And Receive an Ultimatum2 from Them.
It is a human experience, I believe, that men’s faculties3 often serve them best in moments of grave danger. In my own case, to be sure (but this may be a habit of the mind), I am often mastered by a strange lethargy during the hours of a common day. Events have been no other than a dreamy significance for me. I do not set them in a profitable sequence or take other than a general and an indifferent survey of that which is going on about me. But let a crisis of actual peril4 arrive and my mind is all awake, its judgment5 swift, its analysis rarely mistaken. Such a moment came to me upon the deck of the White Wings when I discovered my little Joan at the taffrail of the Diamond Ship and knew that my errand had not been in vain. Instantly I detected the precise nature of the risk we ran and the causes which contributed to it. The situation, hitherto vague and objectless, became as plain as the simplest sum in a child’s arithmetic book.
“Larry,” I said to the Captain, “they will discover our presence inside ten minutes, and we shall learn how they can shoot. This is too easy a target for my comfort. Let us back out while we have the chance.”
Captain Larry, as intent upon the spectacle of the strange ship as any cabin boy, turned about quickly like a man roused up from a dream.
“I was thinking of it before the relief came alongside,” said he; “the steam blast may give us away any minute, doctor. We lie right under their stern, however, and that is something. So long as they don’t send their limelight whizzing?——”
“That is exactly what they are about to do, Captain. They are going to look round for the unknown ship which has been sending them false messages by marconigram. Watch with me and you may follow the story. That is the first chapter of it.”
I pointed6 to the deck of the great ship, whence the figure of my little Joan had disappeared as mysteriously as it came; and there I showed to Larry a group of men in earnest talk with a newcomer from the steamer which now lay almost alongside the larger vessel7. The quick movements, the gestures of this company betrayed the curiosity which the stranger’s words awakened8 and the astonishment9 that rightly followed upon it. Imagining myself to be a spy among them, I heard, in imagination, every word of that fateful conversation. “We sent no message.” “You’ve been fooled right enough.” “There’s mischief10 afloat.” “No, we had no accident—what in thunder are you talking about?—it’s a lie.” So the new hand must be telling the astonished crew. It needed no great prescience to say what would follow after. Even Timothy McShanus arrived at it before I had finished.
“Would that be Colin Ross gone aboard?” he asked me, wheeling about suddenly.
I told him it would hardly be another.
“Then he’ll tell ’em the truth about the cables, or I’m a liar11.”
“He will tell them the truth about the cables, and you are not a liar, Timothy. He is doing so at this very moment.”
“Faith, man, they’ll be firing shots at us then.”
“It is possible, Timothy. If you are curious on the point?——”
“Curious be d——d. Would ye have me in the sea?”
“In the sea or out, I would have you keep a cool head, Timothy. They are going to fire at us, but that is not to say that they are going to hit us. Our turn comes after. Neither to-day nor to-morrow may see the end of it. I am only beginning with them, Timothy. When I have done, God help some of them, the Jew above the others. Now wait for it and see. Here’s the lantern busy. They are putting the story to the proof, you will observe. Let us hope that their astonishment may not be too much for them.”
So a commonplace chatter12 went on, and yet the mad intoxication13 of that interval14 of suspense15 had come upon us all as a fever. No man might measure his words, be sure. There we were, sagging16 in the trough of the seas some three hundred yards, it may be, from the great ship’s guns, our crew muttering in deep whispers, the steam hissing17 from our valves, the smoke drifting to the north in a dense18 suffocating19 cloud. Aware of the few moments of grace possible to us, we had given the word down to Mr. Benson to go full speed astern; and running thus for the half of a mile, we then swung the yacht round and headed due south at all the speed of which we were capable.
Now, indeed, the tense hour of our doubt began. We counted the very minutes until the beams of the monster searchlight should ensnare us once more. Brief exclamations20, cheery words of hope flashing from man to man gave passage to that current of human electricity which burned up as a flame. Would the light never fall? Ay, yonder it strikes the sea, and yonder and yonder—compassing the horizon around in a twinkling, a blind glory, a very pharos of the unknown world. And now it falls upon us, and man can look upon the face of man as though he stood beneath the sun of day; and all is stillness and silence, and the unspoken question.
Far away as we were, a roar of triumph could be heard across the sea when the Jew’s ship discovered us, and the great beams of the searchlight rested upon us exultingly22. In turn, the smoke from our funnel23 forbade us any longer to locate the enemy or to form an opinion as to his movements. Certainly, no gunshot followed immediately upon his achievement; and when a little gust24 of the south wind, veering25 a point or two, carried the loom26 from our furnaces away, we espied27 the two ships drifting as before, and even boats passing from one to the other. From this time, moreover, the darkness failed us somewhat, and a great moon tempered the ocean with its translucent28 beams of silvery light. Our safety lay in our speed. We burned the precious coal without stint29, since our very lives were in the furnace’s keeping.
