IX THE PENALTIES OF ARTEMIS

Persis Lambert was asleep in her berth when the catastrophe came. The boat was not crowded—she was not an Atlantic liner nor yet a P. & O. in the season—and Miss Lambert’s aunt, with whom she was travelling, had, with her maid, a separate stateroom. The niece was the solitary occupant of her own. The alarm was sudden, and the ship’s discipline none of the best. Mrs. Lambert’s maid, having an eye to a legacy long promised, and the utter futility of the legacy if she did not survive, clothed her bulky invalidish asset as well as she could, and put her whole soul into dragging herself and the asset on deck. There were valuables, too, to collect in that hurried moment, for the chief asset would not stir without them.

The maid was sent to wake the young girl—so much, the second wife of Persis Lambert’s uncle demanded of her—but it is a question whether her excited rattling of the stateroom door and her single cry did more than start Persis Lambert on a dallying path towards waking. It was, in any case, the hurrying feet on the deck above and the shouting of stewards in the corridor that made her sit up in her berth and decide to dress as quickly as ever she could. Not once throughout the whole experience did she set eyes on Mrs. Lambert or Mrs. Lambert’s maid.

By the time Persis Lambert got on deck, all the other women and children in the cabin had been thrust into the boats that were now dotting the moon-lit sea at sparse and helpless intervals. Those of the under-officers and crew who were left on board were coping as best they could with a swirling, shrieking crowd of third-class passengers—men, chiefly. The officers in command had done their best to sift out women and children from the malodorous throng that beset the narrow exits from the steerage. Stewards had been sent down to search for any left behind; but several of the stewards had gone overboard on their own account with life-belts, swimming for the boats as they pulled off. The ship was sinking in a heavy, businesslike fashion by the stern—the captain on her bridge like a statue. He had lost his head, and the first mate was virtually in charge. The only thing that stuck, out of some twenty lucky years at sea, was the conviction that he must go down with his ship. His silence was extraordinary; he posed there for death; and Persis Lambert herself, crawling and climbing up the companion-way to the outer air, saw the last gesticulations of appeal made to him by his second officer—who, even as she found support in a brass rail, and clung, trying to arrange her mazed thoughts, flung up his arms with a despairing oath and slid aft into the babel. He did not see her clinging to her rail.

Persis Lambert had put on a life-belt before leaving her stateroom, but she felt it impossible now to test its value. She was in that condition where the mind seems at once omniscient and useless. She perceived the alternatives before her, with no power to act in any way—a paralysis not so much of the motor nerves as of the will itself. She stood there, cramped and waiting, in a great lucid dream of indecision. To be sure, neither of the alternatives was tempting—to try her luck with the screaming mongrels aft, or to climb to the deck rail and leap into the glittering black waste of sea. If it came to that, why not face the stern of the boat and wait until the ocean took her? She could not swim; it was folly for a non-swimming female to betake herself to the biggest ocean in the world before she had to. The only thing she felt like doing was climbing up on the bridge and standing beside the captain, at parade. That, too, was foolish. Yet she would move as soon as she was sure of not doing something silly.

All this, instead of being told as a sequence, should be placed before you, if that were possible, in one synthetic glimpse. These thoughts co-existed in her mind: it was a pigeon-holed instant, clear to perception as a small, slightly complicated picture. Her past life, contrary to precedent (for she was virtually drowning), did not, in any detail, occur to her.

Long before the thing could have been put into words, a man stood before her. He had somehow, between moonshine and crazy lantern-ray, made her out, clutching her rail close to the companion-way whence she had emerged.

“Come along.” There was nothing excited in his tone. He was as stolid as the Owara at her business of sinking, as the captain at his business of going down with the ship.

Persis Lambert scarcely recognized the man at her side, though she knew his name—Angier. She had seen him on deck and in the dining-saloon, but they had never spoken. Mrs. Lambert—now tossing in one of those distant cockle-shells—had given her niece little or no time for new acquaintances.

“Where to?”

Angier took her arm in his to steady her. “Anywhere out of this.”

“What was it?”

“Reef, I guess. Stove in in the wrong place. Oh, quick!” He pulled her towards the side of the ship. “Not much time. There’ll be an explosion any second, probably.”

“But where? I can’t swim. Do you want me to jump overboard?”

“You’ll have to. No chance of those boats.” He jerked a shoulder aft. “It’s hell down there. Discipline all gone to pot. Not room for everybody. Pity about the captain.” He turned for an instant and lifted his cap bridgeward with his free arm.

“Can you get into that?” Angier pointed over the side to a small boat. “It’s not such a jump as it would have been an hour ago.”

“Yes. But what’s the use? It must leak—or something—or they wouldn’t have left it.”

The man paused an instant and looked at her. “I’m not making you. I don’t know a thing about the blamed tub. But my guess is that after the very first, in the rush for the bigger ones, they forgot this. They got it ready, you see. I don’t insist. If you want to chance it down there.... But you must do something—quick.”

Persis Lambert looked aft. She saw men, brown and white, struggling in a confused mass. It was like a pit of snakes. She heard a pistol-shot or two, and indescribable cries—inarticulate, indecent. Then she turned back to Angier. “Shall I jump?”

