Darkness and Dawn (28 page)

Then as the yawl heeled to the breeze and foamed away down stream with
a speed and ease that bore witness to the correctness of her lines, he
struck up a song, and Beatrice joined in, and so their sadness
vanished and a great, strong, confident joy thrilled both of them at
prospect of what was yet to be.

By mid-afternoon they had safely navigated
Harlem River and the upper reaches of East River, and were well up
toward Willett's Point, with Long Island Sound opening out before them
broadly.

Of the towns and villages, the estates and magnificent palaces that
once had adorned the shores of the Sound, no trace remained. Nothing
was visible but unbroken lines of tall, blue forest in the distance;
the Sound appeared to have grown far wider, and what seemed like a
strong current set eastward in a manner certainly not produced by the
tide, all of which puzzled Stern as he held the little yawl to her
course, sole alone in that vast blue where once uncounted thousands of
keels had vexed the brine.

Nightfall found them abreast the ruins of Stamford, still holding a
fair course about five or six miles off shore.

Save for the gulls and one or two quick-scurrying flights of Mother
Carey's chickens (now larger and swifter than in the old days), and a
single "V" of noisy geese, no life had appeared all that afternoon.
Stern wondered at this. A kind of desolation seemed to lie over the
region.

"Ten times more living things in our vicinity back home on the
Hudson," he remarked to Beatrice, who now lay 'midships, under the
shelter of the cabin, warmly wrapped in furs against the keen cutting
of the night wind. "It seems as though something had happened around
here, doesn't it? I should have thought the Sound would be alive with
birds and fish. What can the matter be?"

She had no hypothesis, and though they talked it over, they reached no
conclusion. By eight o'clock she fell asleep in her warm nest, and
Stern steered on alone, by the stars, under promise to put into harbor
where New Haven once had stood, and there himself get some much-needed
sleep.

Swiftly the yawl split the waters of the Sound, for though her sail
was crude, her body was as fine and speedy as his long experience with
boats could make it. Something of the vast mystery of night and sea
penetrated his soul as he held the boat on her way.

The night was moonless; only the great untroubled stars wondered down
at this daring venture into the unknown.

Stern hummed a tune to keep his spirits up. Running easily over the
monotonous dark swells with a fair following breeze, he passed an hour
or two. He sat down, braced the tiller, and resigned himself to
contemplation of the mysteries that had been and that still must be.
And very sweet to him was the sense of protection, of guardianship,
wherein he held the sleeping girl, in the shelter of the little cabin.

He must have dozed, sitting there inactive and alone. How long? He
could not tell. All that he knew was, suddenly, that he had wakened to
full consciousness, and that a sense of uneasiness, of fear, of peril,
hung about him.

Up he started, with an exclamation which he suppressed just in time to
avoid waking Beatrice. Through all, over all, a vast, dull roar was
making itself heard—a sound as though of mighty waters rushing,
leaping, echoing to the sky that droned the echo back again.

Whence came it? Stern could not tell. From nowhere, from everywhere;
the hum and vibrant blur of that tremendous sound seemed universal.

"My God, what's that?" Allan exclaimed, peering ahead with eyes
widened by a sudden stabbing fear. "I've got Beatrice aboard, here; I
can't let anything happen to her!"

The gibbous moon, red and sullen, was just beginning to thrust its
strangely mottled face above the uneasy moving plain of waters. Far
off to southward a dim headland showed; even as Stern looked it
drifted backward and away.

Suddenly he got a terrifying sense of speed. The headland must have
lain five miles to south of him; yet in a few moments, even as he
watched, it had gone into the vague obliteration of a vastly greater
distance.

"What's happening?" thought Stern. The wind had died; it seemed as
though the waters were moving with the wind, as fast as the wind; the
yawl was keeping pace with it, even as a floating balloon drifts in a
storm, unfeeling it.

Deep, dull, booming, ominous, the roar continued. The sail flapped
idle on the mast. Stern could distinguish a long line of foam that
slid away, past the boat, as only foam slides on a swift current.