“What stops them, Larry—what are they waiting for?” I asked him presently. He had deserted30 the bridge and stood aft with me to watch the distant steamers. McShanus, meanwhile, paced the decks like a lion at the hour of feeding. It was his way of saying that he found the suspense intolerable.
“I don’t think we shall have to wait long, sir,” Larry rejoined presently. “You see, they would hardly be ready to fire their guns, and not overmuch discipline among them, I suppose. If they hit us, it will be something by way of an accident.”
“And yet one that might happen, Larry. Well, here it comes, anyway. And a wicked bad shot I must say.”
It was odd that they should have fired at the very moment I replied to him; yet such was the fact and such the coincidence. Scarcely had I uttered the words when a monstrous31 yellow flame leaped out over the bows of the Diamond Ship (which now had put about to chase us), and spreading itself abroad upon the waters left a heavy cloud of black smoke very baffling to their gunners. As for the shell, I know not to this day where it fell. We heard neither explosion nor splash; saw no spume or spray upon the hither sea, and were, not a man of us, a penny the worse for their endeavour. A second attempt achieved no better result. True, we detected the shell this time, for it fell plump into the sea, near the fifth part of a mile from our starboard quarter; but the wretched shooting, the long interval between the shots and the speed at which we travelled, inspired confidence anew, and so surely that my men began to cheer the gunners ironically, and even to flash a signal to them across the sea.
“It’s as I thought, Larry,” said I, “they carry a gun and have no more idea how to use it than a lady in charge of a boarding school. The Jew has been living as near to a fool’s paradise as such a man is ever likely to get to paradise at all. I think we need waste no more coal. Let us lie to and take our chances. The risk is too small to think about.”
“Yon man would never hit cocoanuts at a fair,” chimed in McShanus, who had come up. “What will ye be flying over the ocean for? Is it coal we have to steam to China and back? Sure, the docthor is wise entirely32, and be hanged to them. We lie here as safe as a babe in a mother’s lap.”
We laughed at his earnestness, but the order was rung down nevertheless, and presently the yacht lay rolling to the swell33 and we could hear the stokers drawing a furnace below. Who is justly to blame for the accident which followed I do not dare to tell myself. Sometimes I have charged myself with it and complained bitterly of the opinions I had ventured. I can only tell you that the yacht had scarcely been slowed down when the rogues’ ship fired at us again, and the shot, crossing our forward decks at an angle of some fifty-five degrees, struck a fine young seaman34 of the name of Holland and almost annihilated35 him before our very eyes. The tragedy had a greater significance because of the very mirth with which we had but a moment before regarded the Jew’s gunners and their performance. Death stood there upon the heels of laughter; a cry in the night was the answer to an honest man’s defiance36 and my own bravado37. As for poor Holland, the shot took him about the middle and cut him absolutely in two. He could have suffered no pain—so instantaneously was he hurled38 into eternity39. One moment I saw him standing40 at the bulwarks41 watching the distant searchlight; at the next, there remained but a dreadful something upon the deck from which men turned their eyes in horror and dare not so much as speak about.
You are to imagine with what consternation42 and dismay this accident fell upon us. For many minutes together no man spoke21 a word to another. Such a deathly silence came upon the ship that our own act and judgment might have brought this awful disaster, and not the play of capricious change. To say that the men were afraid is to do them less than justice. In war time, it is the earliest casualties which affright the troops and send the blood from the bravest faces. Our good fellows had gone into this adventure with me thinking that they understood its risks, but in reality understanding them not at all. The truth appalled43 them, drove challenge from their lips and laughter from their eyes. They were new men thereafter, British seamen44, handy-men who worked silently, methodically, stubbornly as such fellows ever will when duty calls them. Had I suggested that we should return immediately to Europe they would have broken into open mutiny on the spot. Henceforth no word of mine need advocate my work or ask of them true comradeship. I knew that they would follow me to the ends of the earth if thereby45 they might avenge46 their shipmate.
“Larry,” I said, “the blame of that is upon me. God forgive my rashness. I feel as though my folly47 had cost me the life of one of my own sons.”
“Sir,” was his answer, “you had no more to do with it than the King himself. I will not hear such talk. The chances are the same for all of us. It might have been yourself, sir.”
McShanus was no less insistent48.
“’Tis to do our duty we are here,” he said. “If there is a man among us who is ashamed of his duty, let us be ashamed of him.”
I did not answer them. The seamen, awakened from their trance, ran to the help of a comrade long past all human help. Far away over the waters, the Diamond Ship still fired her impotent shells at us. Their very impotency convinced me how surely an accident had killed poor Holland. I said that it had been the will of God, indeed, that one should perish on the altar of our justice, and his life to be the first sacrifice to be asked of us. In my own cabin, alone and bitterly distressed49, a greater depression fell upon me so that I could ask myself why I had been chosen for the part at all or how it befell that of the thousands who had been robbed of Valentine Imroth, the Jew, I, alone, must set out to discover him. Vain, indeed, did triumph appear now. We had defied the rogues and they had answered us—not with a final answer, truly, but with that hush50 and awe51 of death which is never so terrible as upon the lonely waste of the great silent ocean.
