Chapter XXXIV
“How are you for a climb?” Margaret asked me, shortly after we had left
the table.
She stood challengingly at my open door, in oilskins, sou’wester, and sea-
boots.
“I’ve never seen you with a foot above the deck since we sailed,” she
went on. “Have you a good head?”
I marked my book, rolled out of my bunk in which I had been wedged, and
clapped my hands for Wada.
“Will you?” she cried eagerly.
“If you let me lead,” I answered airily, “and if you will promise to hold
on tight. Whither away?”
“Into the top of the jigger. It’s the easiest. As for holding on,
please remember that I have often done it. It is with you the doubt
rests.”
“Very well,” I retorted; “do you lead then. I shall hold on tight.”
“I have seen many a landsman funk it,” she teased. “There are no lubber-
holes in our tops.”
“And most likely I shall,” I agreed. “I’ve never been aloft in my life,
and since there is no hole for a lubber.”
She looked at me, half believing my confession of weakness, while I
extended my arms for the oilskin which Wada struggled on to me.
On the poop it was magnificent, and terrible, and sombre. The universe
was very immediately about us. It blanketed us in storming wind and
flying spray and grayness. Our main deck was impassable, and the relief
of the wheel came aft along the bridge. It was two o’clock, and for over
two hours the frozen wretches had laid out upon the fore-yard. They were
still there, weak, feeble, hopeless. Captain West, stepping out in the
lee of the chart-house, gazed at them for several minutes.
“We’ll have to give up that reef,” he said to Mr. Pike. “Just make the
sail fast. Better put on double gaskets.”
And with lagging feet, from time to time pausing and holding on as spray
and the tops of waves swept over him, the mate went for’ard along the
bridge to vent his scorn on the two watches of a four-masted ship that
could not reef a foresail.
It is true. They could not do it, despite their willingness, for this I
have learned: the men do their weak best whenever the order is given to
shorten sail. It must be that they are afraid. They lack the iron of
Mr. Pike, the wisdom and the iron of Captain West. Always, have I
noticed, with all the alacrity of which they are capable, do they respond
to any order to shorten down. That is why they are for’ard, in that
pigsty of a forecastle, because they lack the iron. Well, I can say only
this: If nothing else could have prevented the funk hinted at by
Margaret, the sorry spectacle of these ironless, spineless creatures was
sufficient safeguard. How could I funk in the face of their weakness–I,
who lived aft in the high place?
Margaret did not disdain the aid of my hand as she climbed upon the pin-
rail at the foot of the weather jigger-rigging. But it was merely the
recognition of a courtesy on her part, for the next moment she released
her mittened hand from mine, swung boldly outboard into the face of the
gale, and around against the ratlines. Then she began to climb. I
followed, almost unaware of the ticklishness of the exploit to a tyro, so
buoyed up was I by her example and by my scorn of the weaklings for’ard.
Where men could go, I could go. What men could do, I could do. And no
daughter of the Samurai could out-game me.
Yet it was slow work. In the windward rolls against the storm-gusts one
was pinned helplessly, like a butterfly, against the rigging. At such
times, so great was the pressure one could not lift hand nor foot. Also,
there was no need for holding on. As I have said, one was pinned against
the rigging by the wind.
Through the snow beginning to drive the deck grew small beneath me, until
a fall meant a broken back or death, unless one landed in the sea, in
which case the result would be frigid drowning. And still Margaret
climbed. Without pause she went out under the overhanging platform of
the top, shifted her holds to the rigging that went aloft from it, and
swung around this rigging, easily, carelessly, timing the action to the
roll, and stood safely upon the top.
I followed. I breathed no prayers, knew no qualms, as I presented my
back to the deck and climbed out under the overhang, feeling with my
hands for holds I could not see. I was in an ecstasy. I could dare
anything. Had she sprung into the air, stretched out her arms, and
soared away on the breast of the gale, I should have unhesitatingly
followed her.
As my head outpassed the edge of the top so that she came into view, I
could see she was looking at me with storm-bright eyes. And as I swung
around the rigging lightly and joined her, I saw approval in her eyes
that was quickly routed by petulance.