He peered, in the gloom, to port; and all at once, far on the horizon,
saw a thing that stopped his heart a moment, then thrashed it into
furious activity.

Off there in a direction he judged as almost due northeast, a tenuous,
rising veil of vapor blotted out the lesser stars and dimmed the
brighter ones.

Even in that imperfect light he could see something of the sinuous
drift of that strange cloud.

Quickly he lashed the tiller, crept forward and climbed the mast, his
night-glasses slung over his shoulder.

Holding by one hand, he tried to concentrate his vision through the
glasses, but they failed to show him even as much as the naked eye
could discern.

The sight was paralyzing in its omen of destruction. Only too well
Stern realized the meaning of the swift, strong current, the roar—now
ever increasing, ever deepening in volume—the high and shifting vapor
veil that climbed toward the dim zenith.

"Merciful Heaven!" gulped he. "There's a cataract over there—a
terrible chasm—a plunge—to what? And we're drifting toward it at
express-train speed!"

Dazed though Stern was at his first realization of the
impending horror, yet through his fear for Beatrice, still asleep
among her furs, struggled a vast wonder at the meaning, the
possibility of such a phenomenon.

How could a current like that rush up along the Sound? How could there
be a cataract, sucking down the waters of the sea itself—whither
could it fall? Even at that crisis the man's scientific curiosity was
aroused; he felt, subconsciously, the interest of the trained observer
there in the midst of deadly peril.

But the moment demanded action.

Quickly Stern dropped to the deck, and, noiseless as a cat in his
doe-skin sandals, ran aft.

But even before he had executed the instinctive tactic of shifting the
helm, paying off, and trying to beat up into the faint breeze that now
drifted over the swirling current, he realized its futility and
abandoned it.

"No use," thought he. "About as effective as trying to dip up the
ocean with a spoon. Any use to try the sweeps? Maybe she and I
together could swing away out of the current—make the shore—nothing
else to do—I'll try it, anyhow."

Beside the girl he knelt.

"Beta! Beta!" he whispered in her ear. He shook her gently by the arm.
"Come, wake up, girlie—there's work to do here!"

She, submerged in healthy sleep, sighed deeply and murmured some
unintelligible thing; but Stern persisted. And in a minute or so there
she was, sitting up in the bottom of the yawl among the furs.

In the dim moonlight her face seemed a vague sweet flower shadowed by
the dark, wind-blown masses of her hair. Stern felt the warmth,
scented the perfume of her firm, full-blooded flesh. She put a hand to
her hair; her tiger-skin robe, falling back to the shoulder, revealed
her white and beautiful arm.

All at once she drew that arm about the man and brought him close to
her breast.

"Oh, Allan!" she breathed. "My boy! Where are we? What is it? Oh, I
was sleeping so soundly! Have we reached harbor yet? What's that
noise—that roaring sound? Surf?"

For a moment he could not answer. She, sensing some trouble, peered
closely at him.

"What is it, Allan?" cried she, her woman's intuition telling her of
trouble. "Tell me—is anything wrong?"

"Listen, dearest!"

"Yes, what?"

"We're in some kind of—of—"

"What? Danger?"

"Well, it may be. I don't know yet. But there's something wrong. You
see—"

"Oh, Allan!" she exclaimed, and started up. "Why didn't you waken me
before? What is it? What can I do to help?"

"I think there's rough water ahead, dear," the engineer answered,
trying to steady his voice, which shook a trifle in spite of him. "At
any rate, it sounds like a waterfall of some kind or other; and see,
there's a line, a drift of vapor rising over there. We're being
carried toward it on a strong current."

Anxiously she peered, now full awake. Then she turned to Allan.

"Can't we sail away?"

"Not enough wind. We might possibly row out of the current, and—and
perhaps—"

"Give me one of the sweeps quick, quick!"

He put the sweeps out. No sooner had he braced himself against a rib
of the yawl and thrown his muscles against the heavy bar than she,
too, was pulling hard.

"Not too strong at first, dear," he cautioned. "Don't use up all your
strength in the first few minutes. We may have a long fight for it!"

"I'm in it with you—till the end—whichever way it ends," she
answered; and in the moonlight he saw the untrammeled swing and play
of her magnificent body.

