Angel Island, Inez Haynes Gillmore [the two towers ebook txt] 📗
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by Inez Haynes Gillmore
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Title: Angel Island
Author: Inez Haynes Gillmore
Release Date: November, 2003 [Etext #4637]
[Yes, we are more than one year ahead of schedule]
[This file was first posted on February 20, 2002]
Edition: 10
Language: English
Character set encoding: ASCII
The Project Gutenberg Etext of Angel Island
by Inez Haynes Gillmore
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Angel Island
By Inez Haynes Gillmore
Author of “Phoebe and Ernest,” “Phoebe, Ernest, and Cupid,” etc.
To
M. W. P.
Angel Island
IIt was the morning after the shipwreck. The five men still lay where
they had slept. A long time had passed since anybody had spoken. A long
time had passed since anybody had moved. Indeed, it, looked almost as if
they would never speak or move again. So bruised and bloodless of skin
were they, so bleak and sharp of feature, so stark and hollow of eye, so
rigid and moveless of limb that they might have been corpses. Mentally,
too, they were almost moribund. They stared vacantly, straight out to
sea. They stared with the unwinking fixedness of those whose gaze is
caught in hypnotic trance.
It was Frank Merrill who broke the silence finally. Merrill still looked
like a man of marble and his voice still kept its unnatural tone, level,
monotonous, metallic. “If I could only forget the scream that Norton kid
gave when he saw the big wave coming. It rings in my head. And the way
his mother pressed his head down on her breast - oh, my God!”
His listeners knew that he was going to say this. They knew the very
words in which he would put it. All through the night-watches he had
said the same thing at intervals. The effect always was of a red-hot
wire drawn down the frayed ends of their nerves. But again one by one
they themselves fell into line.
“It was that old woman I remember,” said Honey Smith. There were
bruises, mottled blue and black, all over Honey’s body. There was a
falsetto whistling to Honey’s voice. “That Irish granny! She didn’t say
a word. Her mouth just opened until her jaw fell. Then the wave struck!”
He paused. He tried to control the falsetto whistling. But it got away
from him. “God, I bet she was dead before it touched her!”
“That was the awful thing about it,” Pete Murphy groaned. It was as
inevitable now as an antiphonal chorus. Pete’s little scarred,
scratched, bleeding body rocked back and forth.” The women and children!
But it all came so quick. I was close beside ‘the Newlyweds.’ She put
her arms around his neck and said, ‘Your face’ll be the last I’ll look
on in this life, dearest! ‘And she stayed there looking into his eyes.
It was the last face she saw all right.” Pete stopped and his brow
blackened. ” While she was sick in her stateroom, he’d been looking into
a good many faces besides hers, the - “
“I don’t seem to remember anything definite about it,” Billy Fairfax
said. It was strange to hear that beating pulse of horror in Billy’s
mild tones and to see that look of terror frozen on his mild face. “I
had the same feeling that I’ve had in nightmares lots of times - that it
was horrible - and - I didn’t think I could stand it another moment -
but - of course it would soon end - like all nightmares and I’d wake
up.”
Without reason, they fell again into silence.
They had passed through two distinct psychological changes since the sea
spewed them up. When consciousness returned, they gathered into a little
terror-stricken, gibbering group. At first they babbled. At first
inarticulate, confused, they dripped strings of mere words; expletives,
exclamations, detached phrases, broken clauses, sentences that started
with subjects and trailed, unpredicated, to stupid silence; sentences
beginning subjectless and hobbling to futile conclusion. It was as
though mentally they slavered. But every phrase, however confused and
inept, voiced their panic, voiced the long strain of their fearful
buffeting and their terrific final struggle. And every clause, whether
sentimental, sacrilegious, or profane, breathed their wonder, their
pathetic, poignant, horrified wonder, that such things could be. All
this was intensified by the anarchy of sea and air and sky, by the
incessant explosion of the waves, by the wind which seemed to sweep from
end to end of a liquefying universe, by a downpour which threatened to
beat their sodden bodies to pulp, by all the connotation of terror that
lay in the darkness and in their unguarded condition on a barbarous,
semi-tropical coast.