“Oh, you’ve done this sort of thing before,” she reproached, calling
loudly, so that I might hear, her lips close to my ear.
I shook a denial with my head that brightened her eyes again. She nodded
and smiled, and sat down, dangling her sea-boots into snow-swirled space
from the edge of the top. I sat beside her, looking down into the snow
that hid the deck while it exaggerated the depth out of which we had
climbed.
We were all alone there, a pair of storm petrels perched in mid air on a
steel stick that arose out of snow and that vanished above into snow. We
had come to the tip of the world, and even that tip had ceased to be. But
no. Out of the snow, down wind, with motionless wings, driving fully
eighty or ninety miles an hour, appeared a huge albatross. He must have
been fifteen feet from wing-tip to wing-tip. He had seen his danger ere
we saw him, and, tilting his body on the blast, he carelessly veered
clear of collision. His head and neck were rimed with age or frost–we
could not tell which–and his bright bead-eye noted us as he passed and
whirled away on a great circle into the snow to leeward.
Margaret’s hand shot out to mine.
“It alone was worth the climb!” she cried. And then the Elsinore flung
down, and Margaret’s hand clutched tighter for holding, while from the
hidden depths arose the crash and thunder of the great west wind drift
upon our decks.
Quickly as the snow-squall had come, it passed with the same sharp
quickness, and as in a flash we could see the lean length of the ship
beneath us–the main deck full with boiling flood, the forecastle-head
buried in a bursting sea, the lookout, stationed for very life back on
top the for’ard-house, hanging on, head down, to the wind-drive of ocean,
and, directly under us, the streaming poop and Mr. Mellaire, with a
handful of men, rigging relieving tackles on the tiller. And we saw the
Samurai emerge in the lee of the chart-house, swaying with casual surety
on the mad deck, as he spoke what must have been instructions to Mr.
Pike.
The gray circle of the world had removed itself from us for several
hundred yards, and we could see the mighty sweep of sea. Shaggy gray-
beards, sixty feet from trough to crest, leapt out of the windward murky
gray, and in unending procession rushed upon the Elsinore, one moment
overtoppling her slender frailness, the next moment splashing a hundred
tons of water on her deck and flinging her skyward as they passed beneath
and foamed and crested from sight in the murky gray to leeward. And the
great albatrosses veered and circled about us, beating up into the bitter
violence of the gale and sweeping grandly away before it far faster than
it blew.
Margaret forbore from looking to challenge me with eloquent, questioning
eyes. With numb fingers inside my thick mitten, I drew aside the ear-
flap of her sou’wester and shouted:
“It is nothing new. I have been here before. In the lives of all my
fathers have I been here. The frost is on my cheek, the salt bites my
nostrils, the wind chants in my ears, and it is an old happening. I
know, now, that my forbears were Vikings. I was seed of them in their
own day. With them I have raided English coasts, dared the Pillars of
Hercules, forayed the Mediterranean, and sat in the high place of
government over the soft sun-warm peoples. I am Hengist and Horsa; I am
of the ancient heroes, even legendary to them. I have bearded and bitten
the frozen seas, and, aforetime of that, ere ever the ice-ages came to
be, I have dripped my shoulders in reindeer gore, slain the mastodon and
the sabre-tooth, scratched the record of my prowess on the walls of deep-
buried caves–ay, and suckled she-wolves side by side with my brother-
cubs, the scars of whose fangs are now upon me.”
She laughed deliciously, and a snow-squall drove upon us and cut our
cheeks, and the Elsinore flung over and down as if she would never rise
again, while we held on and swept through the air in a dizzying arc.
Margaret released a hand, still laughing, and pressed aside my ear-flap.
“I don’t know anything about it,” she cried. “It sounds like poetry. But
I believe it. It has to be, for it has been. I have heard it aforetime,
when skin-clad men sang in fire-circles that pressed back the frost and
night.”
“And the books?” she queried maliciously, as we prepared to descend.
“They can go hang, along with all the brain-sick, world-sick fools that
wrote them,” I replied.
Again she laughed deliciously, though the wind tore the sound away as she
swung out into space, muscled herself by her arms while she caught
footholds beneath her which she could not see, and passed out of my sight
under the perilous overhang of the top.
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