes ranged the horizon as if she would pierce the veil of death. He cried out to her; but the vast cavern of the sky swallowed his words.
"It would have been merciful to kill him there in the boat; hunger and thirst of the body are nothing, are soon over with. But think of the surpassing cruelty of saving him! Great pains were taken to that end; winds were manipulated, a ship was selected and driven from her course; it was as if the elements had conspired together and the whole machinery of the universe had paused a moment for the consummation of the act. On a certain morning he was sighted from the quarter-deck of theVanguard; an hour later he was picked up, half dead from thirst, and babbling of an island—as mad as a hatter, of course, since the nearest land was the Marquesas, five hundred miles away"
III
"I've often tried to imagine Devereux's outlook on life, as he begged the captain of theVanguardthat morning to turn his ship about and institute a search for an uncharted island. How the refusal must have stunned him, with the reality still a living presence in his heart. By Jove, you know, the smell of the land lingered in his nostrils as if he'd just that moment left it; he could hear the voices, could feel the touch of lips that were barely parted from his.... But they were rough and practical on board theVanguard; they had to be, for weren't they sailing in the employment of a strictly ordered enterprise? They laughed at him, and held their course. It was then that he began to hate a world that wouldn't listen. He's used to it now; like the savages, he has learned his lesson. And his interpretation of it is accepted only as a further indication of his madness. He says simply that we have lost our souls.
"On the top of this, came the experience in San Francisco. To have his hopes raised so high, only to be shattered overnight when public interest threw down the new plaything, was the final stroke of disillusionment. He went back to the sea; this was his only means of livelihood, and in spite of the romantic hallucination he remained a good sailor. The ship on which he sailed from San Francisco took him south through the Pacific, along the route of homeward bound vessels. This, of all Pacific sailing routes, strikes nearest to the region where Devereux had been lost and found. But it doesn't run quite far enough to the westward actually to cross it. Devereux went to the captain, told him straight-forwardly the inwardness of his trouble and adventure, and begged him to shift the course a little—just to run to leeward, so that they might strike the longitude of the place. He didn't ask to waste any time in search. But the captain, who'd heard about his mate before he shipped him, saw nothing in this but a mild outcropping of the madness, and of course couldn't listen to the appeal. Running a ship to leeward was a matter of dollars and cents.... So they drew near the island, passed it a few hundred miles away, and left it astern as they picked up the southeast trades.
"This was the first of many voyages; he remained in the San Francisco trade for several years. Half a dozen times he passed the island, always leaving it far to leeward; and the memory didn't grow cold. Rather, it burned warmer and higher under this harrowing tantalization, a flame fed by hope and clarified by love. Some time, if he waited patiently, the elements would be propitious, the right chance would come.
"But he, too, became practical about it, recognizing that until he was his own master he wouldn't be free to seize a chance if it came his way. He saved his money, and worked hard to advance his reputation. In due time he was rewarded with the command of a little barque. For a number of voyages his owners sent him to the China Sea; it was at this time that I first met him, to fall under the spell of his romantic destiny. At last, however, he arrived in Singapore one voyage to learn that he'd been chartered to carry coals from Newcastle, New South Wales, to San Francisco. He felt a wonderful elation at the news. It looked like his long-awaited opportunity.
"In the natural order of things, you know, on the passage from Newcastle to California, he would cross the Pacific in the westerlies below the southeast trades, strike north through the trade winds close hauled on the starboard tack, fetch within a reasonable distance of the coast of Mexico, pick up the northeast trades there, and take a weatherly departure for the last stage of the journey. By crossing the equator in 135° west longitude he would be thrown to leeward heavily on that last stage. But he must chance it; no one would know, and he could make his easting in the North Pacific, above the trades. Chance it?—he couldn't have failed to accept the opening, his whole life was centred on the play. God knows, he'd waited long enough, devotedly enough, for deliverance from this protracted anguish, for the resumption of happiness, for another glimpse of the form of love and beauty, for a sight of the island that more and more appeared to him in the nature of a vivid dream.
