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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

I

It 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