“I’ll go first, thanks. Then jump at—for—me, as far as the moon will let you.” He felt his pockets quickly, then buttoned his coat. “Wait a second!” he called, and actually disappeared across the deck. Before she could wonder very hard, he had returned with a shapeless bundle that looked like a heap of blankets. “No good to the Owara,” he muttered, as he flung them into the rocking boat overside. Then he jumped. There was silence for an instant, but presently in the moonlight, Miss Lambert saw him holding up his arms.

“For God’s sake, fall as straight and as limp as you can.”

The deck was uncannily near the water. Miss Lambert heard his scarcely raised voice without difficulty. She brought him to his knees as she fell into his arms, but they soon righted themselves. After stooping for an instant, groping on the bottom of the boat, he stood up with a quick motion of his whole body.

“It doesn’t leak, I think. They just forgot. Lord, what a rotten bunch!”

Angier loosed the falls, then unshipped the oars and bent to them. “Can’t stop to make you comfortable now. We must get out of this party. Just look and see if there is water in that keg, please. Yes? I know there’s food. I saw the tins.”

“Are you going to try to follow the other boats?”

“Might as well try to follow a firefly. I’m going to get us out of this—er—place, if I can. I am sure you’re like me—you’d rather die in the open.”

He rowed steadily away from the Owara, out to sea—a phrase that ill suggests their infinitesimal progress. Still, one wave shoved them idly on to another, and in a few moments they were perceptibly farther away from the sinking Owara. The cries grew less horrid to the ear; they sounded more like a queer, shrill snarling across the water. At last, louder than the death-throes behind them, sounded in Persis Lambert’s ear the cracking of the man’s muscles as he rowed.

“We’re the only people, I believe, on this side of the ship,” she ventured, finally. She had not moved from her uncomfortable position on the big bundle Angier had thrown into the boat.

“You bet we are.” That was all his reply.

“But why?”

Angier pulled for five minutes before replying. “Can you get one of those extra oars?” he asked, finally.

The girl reached for one and pulled it towards her. “Well? Do you want me to row, too?”

“Hardly. Though you’ll probably have to learn to steer. But if any damned Lascar comes swimming along and trying to catch hold, chop him over the arm with it. I told you I wanted to get out of the party. And I don’t make for a reef if I think there is one there. We may tie up on one before morning, but at least I’m not trying to run us on the shore. Don’t forget about the Lascar.” And his muscles cracked again.

Miss Lambert laid down the oar. “I don’t think I could do that, thanks. There’s plenty of room, and if there weren’t, I wouldn’t try to keep any one out.”

“No, I dare say you wouldn’t. But I prefer to die decently. So I’ll trouble you to leave that oar where I can get at it myself without disengaging one of these. Better make yourself as comfortable as you can—though I don’t advise you to lie down.... Ah!”

The explosion had come. Both mechanically ducked their heads, then lifted them. The crazy lights of the Owara were quenched by the sea. They could see, by the moon’s glimmer, the quick final rush of her settling. The captain’s interminable wait on the bridge, they knew, was over. But by common instinct they did not speak of the catastrophe. Angier was rowing hard, and the girl tried to limber her cramped limbs and get herself into a more competent condition and posture. Carefully, deftly, she arranged the things that lay pell-mell in the bottom of the boat, selected her seat, and composed herself.

While the moon lasted, the excitement of the situation kept Persis Lambert’s mind strictly at home in the foreshortened world of the little boat. She peered about her, taking stock of her physical context. There were blankets—she had wrapped herself in one of them—a water-keg, tins that must hold food. There were also a few irregularly shaped objects here and there which she could not identify in the faint light.

They talked very little after the moon had set. Angier stopped rowing now and then for a moment, letting his body relax. Once, he pulled a flask from his pocket, removed the silver cup and passed it to her, asking her to fill it from the water-keg. He offered her whisky, but she refused it. Excited, warmly wrapped, as yet she felt no chill. The stars paled gradually, seeming to sink deeper into a lightening sky—as if they were withdrawing, backwards, out of the presence of earth and sea. The tropic dawn was coming upon them. Around was the constant complex noise of the ocean, running through a watery gamut, from the distant boom to the swishing of the waves round the boat itself.

On the Owara, Persis Lambert had seen little or nothing of her companion; but she remembered him as tall and dark, and given to inhabiting the smoking-room. Occasionally, since they had crossed the equator, she had seen him walking the deck at a tremendous pace. She had never seen him talking to any one, though of course she had not known how he might spend his time in the smoking-room. Mrs. Lambert had made friends with no one, and her niece had, perforce, followed her example. But she was sure that she had never seen Angier in any of the groups who chattered away the tedious leagues. She felt she must settle a few things before the day was upon them. So strange a day it was bound to be!

“How did it happen you weren’t with the first boats?” she asked.

“How did it happen you weren’t?” He stopped rowing for a moment.

“I must have slept through a good deal. My aunt’s maid waked me, but I didn’t realize until I heard the confusion.... I was pretty slow in dressing, I fancy. And I was trying to decide what to do when you came and told me. I’m very grateful to you.”

“Um—yes. I dare say I’m grateful to you. I hadn’t made up my mind, either. You’re sure your aunt got off on one of the first boats?”

