By the World Forgot: A Double Romance of the East and West

Captain Fish was black with rage.

"Mr. Gersey," he roared, "do you know anything about this?"

"Not a thing, sir."

"We done it ourselves," came up from the waist.

"Keep fast the braces," said the captain at last; "keep her on her course."

Inasmuch as she had never been off her course and the braces had not been touched, the commands were useless. They were simply given to save the captain's face a little.

"Mr. Salver," he continued, "it's your watch below. I want to speak to you in the cabin. Pipe down the watch off, Mr. Gersey. We'll settle this matter in the morning."

But the captain knew and the men knew that the matter was already settled. If the men hung together there was no way by which the captain could discover the ringleader. And he could not imprison the whole ship's company. They had beaten him. The flight had been carefully planned and carried out in a bold and seamanlike way.

"You've beat me," said the captain the next morning to the crew as the watches were changed, "but there's a standin' offer of five hundred dollars for any one who'll gimme the details an' the names of the ringleaders. Meanwhile, if any one of you gives me the least cause I'll shoot him like a dog. Mr. Salver an' Mr. Gersey are both armed like me," he tapped the heavy revolver hanging at his waist, "so look out for yourselves. I've no doubt some of you'll squeal. I'll find out yet. God help the men that did it when I do."

The captain's bribe was a large one. There were men in the forecastle who would have jumped at it, but a very clear realization of what would be meted out to them by their fellows if they turned traitor, kept them quiet. The loyal men among the mutineers knew pretty well who were to be suspected and kept close watch on them.

Beekman knew nothing of all that, of course, the next morning as he made his meager breakfast. He did not know how long it would take him to reach those islands, the very name of which he was ignorant, and it behooved him to husband his resources. After his breakfast he laid his course by the compass. The breeze held steady. All he had to do was to steer the boat. At nightfall he decided to furl sail and drift. For one thing he needed the sleep.

The next day, however, the breeze came stronger. It gradually shifted from the southeast toward the north. He reefed the sail down until it barely showed a scrap of canvas and drove ahead of it. There was no sleep for him through the night. He did not dare to leave the boat to her own devices in that wind and sea. The wind rose with every hour. The next morning it was blowing a howling gale from the northeast. He could no longer keep sail on the boat. He could not row against it. Fortunately, he had foreseen the situation. He unstepped the mast and unshipped the yard with which he pried up some of the seats and with these and spare oars he made himself a serviceable sea anchor, which he attached to the boat's painter forward, cast overboard, and by this means drifted with the storm being at the same time wet, cold, lonely, and very miserable. He knew the boat was a lifeboat; its air tanks would keep it from sinking, but if it ever fell into the trough of the sea it would be rolled over and over like a cork. It would fill with water and refill in spite of his constant bailing. He could only trust to his sea anchor to keep the boat's head to the huge seas by which it was alternately uplifted and cast down in vast, prodigious motion. Had it not been provided with those air tanks the boat would have been swamped inevitably.

His provisions got thoroughly wetted. One of the water breakers was torn from its lashing and the same wave that worked that damage dashed it against the other, staving it in. His boat compass and tools were swept away. Only what was in the lockers forward and aft remained. The boat was swept clean. He had bailed as long as he had strength, but even the bailing tin finally disappeared. At last he sank down exhausted. The waves beat over him. The seas rolled him from side to side. He had strength enough to lash himself to the aftermost thwart before he fell into a state of complete collapse.

So he drifted on through the night. Toward morning the gale blew itself out. The next day the sun rose in a cloudless sky. The breeze subsided. The seas still rose mightily, but he knew that if no more wind came they would presently subside. He swallowed some of the sodden, hard bread in the forward locker for breakfast and then with the top of an empty biscuit tin from the same place he made shift to free the boat of water, at least sufficiently so for her to rise on the waves of the still rough and tumbling seas. He was too exhausted to get in his sea anchor. Indeed, so many things had carried away that he could not have stepped the mast or spread the sail. The canvas itself was gone with his blankets and tarpaulin. He could not use the oars. He could only drift.

How many days he sat in that boat under that burning sun he could not tell. Where he drifted as it fell dead calm he did not know. If he had been less crazed by the awful heat of the unshaded sun and the more awful thirst which made him forget his hunger-he simply could not swallow the hard, dry bread and the salt meat after a time-he might have kept a sort of dead reckoning. He was too weak even to take bearings by sun or stars. Not a sail, not the smoke of a steamer, met his burning stare-his eyes were hot, blazing in their sockets like the sun overhead, he fancied-around him as day after day he surveyed that ever unbroken horizon, himself a dot in the center of a vast periphery of emptiness.

