After the fashion of these gulf storms, this one tarried not in its
coming, nor offered any clemency when it had arrived. Where but a
half-hour since the heavens had been fair, the sea rippling, suave and
kind, now the sky was not visible at all and the tumbling waves about
us rolled savagely as in a nature wholly changed. The wind sang
ominously overhead, as with lift and plunge we drove on into a bank of
mist. A chill as of doom swiftly had replaced the balm of the southern
sky; and forsooth, all the mercy of the world seemed lost and gone.
And as our craft, laboring, thrust forward blindly into this reek,
with naught of comfort on any hand, nor even the dimmest ray of hope
visible from any fixed thing on ahead, in like travail of going, in
like groaning to the very soul, the bark of my life now lay in the
welter, helpless, reft of storm and strife, blind, counseled by no
fixed ray ahead. I know not what purpose remained in me, that, like
the ship which bore us, I still, dumbly and without conscious
purpose, forged onward to some point fixed by reason or desire before
reason and desire had been engulfed by this final unkindness of the
world. For myself, I cared little or none at all. The plunge of the
boat, the shriek of the wind, the wild magic and mystery of it, would
have comported not ill with a strong man's tastes even in hours more
happy, and now, especially, they jumped with the wild protest of a
soul eager for some outlet of action or excitement. But for these
others, these women--this woman--these boys, all brought into this
danger by my own mad folly, ah! when the thought of these arose, a
swift remorse caught me; and though for myself I feared not at all,
for these I feared.
Needs must, therefore, use every cool skilled resource that lay at
hand. No time now for broken hearts to ask attention, the ship must be
sailed. Crippled or not, what she had of help for us must be got out
of her, used, fostered, nourished. All the art of the navigator must
be charged with this duty. We must win through. And, as many a man who
has seen danger will testify, the great need brought to us all a great
calm and a steady precision in that which needed doing.
I saw Peterson at the wheel, wet to the skin, as now and again a
seventh wave, slow, portentous, deadly-deliberate, showed ahead of us,
advanced, reared and pounded down on us with its tons of might. But he
only shook the brine from his eyes and held her up, waiting for the
slow pulse of our crippled engine to come on.