“I think she must have. They wouldn’t overlook her. Let’s not talk about it. Every one loses his wits at such a time. Think of the poor captain.”

“I’ve no time to waste thinking of anything. Do you realize what we’re in for?”

“No, I don’t.” Persis Lambert answered in a matter-of-fact way. “I’m no heroine, by the way. I’m never seasick, but that’s all you can say for me. I hope I shan’t fail you or be a nuisance, but I can’t imagine that I shall be any good.”

“Humph! Well, I’m no Swiss Family Robinson myself. I’m fairly strong in the arms, legs, and back, but I am not what you call a resourceful person. I’ve never had any experience of this kind. So if we do strike land, you needn’t expect any of the comforts of camp life. I haven’t even a pistol, if worse should come to worst. What did you manage to save?”

“I’ve got some money, which is of no use—and a flask—and my warmest clothes on—and, I think, a toothbrush in my pocket, and a cake of soap. I didn’t see any sense in weighting myself down.”

“I did better than you, then. At least, I hope there’s some loot worth having in that blanket you have your feet on. I stepped into the smoking-room for a moment, you remember. Matches, anyhow. Ah, there’s the sun. Suppose we eat. It might give us courage to look around. We must be in a mess of islands about here, you know; and there’s a great choice in islands, in these parts—especially when you haven’t a pistol.... I hope you won’t let me get on your nerves,” he added, suddenly. “It’s a queer hole to be in, and you must be sensible. If you played the fool, I’d chuck you overboard.”

“I don’t think you would.” Miss Lambert’s head was bent over a biscuit-tin. “You chucked me on board, you remember.”

“Oh, it was no place to die—that disreputable old tub with all her virtue oozing out of her.”

“You seem to be very fastidious about your place of dying.”

“Well!”—he jerked his head back and faced the sun—“you can’t say it isn’t decent here. You didn’t want to go down strangling with a lot of dirty Chinks biting you in the back, did you? When I’m through breakfast, I’ll look over that loot. I hope I was inspired last night in the smoking-room. I pawed about like lightning for ten seconds. By the way, what is your name? Mine is Angier.”

“Persis Lambert. I should like a drink of water, please. Thank you. And what are we going to do about the sun?”

“Rig up something if we can. And, for heaven’s sake, go slow on the water. I’ve got a map in my pocket, but it’s rather small. The boat’s not much bigger, and you’ll kindly remember that we may be dead before night. If a storm came up like the one two days ago, you certainly would be. You can’t swim, remember.”

“Why should I go slow on the water then?”

“Because we have a fighting chance.”

“Even if I can’t swim?”

“Oh, I’d keep you up as long as I could, if you didn’t clutch me.”

“You said you’d throw me overboard if necessary.” Persis Lambert raised her hand. “Kindly understand me. I’m not asking for anything. Only it would be much more convenient if you would explain to me briefly what I can expect from you. What sort of man are you, anyhow? I don’t care, one way or the other. I simply should like to know. Are you going to leave me to shift for myself, or are you going to be conventional?”

Angier laughed—a strange, impotent sound in that waste of sunny waters. “You can bet I’m going to be conventional. That is, I’ll play the game if you will. If you’re a good girl, I’ll be a good boy—if only because being chivalrous at a time like this, edging along towards the tropic of Capricorn, is so ridiculous. I’ll let you have the last mouthful, just because it would be so sensible not to.”

“You don’t mean that.”

“Well, just to prove that I am a free man. I’m not going to chuck a helpless thing like the moral law, just because a big brute like the Pacific Ocean comes along and tells me to. I let it pretty much alone when I’m at home, but damned if it isn’t worth wasting time on in a place like this, just as a spectacle. Don’t you worry. It’ll probably be a shark or a native that does for you. It won’t be I—unless you take to acting in a way no man could stand. There’s such a thing as being too conventional, you know.” He looked her squarely in the eyes.

“I’ll be as sensible as I can. But I’m a free woman, too.”

“Not if you can’t swim.”

“Oh, if you think you can swim across the Pacific, I don’t wonder you boast about being free.” Then, for the first time since the accident, a drawing-room manner returned to her. She spoke very sweetly. “But let’s not quarrel. What are we going to do about sleeping? You must be absolutely exhausted. Couldn’t I do something with the oars while you took a nap?”

“You might decorate them if you’ve got a box of colors about you. Thanks, I’m not sleepy. But you’re quite right. You’d better curl up for a while. I’ll try to rig up something with an oar and one of the blankets. I’ll wake you when I want you. You don’t look very strong, by the way.”

“I’m not, but I’m perfectly well. I’m at my normal weight. It isn’t much. But—” She looked around.

“I’ll be sleeping, myself, later. Then you can comb your hair.”

Miss Lambert curled herself up obediently and uncomfortably under the improvised tent. She fell asleep sooner than she had hoped, and the man, taking up the oars, with a pocket compass before him on the water-keg, rowed steadily on. The first boats had gone north, making, he suspected, for a port. The other lot, what with bad discipline and savage endeavors defeating themselves, must have gone down, taken by the sharks or that mid-sea level which buoys up the drowned. Many of them had probably been killed outright by huge splinters of the exploding Owara. No relic, no fragment, since the dawn, had drifted their way. He kept his course, as well as he could, due south. “A great get-away,” he murmured to himself. He did not once look at the girl.