He lost track of the days, of course. As he thought of it afterward it seemed to him that he went mad. The only concrete fact that finally came to him was at the darkest hour of a certain night that closed what he had felt must be his last day. He was conscious of a violent shock. It seemed to him that the boat had struck something. There was a swift motion of rebound, a splashing of water over him, another heavy forward surge, another shock, a crash as of splintering timber, and then all the motion ceased. All around him was a strange roaring. He was too feeble to speculate as to what had happened. He could only wait for the dawn.

The first gray of morning brought him a faint hope of life. The light of day showed him the whaleboat, her bottom hopelessly shattered, caught firmly on a rocky reef. Around him, once in a while over him, great waves were breaking; the whole mighty Pacific sweeping down from the line falling in crashing assault upon this barrier of jagged stones. Back of him was the sea-unbroken to the horizon-over which he had come. In front of him stretched a space of still water. On the other side of this lagoon rose huge, precipitous rocks, bare, gaunt, forbidding. As he stood up tremblingly and peered beneath his hand he thought he could detect at the foot of these mighty cliffs a stretch of golden sand.

Even with the inspiration of land at last and probable food and drink it was difficult in his lack of strength to wrench loose a shattered plank. Still, by desperate effort he accomplished that at last. With that to buoy him up he stumbled across the reef and launched into the smooth waters of the lagoon. The swim would have been nothing under ordinary circumstances, but in his terrible prostration, even with the aid of the plank, it was a long, difficult passage. Half a dozen times he was on the point of throwing up his hands and going under, but something-love of life, hope indestructible, eternal, remains of determination, instinctive unwillingness to acknowledge himself beaten-kept him up. He pressed on through the smooth waters of the lagoon. Finally his feet touched the strand. Standing trembling but triumphant a few moments to recover himself, he staggered across it.

He discovered as he did so an opening in the rock concealed previously from him by an overlap of the cliff. The rift in the cliff wall was perhaps thirty yards wide. It could only be seen from one direction. The waters of the lagoon ran inward through it. The sand narrowed and stopped at the opening. From, that beach he could not see within. Climbing a little distance up the edge of the cliff and peering around it, he saw at the end of the inlet a deep bay, a harbor roughly circular, perhaps half a mile in diameter. He surveyed it long and carefully in the half light which made it impossible to see clearly.

As nearly as he could guess the height of the cliffs ranged from three hundred to five hundred feet. In niches and shelves here and there a few bits of green appeared. The tops of the cliffs seemed as bare as the sides. No way to surmount them appeared. Sometimes they ran straight down into the deep, dark water. At the base of the walls here and there were little stretches of sand. The place was still dark and gloomy, and somehow terrible. The sunlight had not penetrated into it yet; would not, he judged, for some time, or until the sun got into exactly the right position to shine through that narrow opening.

An unusual mental alertness had taken the place of his lethargy. Hope had made the change. He must, first of all, find water, then food, and then he must reach the top of the cliffs. On the other side of the shoulder of wall where he stood ran one of the stretches of sand. How could he get around that shoulder and pass through that opening? He did not dare to attempt to swim around it yet. He must climb over it. Painfully, with ebbing strength but with growing hope, he managed at the imminent risk of his life to climb around the point and finally set foot upon that narrow strip of sand. He looked back only to find the wall behind him rising sheer above his head, just as the walls opposite had. It was like being imprisoned in a vast tower, one side of which had been riven from top to bottom. And the dark, forbidding gloom oppressed him still more. The morning was still, there was no breeze in that enclosed place, but he shivered nevertheless and would have given anything for human companionship. He even tried to cry aloud to break the appalling stillness, but no sound came from cracked lips and parched, constricted throat. Was he to fail, having come so far?

In frantic terror he broke into a feeble run aimlessly forward. Rounding another jut of the wall, he saw that which meant life-a slender stream of water falling in long, broken leaps from the top to the bottom of the wall. It had cut a channel through the sand and was lost in the bay. At the sight, strange to say, his strength left him. Fear had drawn him on and now fear and everything else were forgot. He fell to his knees, but still had strength and determination to crawl on. At last he reached it, fell on his face, and drank. It needed all his resolution, all his courage, all his mental and physical power not to drink and die. He knew he must drink sparingly and he did so.