Then came the long, log-like stupor of their exhaustion.
With the day, vocabulary, grammar, logic returned. They still iterated
and reiterated their experiences, but with a coherence which gradually
grew to consistence. In between, however, came sudden, sinister attacks
of dumbness.
“I remember wondering,” Billy Fairfax broke their last silence suddenly,
“what would become of the ship’s cat.”
This was typical of the astonishing fatuity which marked their comments.
Billy Fairfax had made the remark about the ship’s cat a dozen times.
And a dozen times, it had elicited from the others a clamor of similar
chatter, of insignificant haphazard detail which began anywhere and
ended nowhere.
But this time it brought no comment. Perhaps it served to stir faintly
an atrophied analytic sense. No one of them had yet lost the shudder and
the thrill which lay in his own narrative. But the experiences of the
others had begun to bore and irritate.
There came after this one remark another half-hour of stupid and
readjusting silence.
The storm, which had seemed to worry the whole universe in its grip, had
died finally but it had died hard. On a quieted earth, the sea alone
showed signs of revolution. The waves, monstrous, towering, swollen,
were still marching on to the beach with a machine-like regularity that
was swift and ponderous at the same time. One on one, another on
another, they came, not an instant between. When they crested,
involuntarily the five men braced themselves as for a shock. When they
crashed, involuntarily the five men started as if a bomb had struck.
Beyond the wave-line, under a cover of foam, the jaded sea lay feebly
palpitant like an old man asleep. Not far off, sucked close to a ragged
reef, stretched the black bulk that had once been the Brian Boru.
Continually it leaped out of the water, threw itself like a live
creature, breast-forward on the rock, clawed furiously at it, retreated
a little more shattered, settled back in the trough, brooded an instant,
then with the courage of the tortured and the strength of the dying,
reared and sprang at the rock again.
Up and down the beach stretched an unbroken line of wreckage. Here and
there, things, humanly shaped, lay prone or supine or twisted into crazy
attitudes. Some had been flung far up the slope beyond the water-line.
Others, rolling back in the torrent of the tide, engaged in a ceaseless,
grotesque frolic with the foamy waters. Out of a mass of wood caught
between rocks and rising shoulder-high above it, a woman’s head, livid,
rigid, stared with a fixed gaze out of her dead eyes straight at their
group. Her blonde hair had already dried; it hung in stiff, salt-clogged
masses that beat wildly about her face. Beyond something rocking between
two wedged sea-chests, but concealed by them, constantly kicked a sodden
foot into the air. Straight ahead, the naked body of a child flashed to
the crest of each wave.
All this destruction ran from north to south between two reefs of black
rock. It edged a broad bow-shaped expanse of sand, snowy, powdery,
hummocky, netted with wefts of black seaweed that had dried to a
rattling stiffness. To the east, this silvery crescent merged finally
with a furry band of vegetation which screened the whole foreground of
the island.
The day was perfect and the scene beautiful. They had watched the sun
come up over the trees at their back. And it was as if they had seen a
sunrise for the first time in their life. To them, it was neither
beautiful nor familiar; it was sinister and strange. A chill, that was
not of the dawn but of death itself, lay over everything. The morning
wind was the breath of the tomb, the smells that came to them from the
island bore the taint of mortality, the very sunshine seemed icy. They
suffered - the five survivors of the night’s tragedy - with a scarifying
sense of disillusion with Nature. It was as though a beautiful, tender,
and fondly loved mother had turned murderously on her children, had
wounded them nearly to death, had then tried to woo them to her breast
again. The loveliness of her, the mindless, heartless, soulless
loveliness, as of a maniac tamed, mocked at their agonies, mocked with
her gentle indifference, mocked with her self-satisfied placidity,
mocked with her serenity and her peace. For them she was dead - dead
like those whom we no longer trust.
The sun was racing up a sky smooth and clear as gray glass. It dropped
on the torn green sea a shimmer that was almost dazzling; but ere was
something incongruous about that - as though Nature had covered her
victim with a spangled scarf. It brought out millions of sparkles in
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