When, a few hours later, Persis Lambert crawled out of her improvised tepee, her sleep-soaked eyes saw, thanks to the glare of the sun on multiplied leagues of water, only the vague litter of objects about her. Her eyes clung to the blessedly dark surfaces of little things—a blanket, the handle of an old hatchet, her own skirt. Then they traveled to Angier’s figure at the bow. By lifting and lowering her eyelids in quick rhythm, to shake the sleep out, she managed finally to focus her gaze, to discount to some extent the rude blaze of the ocean. Angier had not spoken to her, and she now saw why. Oblivious of Persis Lambert, his back half turned to her, he was looking steadily out to sea through a small pair of binoculars. Perfectly motionless, he seemed to be studying some fixed point in the distance. He must have heard the stir of her waking and moving forward in the boat, but he paid no more attention to her than if she had been the ship’s cat stretching itself. She did not know to what point of the compass his gaze was directed—all directions were alike to her, with the sun overhead. She limbered her cramped limbs as best she could in that tiny rocking space, smoothed her hair, and wiped her face with her handkerchief. Finally she turned to parallel with her own eyes the path of his long, steady gaze through the glass. Then she exclaimed, for land, no less, was what she saw. She was incapable of judging distances, but the peculiar outline of palms was distinguishable to her, lifted above a tiny colorless strip that must be shore. At the girl’s exclamation, Angier turned and put the glass down carefully.

“These aren’t much good—tourist things—but you can see for yourself what I’m looking at.” He did not offer her the glass; and she did not ask for it.

“How far away?”

“I don’t know. Distances are deceptive, of course. But you will notice that there is a favoring wind, and a current too, I’m pretty sure. I don’t know that I like the current; but I can’t say that I like being boiled alive, either. We shall get there soon enough, I think. You didn’t sleep more than an hour or two. I think I’ll turn in myself, after you’ve got some notion of steering. No point in using up muscle to keep out of this wind-and-current combination. There must be a current, you know—” He knotted his brows, as if in displeasure.

“Why do you mind the current so?”

Angier grinned. “I’m no navigator, please remember. Nobody ever taught me what to do with a current in a coral area! But you can wake me up before we get anywhere near.”

“May I see the map?”

“Sure! But I am afraid it was made only for European consumption. There must be several hundred islands in the immediate neighborhood”—he waved his arm impartially in a circular sweep round the horizon. “I do know about where the Owara went down. I looked at the ship’s chart last evening. But it doesn’t help us much, does it? Now let me show you what to do back here.”

Persis Lambert took her instructions in steering as intelligently as she could. They were, for that matter, haltingly given. Angier had to confess, with grim laughter, that he knew very little about the business. “I’ve had a lot of things happen to me, but they’ve never been in boats. Perhaps it’s a pity we didn’t ship a Lascar while we were about it. But what would have been the good of a Lascar without a pistol to shoot him with? Wake me up any minute you want me. I don’t think there’s much you can do, as a matter of fact, except try to keep her from slewing entirely out of her course. And if it is wind-and-current combination, she couldn’t do that if she tried. Au revoir!”

He stuck his head out of the tepee after he had burrowed his way in. “You didn’t bring a pistol, did you?”

“Of course not. I never had a pistol in my life.”

“All right, all right. Only it is just as well to be sure.”

“Did you think I would shoot you?”

A deal of pent-up sarcasm went into her tone. There was no reply. Persis Lambert looked about for the binoculars, but they had gone, slung over Angier’s shoulder, into the tepee. She sat for a long time clutching the steering-rope as he had directed, gazing at the line of palms on the horizon. It was a great relief to be alone. Occasionally she closed her eyes for a moment to shut out the glare that stabbed like a million arrows; but whenever she opened them again, she stared always at that fixed point as if there were no other fact abroad upon the sea.

It was late afternoon when Angier and Persis Lambert landed on their island. Angier confessed that he had feared a hundred easy ways of destruction, but in point of fact the low, sandy coast seemed positively to welcome them. A tiny recess in the shore-line embraced their little boat, harbor-fashion—though the Owara would have filled its curving arms to overflowing. Angier had trained his glass on the land many times before landing, but at last he slung it back over his shoulder, and eventually they heard the soft crunch of sand under the keel as they beached the boat—the first land-noise either had heard for many a day. They seemed to have stepped out of a moving nightmare of great waters, a vast, aqueous vision, into a firm, terrestrial reality. Persis Lambert hummed to herself as she carried things from the boat to the shade of a palm-grove.

“Stop that, will you, please?” The man’s harassed voice sounded close behind her.

“Why? I hated the boat.”

“You don’t yet know whether we have this bit of hell to ourselves or not. And as soon as I can decide what to do with you, I’ve got to find out.”

She stopped where she was, with her load. “And leave me?”

“Someone’s got to stay with the stores. They aren’t much, but they may be all we’ll have for some time.”

“Do you really think”—it was her sweet tone, brought back into use for the occasion—“that I should be very effective if any one did turn up who wanted them?”

Angier laughed shortly. “Right you are. You wouldn’t—unless it were an animal.”