When he had satisfied his thirst by slow degrees, he sat down on the sand to consider his situation. The cool, sweet water put new life into him. He was suddenly conscious of a terrible, gripping hunger, but the first and greatest of his needs had been satisfied. There must be some way to the top of those cliffs. Where there was fresh water there must be life. No island in the south seas could be so lonely, so sequestered, so unvisited as not to have a life and vegetation of its own. Wherever there was water and earth, especially in those latitudes, were to be found the kindly fruits thereof.

He decided that he would go back to the whaleboat, that he would get what crumbs that were left of the hard bread that he had been unable to eat and the remaining scraps of the salt meat that had choked him. He could swallow them now. Then he would come back and after he had been strengthened by his meal he would examine every foot of the cliffs to find a way upward. Meanwhile, he would rest a little. He threw himself down on the sand on his back and stared upward. As he did so he noticed the sun had reached such a position that it shone full through the entrance, suddenly illuminating the whole gloomy tower with light and changing the entire aspect of it.

He put his hand behind him to raise himself, intending to take advantage of the flood of light, which he saw would be there but for a short time, for a further inspection of the place. But his eyes were still cast upward. In the center of his vision the top of the cliff cut the brightening sky. Suddenly, as if formed instantly out of thin air, over the edge appeared a human figure. This figure was poised upon the very highest point of the towerlike wall, and was staring seaward through the great rift.

In the clear air and the bright sunlight he had not the slightest difficulty in discerning details. Perhaps his sight was sharpened by his anxiety and desire.

The figure was that of a woman and her skin was whiter than his own!

BOOK II

"An' they talks a lot o' lovin',

But wot do they understand?"

CHAPTER XII

THE HARDEST OF CONFESSIONS

Six months after the departure of the Susquehanna with its unwilling member of the crew, Harnash found himself in a position of advantage far beyond his wildest dream. The active search for Beekman had of necessity been abandoned long since, although the authorities still kept the matter in view. No one had yet connected his disappearance with the Susquehanna because her clearance papers had been taken out the day before, although her actual sailing had been delayed. She had slipped away unmarked in the early dawn, under her own canvas, the wind being favorable, and as Captain Fish knew the channel well she had even dispensed with the pilot.

In the search and the negotiations connected with it George Harnash had been thrown rather intimately and closely with John Maynard. There had been no business associations between them at first, but Maynard's growing appreciation of the ability of Harnash, which was very considerable, was heightened by a rather brilliant coup which the young man pulled off and from which Maynard suffered; not seriously, of course, from Maynard's point of view, although the results were of a very considerable financial gain to Harnash.

Now there was none of the mean spirit of revenge in Maynard. It was his policy to convert a brilliant enemy into a friend, if possible. Of course, some enemies were too big for that purpose, and those Maynard fought to a finish. Harnash was not in that category. Maynard was getting along in years. The excitement of battle had begun somewhat to pall upon him. He loved fighting for its own sake, but he had fought so long and so hard and so successfully that he was willing to withdraw gradually from the more active conflict, leaving warfare to youth, to which indeed it appertains.

Among the young men he gathered around him there was none who stood quite as high in his good graces as Harnash. No suspicion of the love affair between Harnash and Stephanie had arisen in the old man's mind, but he was not unaware that Stephanie greatly liked the young man. At first he had thought that the liking had developed from the other man's affection for Beekman.

Against that young man his resentment grew hotter and hotter. The police scouted the conclusion that Beekman was dead. His case, they alleged, was just one of the many mysterious disappearances from New York, most of which were eventually explained. There was not a scrap of evidence anywhere to account for Beekman's disappearance. Probably the labels had been torn from his clothing before it had been disposed of, if it had been sold. His watch case might have been melted down for old gold, obviously, if it had not accompanied him. At any rate, the works had not been traced. And no pawn shop or fence yielded the slightest clew to any other jewelry. The great reward still standing brought no information whatever.

Maynard was finally convinced that Beekman had deliberately run away from his daughter, and the world also accepted that solution. Only Harnash and Stephanie knew the contrary. Seeing them so much together, it had often occurred to Maynard that possibly Harnash might succeed in consoling his daughter. It was not on that account, however, that he took him into business after three months of association and finally made him his personal representative and confidential man.

Now Harnash had been unremitting in his attentions to Stephanie. She did not hesitate to avow her affection to him and to continue in that avowal, but she had not receded an inch from her position that before Harnash could even speak to her father, and certainly before he could claim her, Beekman must be found and his consent gained.