The yawl came round slowly till it was crosswise to the current,
headed toward the mainland shore. Now it began to make a little
headway. But the breeze slightly impeded it.

Stern whipped out his knife and slashed the sheets of platted rush.
The sail crumpled, crackled and slid down; and now under a bare pole
the boat cradled slowly ahead transversely across the foam-streaked
current that ran swiftly soughing toward the dim vapor-swirls away to
the northeast.

No word was spoken now. Both Beatrice and Stern lay to the sweeps;
both braced themselves and put the full force of back and arms into
each long, powerful stroke. Yet Stern could see that, at the rate of
progress they were making over that black and oily swirl, they could
not gain ten feet while the current was carrying them a thousand.

In his heart he knew the futility of the fight, yet still he fought.
Still Beatrice fought for life, too, there by his side. Human
instinct, the will to live, drove them on, on, where both understood
there was no hope.

For now already the current had quickened still more. The breeze had
sprung up from the opposite direction; Stern knew the boiling rush of
waters had already reached a speed greater than that of the wind
itself. No longer the stars trembled, reflected, in the waters. All
ugly, frothing, broken, the swift current foamed and leaped, in long,
horrible gulfs and crests of sickening velocity.

And whirlpools now began to form. The yawl was twisted like a straw,
wrenched, hurled, flung about with sickening violence.

"Row!
Row!
" Stern cried none the less. And his muscles bunched and
hardened with the labor; his veins stood out, and sweat dropped from
his brow, ran into his eyes, and all but blinded him.

The girl, too, was laboring with all her might. Stern heard her
breath, gasping and quick, above the roar and swash of the mad waters.
And all at once revulsion seized him—rage, and a kind of mad
exultation, a defiance of it all.

He dropped the sweep and sprang to her.

"Beta!" he shouted, louder than the droning tumult. "No use! No use at
all! Here—come to me!"

He drew the sweep inboard and flung it in the bottom of the yawl.

Already the vapors of the cataract ahead were drifting over them and
driving in their faces. A vibrant booming shuddered through the dark
air, where now even the moon's faint light was all extinguished by the
whirling mists.

Heaven and sea shook with the terrible concussion of falling waters.
Though Stern had shouted, yet the girl could not have heard him now.

In the gloom he peered at her; he took her in his arms. Her face was
pale, but very calm. She showed no more fear than the man; each seemed
inspired with some strange exultant thought of death, there with the
other.

He drew her to his breast and covered her face; he knelt with her
among the heaped-up furs, and then, as the yawl plunged more violently
still, they sank down in the poor shelter of the cabin and waited.

His arms were about her; her face was buried on his breast. He
smoothed her hair; his lips pressed her forehead.

"Good-by!" he whispered, though she could not hear.

They seemed now to hover on the very brink.

A long, racing sluicelike incline of black waters, streaked with
swirls of white, appeared before them. The boat plunged and whirled,
dipped, righted, and sped on.

Behind, a huge, rushing, wall-like mass of lathering, leaping surges.
In front, a vast nothingness, a black, unfathomable void, up through
which gushed in clouds the mighty jets of vapor.

Came a lurch, a swift plunge.

The boat hung suspended a moment.

Stern saw what seemed a long, clear, greenish slant of water. Deafened
and dazed by the infernal pandemonium of noise, he bowed his head on
hers, and his arms tightened.

Suddenly everything dropped away. The universe crashed and bellowed.

Stern felt a heavy dash of brine—cold, strangling, irresistible.

All grew black.

"
Death!
" thought he, and knew no more.

Consciousness won back to Allan Stern—how long afterward he
could not tell—under the guise of a vast roaring tumult, a deafening
thunder that rose, fell, leaped aloft again in huge, titanic cadences
of sound.

And coupled with this glimmering sense-impression, he felt the drive
of water over him; he saw, vaguely as in the memory of a dream, a dim
gray light that weakly filtered through the gloom.

Weak, sick, dazed, the man realized that he still lived; and to his
mind the thought "Beatrice!" flashed back again.