“There are very few animals”—she turned again toward the palm-grove—“that wouldn’t soon be in possession, for all me. My relations with our dumb brothers don’t extend beyond dogs—small ones, with collars.”

He looked at her curiously. “I should think you would like to get rid of me for a little while.”

“I’d love to.” Her tone was still very sweet. “But I prefer you to a quadruped. And until I’m better acquainted with the natives, I think I prefer you to them. Of course, they may turn out very nice. In that case, we’ll see.”

Angier shrugged his shoulders. “All right. Only, if you can spare me for five minutes, I’ll go into that next bunch of palms and look through the glass. There’ll be a lagoon, or I miss my guess. Keep down by the boat, please, and, if you want me, shout. I shall be close by.” In his promised five minutes, he returned. “It’s a smallish place, after all. There is a lagoon. We’d better walk around it, I fancy. It would be something of a relief to know that we are the sole inhabitants, though what we shall live on—Oh, well, hang it! no use borrowing trouble.”

Both man and girl were silent on their strange pilgrimage. Persis Lambert, indeed, was all but exhausted; and as soon as Angier delivered himself grudgingly of the opinion that they were indeed the only human occupants of the island, she begged to return to the landing-place. The circumference of the atoll Angier judged to be a scant two miles. It was the classic coral island; baldly described, a ring of palms inclosing a lagoon. Vegetation was scanty, and there seemed to be little or no animal life: many birds and insects, and a few lizards. The blue lagoon teemed with parti-colored fish, and the palms in their due time would drop cocoanuts; so much they could count on. They might, with good luck, snare some pigeons. Beyond that, the less thought about it the better.

Angier worked hard, before dark came upon them, to rig up a shelter for the girl. In time he hoped to do wonders with thatch, he told her, dryly; just now she must stick to an oar-and-blanket device. At least, thanks to his plunder of matches, they could have a fire. They ate their supper beside the little blaze of brush. Not since dawn had either one mentioned the Owara. They took the catastrophe for granted, as the warp on which they must weave their strange and painful pattern. They assumed it callously, as one assumes the basic conditions of life—the climate, or one’s Caucasian blood. Slowly, in their spasmodic talk, they staked out the little dominion of their present—expedients for netting fish, for catching rain-water, for rigging up a signal. With the air of a chancellor of the exchequer, Miss Lambert promised a petticoat for the common weal. As they planned and Angier smoked, full-length by the fire, Persis Lambert drew a ribbon from her pocket, and measuring it carefully, she knotted it about a ring she took from her finger, then hung the ring round her neck.

“Why is that?” The man’s voice seemed to rise up from beneath the sand.

“It’s a pearl. I mustn’t get it wet.”

“Wouldn’t it be safer in one of my pockets?”

“I think not. See—I put it under everything.”

“Why not wrap it up and bury it? It’s no protected life you’re going to live.”

“Thanks, no. It’s my engagement ring.”

“Oh—” This time the voice seemed to sink into the sand hollow where the man’s head rested.

“I’m going to bed,” said Persis Lambert at last. “What are you going to do? You’ve given me all the blankets.”

“What of it?” Angier sprang to a sitting position. There are only three, two for your shelter and one to cover you with. I have my overcoat. And sand isn’t hard. Better than the boat, anyhow.”

“Aren’t the nights cool in the tropics?”

“I’m not a class in geography! It was devilishly hot last night, rowing. That’s all I know. Anything I can do for you?”

“No.” She disappeared into the shelter. It had been braced as well as possible against the strong sea-breeze.

Half an hour later Miss Lambert came out. Angier, who had been dozing by the dying fire, was now sitting up and drinking from his flask. His teeth chattered against the cup. She looked at him gravely. “Have you any medicines?”

“No.”

“Nor I. So I think you’d better not get a chill first off. Why don’t you build up the fire?”

“I don’t precisely feel like starting out for more firewood. Besides, it’s going to rain. Do get along in there and don’t bother me—unless you’re cold. Are you?” He pulled himself up to his feet slowly and stood before her.

“No, I’m not.” She paused an instant, then went on in her coldest tone: “What good there is in the shelter I think you have as much right to as I. When we achieve thatch houses, it will be different. I should be much obliged if you would get out of the sea-wind, too.”

“If you would take a little of that damned hostility out of your voice, I would!”

Miss Lambert looked surprised. “Didn’t we decide all that sort of thing in the boat? I don’t suppose this is pleasant for either of us.” Great drops fell on her forehead. “Is this likely to be a hard storm?” she asked hastily.

“How do I know? I’m no meteorologist.” There was enough in his own tone of the “damned hostility” of which he had complained.

Miss Lambert laughed—a very tired tinkle of a laugh. “No; neither one of us is exactly the person the other would have chosen to be cast away with. We’re both tenderfeet. I rather wonder what you used to do for a living. Listen”—the drops came faster and faster, and the swish of the palm-leaves high above their heads grew shriller and wilder—“I don’t know you at all. So far as I do know you, I certainly don’t like you.” Even the beat of her words grew quicker, like all the audible rhythms of the world about them, whipped up, accelerated by the wind. “You create in me a positive aversion. But your strength is the only thing either of us has to depend on. So you will come into the shelter. It’s sufficiently open to the sky, as it is. I intend to sleep, and I probably shouldn’t if I knew you were rotting in the rain outside. If you wish me to take the space nearest the blanket”—she pointed at the seaward screen—“I will.”