Harnash had concealed nothing from the woman he loved except what he had done with Beekman. He met her refusal to marry him with a refusal to reveal that. In keeping that secret he was as obstinate in his way as she was in hers. Of course, Harnash would ultimately be compelled to tell the whole story, and as the months slipped by and the time of the arrival of the Susquehanna at Vladivostok, where she would be in cable communication with the rest of the world, approached he naturally grew more and more apprehensive and showed it to Stephanie's keen and searching eyes, at least.

When Maynard trusted a man he trusted him all in all. It was a part of his policy. If a man were not worth trusting he did not want him around and he did not have him around, as a matter of fact. Therefore among other duties devolved upon the new confidential assistant was the opening of the great financier's mail. Harnash had never made up his mind just what he should do when the necessity for confession and explanation was presented. He had tried to plan his course, but so much depended upon circumstances that he had always put the decision by. Stephanie loved him-and it was easy to see that her passion for him was growing and that it almost matched his own-but she was a high spirited girl with certain unspoiled notions of right and wrong, and with a certain amount of her father's unyielding firmness which made her conduct in the threatening emergency something of a problem.

The problem changed from the abstract to the concrete one morning about a half year after that bachelor dinner. The Susquehanna was overdue at Vladivostok. From the shipping experts in the Inter-Oceanic Trading Company Harnash had found that out and it had greatly increased his anxiety by giving it a new turn-suppose something had befallen the ship? Every day of delay added to his mental distress. And although the shipping people manifested no special apprehension-ships were often longer overdue, especially sailing ships-Harnash grew more and more uneasy.

One morning while he was going over the mail at the office prior to Maynard's arrival a messenger boy brought in a cable from Honolulu. He signed for it, dismissed the boy, and without the slightest apprehension tore open the envelope. This is the message that stared at him:

Regret to report Susquehanna burned at sea, sunk by explosion of cargo. Third officer and six survivors landed here yesterday in small boat. Captain refused to abandon ship. One other boat got away, probably lost. Cable instructions.

It was signed by Smithfield, the agent of the Inter-Oceanic Trading Company in the Hawaiian Islands. One glance, one horrified inspection stamped the facts on Harnash's brain and consciousness. The Susquehanna was lost with all her people except the third officer and six men; that meant Woywod too. Was Beekman among those six, or had Harnash sent him to his death? Could he have been in the other boat? Was there a chance that it would turn up? Somehow Harnash jumped at a conviction, of which he could not disabuse his mind, that Beekman was among the missing. This he had not planned. That it could happen he had never dreamed, even remotely.

Now Harnash faced the greatest temptation of his life. He was quick enough to see that if Woywod and Beekman had been lost, in all probability the secret would never be known and all he had to do was to say nothing to be safe. But Harnash had never liked Beekman so much as at that very moment. Forgetful for the time being even of Stephanie, his mind reverted to their college associations, their subsequent business career, the unfailing courtesy and kindness and trust which Beekman, high-placed and rich, had extended to him, relatively humble and poor, his cordial cooperation and confidence, his help. While Harnash was the business and brains of the firm, he could have accomplished little without Beekman.

He recalled the genial, pleasant humor of his friend, the good times they had enjoyed together, and as he did so he put his head in his hands and groaned aloud. Harnash felt like a murderer. He believed indeed that he was one. It was the turning point in his career. If he spoke he would brand himself in the eyes of all to whom the story might become known-John Maynard, of course, and Stephanie, the woman he loved truly and whole heartedly, even though his love had made him do an unworthy and ignoble thing. If he kept silent, with the start he had gained in John Maynard's graces and with Stephanie's affection, he would eventually marry her. If he did not tell her, if he put her off with some carefully manufactured story, he could probably persuade her after a time to marry him. In that event he saw himself doomed to a long life with the woman he loved so passionately and whom he would fain trust with everything, with a hideous secret between them. To win her under such conditions was to lose her. Which was the better course?

Many a man gives way to an evil impulse under the strain of a great temptation, but it does not necessarily follow that he cannot recover from that impulse, that his moral nature is broken down completely by the one lapse, even though it be a great one. As a matter of fact, a woman like Stephanie Maynard could scarcely have loved George Harnash as she did if he had not been on the whole much better than his worst.

Then and there Harnash came to a decision. Not without much inward wrestling and many groanings of spirit did he reach the conclusion that it was better not to try to cover up what he had done. To him entered Maynard. The cheery good morning of the elder man died on his lips as he noted the strain and anxiety in his young friend's face.

"What's the matter?" he began abruptly.