Nor was the hour to pass without further news of them. Impotent at the guns, they fell to words, rapped out by our receiver so plainly that a very child of telegraphy could have read them.
“The message of Valentine Imroth to the Englishman, Fabos.—I take up your challenge. Joan Fordibras shall pay your debt in full.”
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1
rogues
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| n.流氓( rogue的名词复数 )；无赖；调皮捣蛋的人；离群的野兽 | |
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ultimatum
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| n.最后通牒 | |
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faculties
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| n.能力( faculty的名词复数 )；全体教职员；技巧；院 | |
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peril
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| n.(严重的)危险；危险的事物 | |
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judgment
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| n.审判；判断力，识别力，看法，意见 | |
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pointed
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| adj.尖的，直截了当的 | |
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vessel
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| n.船舶；容器，器皿；管，导管，血管 | |
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awakened
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| v.（使）醒( awaken的过去式和过去分词 )；（使）觉醒；弄醒；（使）意识到 | |
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astonishment
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| n.惊奇，惊异 | |
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mischief
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| n.损害，伤害，危害；恶作剧，捣蛋，胡闹 | |
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liar
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| n.说谎的人 | |
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chatter
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| vi.／n.喋喋不休；短促尖叫；(牙齿)打战 | |
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intoxication
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| n.wild excitement;drunkenness；poisoning | |
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interval
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| n.间隔，间距；幕间休息，中场休息 | |
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suspense
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| n.（对可能发生的事）紧张感，担心，挂虑 | |
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sagging
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| 下垂[沉，陷]，松垂，垂度 | |
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hissing
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| n. 发嘶嘶声, 蔑视 动词hiss的现在分词形式 | |
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dense
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| a.密集的，稠密的，浓密的；密度大的 | |
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suffocating
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| a.使人窒息的 | |
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exclamations
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| n.呼喊( exclamation的名词复数 )；感叹；感叹语；感叹词 | |
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spoke
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| n.（车轮的）辐条；轮辐；破坏某人的计划；阻挠某人的行动 v.讲，谈（speak的过去式）；说；演说；从某种观点来说 | |
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exultingly
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| 兴高采烈地，得意地 | |
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funnel
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| n.漏斗；烟囱；v.汇集 | |
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gust
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| n.阵风，突然一阵（雨、烟等），（感情的）迸发 | |
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veering
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| n.改变的；犹豫的；顺时针方向转向；特指使船尾转向上风来改变航向v.（尤指交通工具）改变方向或路线( veer的现在分词 )；（指谈话内容、人的行为或观点）突然改变；（指风） （在北半球按顺时针方向、在南半球按逆时针方向）逐渐转向；风向顺时针转 | |
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loom
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| n.织布机，织机；v.隐现，(危险、忧虑等)迫近 | |
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espied
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| v.看到( espy的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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translucent
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| adj.半透明的；透明的 | |
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stint
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| v.节省，限制，停止；n.舍不得化，节约，限制；连续不断的一段时间从事某件事 | |
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deserted
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| adj.荒芜的，荒废的，无人的，被遗弃的 | |
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monstrous
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| adj.巨大的；恐怖的；可耻的，丢脸的 | |
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entirely
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| ad.全部地，完整地；完全地，彻底地 | |
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swell
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| vi.膨胀，肿胀；增长，增强 | |
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seaman
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| n.海员，水手，水兵 | |
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annihilated
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| v.（彻底）消灭( annihilate的过去式和过去分词 )；使无效；废止；彻底击溃 | |
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defiance
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| n.挑战，挑衅，蔑视，违抗 | |
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bravado
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| n.虚张声势，故作勇敢，逞能 | |
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hurled
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| v.猛投，用力掷( hurl的过去式和过去分词 )；大声叫骂 | |
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eternity
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| n.不朽，来世；永恒，无穷 | |
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standing
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| n.持续，地位；adj.永久的，不动的，直立的，不流动的 | |
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bulwarks
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| n.堡垒( bulwark的名词复数 )；保障；支柱；舷墙 | |
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42
consternation
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| n.大为吃惊，惊骇 | |
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43
appalled
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| v.使惊骇，使充满恐惧( appall的过去式和过去分词)adj.惊骇的；丧胆的 | |
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seamen
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| n.海员 | |
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thereby
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| adv.因此，从而 | |
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46
avenge
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| v.为...复仇，为...报仇 | |
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47
folly
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| n.愚笨，愚蠢，蠢事，蠢行，傻话 | |
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insistent
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| adj.迫切的，坚持的 | |
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49
distressed
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| 痛苦的 | |
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50
hush
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| int.嘘，别出声；n.沉默，静寂；v.使安静 | |
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51
awe
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| n.敬畏，惊惧；vt.使敬畏，使惊惧 | |
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