“I think that may turn out to be the wettest spot of all—since the wind is that way and we don’t have much to weight the rug with,” he answered. “I think I’ll take it myself. If I find I’m keeping at all dry, I’ll ask you to change.”

He followed her and flung himself down in the indicated spot, on the carpet of leaves and brush he had earlier in the evening strewn hastily over the sandy soil. Presently both slept.

Six weeks to a day was the duration of Angier’s and Persis Lambert’s stay on their island. But six actual weeks, with a possible future of years, means a lifetime as complete as many that consider themselves rounded to the full sum of human experience. The intensity of an existence that is limited to itself is something few of us can conceive—we who are free to brood on the past and hope for the future, whose days are mere portals looking two ways. Neither one discussed a past life in which the other had no share; and their talk of the future stopped at a possible rescue. By some common instinct, mutually reinforced, they refrained from narrative. At the end of their exile Persis Lambert was still ignorant of Angier’s business in life, as he was ignorant of the name of her fiancé. The girl’s frankly stated aversion to the man doubtless dried up the springs of confidential talk in her—and, by natural result, in him. Anecdote sometimes drifted their way: an analogy out of past experience or an allusion to a book the one or the other had read. But they played a game of which should reveal the less. They bounded their world, as rigidly as children, by the fringe of the sand beneath the circle of palms.

And all the while, precisely as if they were children, whose intimate confidences are all objective, immediate, and innocent of moral import, their intimacy grew. By a curious inversion of experience they came to speak naturally of things that, in years of conventional acquaintance, would never have been mentioned. What the merest friend at home might have known about either was jealously concealed, while the little details, which scarcely anything but the closest relation would have brought to free discussion, came vividly and frequently into their talk. It was as if the outer walls were defended while the enemy chaffered quietly in the market-place. Necessity, which drove them to be “sensible,” could not drive them to be friends. They seemed to vent their private rage at their plight by being squeamish over things Mrs. Grundy could never have objected to—as if the last resort of dignity lay in being squeamish over something, no matter what. If they had to speak of their digestions, they would never divulge their home addresses! They should have been Adam and Eve at their housekeeping; instead, they were still Miss Lambert and Mr. Angier in Eden. Eden is used metaphorically, to be sure; for the resources of their island were scantier than those of the Seventh Day. They struggled experimentally for food and shelter, working out, with bent brows, the evolution of early periods, achieving in a hard day what neolithic centuries had gone to discovering. When they laughed, it was the grim laughter of the Stone Age—at the fish clumsily speared, or the ripe cocoanut floating out to sea. But if Persis Lambert wept in secret, the tears she shed had taken all history to produce. A strange working of inhibitions, in a place that had never heard the word or seen the thing.

Needless to say, it was the girl who set their psychic pace. More than once Angier bit off in the very utterance some speech that had tried for freedom—his silence following hard upon the chill tightening of her lips. Yet she was not ungracious or taciturn; only clinging desperately, one would have said, to some privacy of the mind. Of the physical privacy which every woman takes for granted, she had next to none, “sensible” as she had promised to be. She could not have accused Angier, had she wished, of limiting it voluntarily; but circumstances did the job as completely as if he had been a brute. The tropic showers that flung them huddled in their blankets against the same tall palm-trunk; the necessary co-operation in all tasks, since her slender, ignorant hands must ever be guided by his; the night-terror that often made her rise and creep where she could hear his breathing; the sordid talk of a hand-to-mouth existence, where one of the hundred forms of death rises up ever to dwarf any more delicate danger—every fact of every hour seemed to make them more one than wedlock. The man saw to it that she should have her due share of solitude, but her solitude on such terms was scarcely worth the name. It shrieked the bodily fact of him back at her from whatever point of the compass he had betaken himself to.

Once Angier suggested that they should try the boat again, and seek a wider and more fertile exile. “This is too much like rats in a hole. Pretty soon we shall get the stink of those fish we are drying, clear across the lagoon.”

“You can go if you like,” she said. “I will wait for you.”

“Oh!... and if I never came back?”

“I shouldn’t be worse off, should I?”

The man’s face twitched slightly. “Permit me to believe that you would.”

“Of course I should,” she said, perfunctorily. “But I won’t go. I will never get into that boat again—never.”

“You have a lot of grit, but I should say, no sense.” With that, Angier dropped the subject.

One night Persis Lambert woke—suddenly, out of a sound, dog-tired sleep. Something was near her, in the dark, an indistinct shape bending over her. Almost immediately she knew it for Angier, and closed her eyes again, quietly waiting, every muscle and cord tense under her blanket. Soon he rose noiselessly from his kneeling position and walked slowly away. He did not go back to his own sleeping-place, but moved off through the palm-grove towards the lagoon. As soon as she judged him out of earshot, she rose and followed him, tracking him through the moonlight, furtively. She saw him walk down the little shore to the lagoon and lie down full-length, hiding his face on his arms.