"And, by Jove, when he got there, he couldn't find it! It didn't seem, to be in existence any longer; at least, it wasn't to be discovered in the region where he had expected to come across it. He couldn't remember the exact latitude and longitude, you'll remember, although he had an approximate position which ought to have served the purpose. He cruised in the locality for over a week, backward and forward, around and around, combing every square mile of its waters; but he saw no sign of land. He had a terrible feeling that he might have passed it by night, that if the night could have been turned to day he might have caught a glimpse of it on the distant horizon. It was at night, he says, that the sense of its nearness was most acute, an ethereal presence lying all about him in the soft, impenetrable obscurity. At times he could almost smell the land. He felt that she, too, had remembered, and had remained faithful to him; that the pain and longing in her heart hung in mysterious vibrations about the island, to guide him to her if ever he came that way. But, as of old, he couldn't tell the direction; it was always his bitter fate to lack a compass at the crises of life. He didn't find either the island or the rock that had split theEvening Star; and in the end he had to go away.
"He tried again, some years later, but with the same lack of success. I have an idea that his latitude and longitude were away off; yet the place where he had been picked up was exact enough. Or perhaps ... But what's the use of speculating on a hypothesis without tangible grounds? He couldn't find the island.Heis the story—as you see him over there.
"By this time a hopeless melancholy had settled on him; yet he persisted in what he conceived to be the main business of life. His faith, indeed, was unquestioning; he apparently couldn't have done otherwise, and all his days and designs arranged themselves around this central purpose as naturally as mists rise to the sun. He left the sea, and went into the pearl fishing enterprise down on the north coast of Australia. He wanted to make money—and he made it. As soon as he possessed the means, he bought a schooner, fitted her up for a year's cruise, and disappeared over the eastern rim of the Pacific. It was well over a year, in fact, before he turned up again.
"I happened to be in Singapore when he arrived from that first cruise. Going down the Jetty late one afternoon to lake my sampan, I met him wandering in the opposite direction. One look at his face told me that he'd failed again. He had come in at noon, wasn't going anywhere, didn't know what he wanted to do. I took him aboard with me to supper, and we had a long evening on deck under the awning.
"'Devereux, has it ever occurred to you that the island may have sunk in a volcanic disturbance?' I suggested, after he'd gone over the affair for the twentieth time.
"The idea gave him comfort, strange as it may seem; he could contemplate the entire destruction of his beloved as an event of minor importance. It offered something to fall back on, in his mental agony; a practical explanation to dull the edge of the frantic feeling that all the while the island existed, if he could only find it. When I noted how he devoured the suggestion, I enlarged on its possibility.
"'You see, you haven't been able to find the rock, either' I pointed out 'And I remember you told me there wasn't any coral formation in the neighbourhood of that rock. A sure sign of recent volcanic activity. I'd be willing to bet that it hadn't been on the surface very long; it had been poked up recently for your especial benefit. And where volcanic action is busy poking things up, it's just as liable to sink them down again'
"'But the island had been there a long while' he objected 'It had a coral reef all the way round; our boat crossed it by a miracle that morning. And the people, Nichols—people don't rise full grown from the sea, or drop down out of the air'
"I wondered whether they didn't, in this case. 'Never mind, this was the way of it' said I 'The rock was an indication of volcanic action that hadn't yet extended to the island. But the whole area was in danger, and the next outbreak, which happened to be one of depression, dragged down the island, too'
"We left the question pending, and went our various ways. Now and then I'd run into him, wandering about the world, as the years went by. He's never wholly given up the search. The singular thing about it is that material fortune has fairly pursued him. He's made a lot of money, and sunk it all in fruitless expeditions. Too bad it is that he didn't possess a scientific bent; he knows all there is to know of the Pacific islands on their practical side—that is, on the side that isn't worth knowing"
Nichols struck the table again. "Well, what do you think of it?" he demanded "There he goes, now—alone, always alone. Why was he sent back to us? What's his obscure moral? Do you get any hint?"
"Nichols, do you yourself believe in the reality of this island?" I asked.
He glanced at me keenly. "Isn't that wholly beside the point?" said he "I don't believe the island exists to-day, if that is what you mean. But there's a year in an open boat, back at the beginning of the record, to be explained. The point is that he believes in the island. By Jove, he remembers it—do you understand? See that droop in his back, as he stands absently looking out of the door? He's growing old, and the woman would be past middle age to-day, and the boy would be a man; but they have a trick of remaining young in his memory. Oh, he faces the fact, of course, in his practical moments; wonders what they have come to, whether the boy ever matured, whether the woman waited, or gave him up for lost and married another man. He can speak about these things, because he's quite determined to believe that the island is sunk under the ocean, that they're all dead. But when the moon's out, and he gets to dreaming, they come back to him just as he left them, a young and beautiful woman with a child at her breast, both of them perfectly alive. How can you ask me ... whether I believe in the island?"