She did what he had done a few minutes before—knelt down and bent over him. But though he was awake, he was not aware of her, as a thick sob told her. Careless, therefore, she bent still closer. It did not occur to her that she was eavesdropping—they were as cruelly close as that! But no words came, only the sobs, worse than words. She pressed so near—though still not touching him—that her ring, hanging from its ribbon, swung lightly against his face. She pulled it away, but he had felt it, and sprang to his feet, facing her in the moonlight. The little lagoon rippled softly beside them.

“You devil!” he cried. “Why did you follow me?”

“Why did you wake me?”

“I didn’t wake you.”

“Then I didn’t follow you.”

Silently they walked back to their palm-grove. As they separated, she paused an instant and looked at him. Then she dug her wrists into the deep sockets of her eyes. The gesture blurred her vision, and she saw him only dimly.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered.

“Oh, damn you....” he murmured, with a curious, meditative inflection, and walked away. She did not watch him further, but went back to her bed and slept.

Neither one alluded, in the days that followed, to the incident of that night. Their eyes were clear of allusion, their talk as sterile as ever. On the fifth day after, deliverance came in the shape of a government patrol-boat doing pacific duty among the islands. The signal, religiously kept afloat, was an easy mark for binoculars that steadily raked the horizon for any sign of trouble.

Their return to the world was as swift and inevitable as their departure from the Owara. Persis Lambert stood on the strip of sand, watching the boat rowed shoreward by vigorous sailors. When it was within a few rods of them, she turned to look for Angier, who had disappeared from her side.

“Is he leaving it to me—the cad?” she whispered to herself. But he returned from the camp in time to greet the under-officer who sprang from the gunwale to the sand, in high excitement. Miss Lambert, after a grave greeting, left all explanations to Angier. He made them very well, then suddenly fell silent, his eyes fixed on the dwindling coronet of palms. Miss Lambert, her back to Angier and the young officer, strained her glance towards the little steamer. Once on it, she went below to quarters hurriedly arranged for her; and when, some hours afterward, she came on deck again, the island of their six weeks’ sojourn was lost forever in the dusk and distance.

Angier approached her the next morning. “They seem to think we have a lot to say to each other. As a matter of fact, we haven’t. But I might tell you that they are taking us on to a port of call of the Wallaby, going to Singapore. We shall just about make it in time to catch her. We ought to be on board her to-morrow.”

Miss Lambert nodded. “Have you any money?” she asked.

“Quite enough to go on with.”

“I saved a lot, you know. At least, I suppose a letter of credit is still good.”

“I think you’ll find it so—in spite of everything.”

“I wish you would tell me how much you have.”

“Is that the kind of thing I ever have told you? Why should I begin now?”

“As you like.” She turned her head away from him.

“I’m sorry, by the way, about your aunt....”

Persis Lambert’s eyes filled. “That’s all right. I mean, you’ve said all you need to say. Do you think they really know?”

“It seems to be their business to know everything that happens in this archipelago. I think they pretty well live up to it. I’m afraid there’s no doubt. The first two boats were overloaded.... Rotten discipline.” He walked away.

The next morning they trans-shipped quickly in a lurid tropic harbor; and Persis Lambert took possession of a stateroom from which, for three days, she did not stir. When, braced to face the world again—a world whose thousand curious eyes she had felt burning through the very decks to reach her as she lay in her berth—she disposed herself nonchalantly in a deck-chair, a steward brought her a note. So oddly had the two inverted the natural course of experience that she felt Angier had taken a liberty in writing to her. The liberty taken was slight, however, and this she freely admitted after a glance. It was a single line to inform her that he was to leave the steamer at the next port. He must have landed the night before. She remembered objecting, as she tried to drowse, to the noises of landing—the hurrying feet, the unintelligible native babel, the scraping and pounding and shouting before the dinghy went ashore.

Persis Lambert rose and went to the deck rail. The torn bits of the note fluttered over the side. Then she came back to face the congested curiosity of a portly Dutchwoman who had been stalking her for three days.

Summer was heavy on the big town, but Miss Lambert still lingered behind shuttered windows, in a world of brown holland and shadows. Her step-sister, with her own family, had left for the mountains. Miss Lambert would follow, she said, when she could; and the old caretaker and his wife would meanwhile suffice to her service. Mrs. Bayle supposed she knew why Persis stayed on; Tony Wainwright was still in town, working on gigantic plans for some competition or other. After poor Persis’s harrowing adventure, it must be good to breathe the metropolitan dust and build up her nerves on Tony’s devotion. Persis had not said precisely that; but for all Persis ever said—!

Miss Lambert had seen her betrothed many times in the crowded weeks since her return. She had not particularly sought chances to see him alone. She had taken his and her and every one’s engagements as they came. But if Tony Wainwright had had the instinct to complain, he should by rights have stifled it, for, in planning to stay on after the family, Miss Lambert gave him promise of ample time to have her quite to himself.

She had, in point of fact, seen him quite alone several times; yet she prepared for him this afternoon as if it were their first reunion after her long and eventful absence. She began to speak to him at once, indeed, on a new, strange note—a note, had he but known it, tempered under the Southern Cross.

“Tony, it can’t be.”

“What can’t be, my darling?”

“This—any of it. I stayed on to tell you. Nothing makes any difference—not even being quite alone with you. I have waited to see. Now I know.”

“But what?” He focussed his eyes on her keenly as she stood near him in the shadows, a frail, pale figure with wavering outlines.

“I can’t marry you.”

“May I open the shutters?” He moved to the windows. “I’d like a little light on this.”

“If you think his Satanic majesty, the sun, is going to help you,” she murmured.

“Why shouldn’t he?”

“I’ve seen him at home, remember.”

In the rich afternoon light, they faced each other, still standing among the wan masses of the shrouded furniture.

“Look here, Persis, what is all this about? Anything to do with that rotten voyage?”

She did not answer at once.

“Or with that man—Angier?”

“Yes, everything to do with him.”

“You’re in love with him?” He dropped into a chair, put his elbows on his knees and his chin on his hands.

“Try not to be stupid, Tony. To the best of my recollection, I detested him.”

“You’ve praised him highly.”

“Yes? I’m glad of that, for I think he deserved it. I should have scarcely expected myself to do my duty in that way, though.”

“Well, then.... Have you heard from him?” Tony Wainwright, in the presence of a problem, could not, for the life of him, help behaving like a lawyer. His tones were so familiar that Persis Lambert smiled a little.

“Heard from him? Never. What do you take me for?”

“I don’t see why you shouldn’t.”

“I fancy he sees. But that isn’t the point.” She sat down, herself, then. “What I have to say, Tony, is very simple—or it would be simple if you weren’t likely to think it preposterous. The honest fact is that I can’t marry any one. I feel like a widow, if you want to know.”

He was silent for a moment. “I see.” Then he got up and walked to the chimney-piece.

“I’d be willing to wager a good deal that you don’t see.” Her voice was hard as porcelain with a wonderful glaze.

“I tell you I detested him. For that matter, I don’t know why. He behaved with exceeding consideration throughout. He rose out of a nightmare and went away into a nightmare, and in between he did everything he could for me. I know nothing about him—who he is, or where he came from, or where he has gone. If either one of us can help it, I am quite sure we shall never meet again. That is the whole history of that.”

“What is there, then?”

“Quite simply this: that I feel as if I had been married to him, and I’m quite incapable of marrying again.”

“But why?”

“Try it yourself, Tony! Six weeks—they tell me it was six weeks, but it was the longest lifetime I’ve ever lived—of complete isolation on a naked coral island with a man you’ve never seen before. Nothing between you and him—nothing. As lonely we were as the first man and woman; and for all I knew, it might go on for ever. You’ve never experienced an intimacy like that. Compared with us, you and I are strangers. I can’t describe it.... Night after night, the only thing that stood between me and dying of fear was the sound of his breathing. Time after time his body kept mine from being soaked, flesh and bone, with rain. I mended his clothes with a sharpened thorn, and we huddled under the same thatch to keep off the horrible sun. There has never been anything like it. I never dreamed of living such a life with you. And”—her voice grew thin, disdainful, remote—“I disliked him.”

“Do you dislike me?” Wainwright asked curiously.

“I am exceedingly fond of you. But I have a horror of marriage. I have a horror of ever again being intimate with any human creature. I can’t do it; and that’s the end of it.”

“Damn him!” said Wainwright, under his breath.

“You needn’t damn him. He did his best. And I did mine. But we were flung on that sand to root for existence like two animals. Every nerve in me has been violated. I never wish to face a single reality of life again. To be a wife would be more than I could bear.”

“We’ll talk of it again.” Tony Wainwright, with almost superhuman composure, started towards the door. “You have always been hypersensitive, and now, my poor darling, you are ill. It has been too much for you. It will take time, and I shan’t hurry you. You’re right about that. I knew something was up, but I imagined it was just the beastly reaction after such a time. I dare say I’d better leave you now. When may I come again?”

She rested her eyes on him tenderly. “Whenever you like, so long as you understand that we’re not engaged.”

He took a step towards her. “Persis, I can’t go away like this. You snap a thread and blow me down the wind. You must let me have it out with you when you’re rested, when you’re calmer.”

“Am I not calm?”

“Not sanely calm, no.”

“Then I never shall be.”

“I don’t believe that, dear.” He bent over her and touched her hair very lightly. “I’ll come to-morrow, earlier.” She did not look up, but he bent no nearer. In a moment he straightened himself, drawing a deep breath. “Wasn’t he in love with you, Persis?”

She started slightly as if she had heard something other than words—as if, across half the earth, the faint ripple of a lagoon could sound faintly and die away. “No, Tony, I am quite sure that he wasn’t.”

“Could you have told? He must have been, dear.”

“I could have told. He wasn’t.”

“And I may come to-morrow?” He took her hand.

Gently, Persis Lambert worked her hand free. “Surely, you may come whenever you will—if you understand that it’s over.”

“And you are all to win again? Oh, Persis, Persis! But you’re worth it, darling, and I’ll never say a word too much. I’ll serve seven years if I must.”

“It won’t take you seven years to find out the truth.” She shook her head at him as he turned on the threshold to look back. “You’ll get no more of it from me, ever, than you’ve had this afternoon.”

By old habit, she went to the window to watch him come out. The same habit made him lift his face. She blew him a kiss, and stood there until he was out of sight. “That is the last thing I shall ever do for any man,” she said, aloud, as she turned away from the window.