Part 18

The engine subsided into a low growl. The wind screamed in the wires as if for the first time, and below grew the long rustling rumour of the waves. He could see whitecaps flashing now over brilliant sapphire hollows. Why, these waves were high, he thought confusedly, leaning back against the steepness. The faint scream of a woman behind him came only a second before the shock and bounce of landing, with the crash and drench of flying cold water. When their bouncing slide lost momentum, they were immediately bucked about, tossed and dropped and flung on the strong new element as if in a light, top-heavy dory. The hiss and surge of waves were around them, dark blue water hurling itself northwestward, blue blacks in the hollows and laced with snowy streaks of foam.

Ronny turned at once to look back and grin at his father, still exhilarated with himself and with his sudden sense of adventure. It was like looking at people whom he had not seen for years, who were changed, yet completely familiar. His father met his glance with a face like bronzed rock, in which the eyes were a little fixed. He and they all were engaged in the almost violent business of keeping their balance in the lurching dip and rise of the plane, topheavy as it was and beaten by the wind, upon the strong waves which rose before them, jagged and frowning, which heaved them up with an unremitting power and passed behind them for others hurrying and trampling on.

Gloria Cargill was clinging with one hand to his father’s arm, and with the other was straightening her bright green hat. Mrs. Kinney’s plucked eyebrows were lifted over the roundness of her eyes in an almost ridiculous expression of amazed protest, and Colonel Kinney, holding her tightly, was crimson to his heavy dewlaps, and swearing visibly. Ronny was happy that he had not yet revealed himself to these courageous people.

The aviator jerked off his helmet and became immediately individual and human. His blue eyes were anxious in a bony, sun-reddened face. His bleached hair bristled on his head, and his eyelashes were bleached. Ronny remembered suddenly that his name was Bill. He looked more disturbed than any of them.

“Well, folks,” he said, “I sure am sorry. That strut busted like a match stick. Somebody will get murdered for this, if I have to do it myself. Hope the ladies are all right. There’s nothing to worry about, of course. Perhaps I can patch it.” He crawled backward between them and on to the back of the fuselage.

“Want any help?” Andrew Burgess called, with his eyes warm and lively again. “Rotten luck. I’ve been ready for a bottle of beer for the last fifteen minutes. Hope this won’t make us too late for lunch.”

Ronny, looking up at Bill as he climbed over the seat and seeing the curious slant look he cast down at his father’s nonchalance, knew as suddenly as if he had spoken that the matter was to be graver than that. He clung to the edge of his seat as the plane swung down in a smashing burst of spray that flew over them and stung their faces, considering the thing soberly. The violence of those Gulf Stream waves was still almost unbelievable. They had looked down so long upon the seeming flatness of this water. Ronny’s clothes were getting wet and he shifted about on his seat to avoid the stinging spray that came inboard.

His father and Gloria Cargill were singing “Where do we go from here?” and “When do we eat?” with voices that seemed a little too boisterous. He knew that Gloria was showing what a good sport she could be, for his father’s admiration, who watched her powder her nose and rouge, and do over her lips with the scarlet lipstick. Gloria was lovely, glancing sidewise into her tiny mirror, sidewise up at him. Mrs. Kinney was not singing. Her plump cheeks had gone a little sallow under the rouge, and her bright yellow hat and bright yellow dress looked startling on her. She sat hunched up very close to her husband, with her eyes fixed upon the lifting wave tops. Colonel Kinney patted her hand regularly and watched Bill.

As the plane lifted to a racing wave Ronny could look out over the sea to some distance to more racing blue wave tops with flashes of white boiling at their crests, under the dazzling beat of the sun. The horizon that had shrunk to this, from the vast sweep of the air, was jagged and uneasy with waves, and the sky beyond it was a remote unnoticed blue. It was the sea that had suddenly taken the menace that the air had had; the sea, looming and tossing around the incongruous smallness of the plane, an awkward alien, unfitted for this heavier element. It seemed to Ronny that they sat a little lower among these waves than they had at first.

The aviator, Bill, was slashing at a tangle of stiff canvas and wires and broken sticks under the lower wing. Ronny saw him slip and the tangle drop into the water, where it hung and splashed, held by a single wire. The plane veered suddenly at the crest of a wave and Ronny saw it plunge, stern down, on the wreckage. With a scream from Mrs. Kinney, a broken strut crashed through a thin floor board and in the jagged rip sea water bubbled smoothly, wetting their feet and ankles and legs.

“Hey, look here!” Ronny’s father called suddenly. “We’re getting wet! Here, Bill; come here and fix this! Put your feet up, Gloria. It’s all right, Mrs. Kinney. We’ll be all right presently.”

Ronny had been certain his father would take charge of things. He was splendid. His voice was loud and confident and reassuring. Only Ronny could not make himself believe that nothing was the matter. Things looked bad to him. Bill’s face told him the same thing, slipping and splashing back along the wet fuselage, like a whale back, low in the water.

The water was rapidly filling the cockpit. There wasn’t any use being too cheerful, Ronny was thinking, climbing up to sit crouched uncomfortably on the back of the seat. His father and Gloria did it, laughing. But Mrs. Kinney had to be helped up and then held, perched precariously, her round dismayed eyes still fixed on the coming water. Colonel Kinney held her, with his ruddy face turning a curious congested purple. Ronny saw suddenly that the Kinneys were afraid, and he was sorry for them. It was dreadful to be afraid.

The plane had sunk with the weight of water in the cockpit, but now it seemed not to be sinking any more.

Bill scrambled wetly up beside Ronny and spoke to the others, “This isn’t so good, folks, but it isn’t so bad. The old bus is knocked out, but it can’t sink any more and we’re not so far from Bimini now. We may even drift quite near, the way the stream runs. Somebody’s sure to pick us up almost any minute, because we’re in the direct line of boats from Miami to Bimini and they’ll report by and by that we haven’t arrived. All we’ve got to do now is hang on.”

His glance met Ronny’s on the last words, and Ronny saw that in spite of his cheerful, matter-of-fact voice, his eyes were wide and unwinking. Ronny’s own eyes were like that. As they stared at each other for a long moment, Ronny felt a sudden warmth of understanding and comradeship leap between them. After all, Bill was not so very much older than he was, for all the weathered maturity of his face. That glance linked them, by their youth, by their common ability to look at the situation, without too much fear or too much optimism. These others must be protected at all costs.

“Are you with me?” said Bill’s glance to Ronny, and Ronny’s answered instantly, “You betcha life.”

Bill withdrew his gaze abruptly to unlace his shoes and take them off. Ronny did the same, glad to feel his toes free in the water. He watched one shoe float a minute and then go over the side in a slap of water from a running wave. Bill was plucking up the wet cushions from the seats below the water.

“They’ll float,” he said briefly. “You hang on to this one, Mrs. Kinney. And listen here. The backs of these seats are going to get awfully uncomfortable in about a minute. It would be easier if we all got down on the fuselage, even if it is partly in the water. Then the ladies can hang on to these cushions, too. That’s right, isn’t it, sir?”

He appealed to Andrew Burgess, and Ronny saw his father brighten visibly, as if glad of something to do. “Perhaps you could show them, sir,” Bill further suggested, and Andrew turned and slid back gingerly over the wet surface, lowering himself with one hand on a strut down on the incline, so that he rested with his legs in the water, but his body supported.

“It is better,” he said promptly. “Come along, Gloria. Help Mrs. Kinney, Colonel. Here, grab my hand. You won’t get any wetter than you are now. It’s not half bad.”

Ronny and Bill and the colonel, splashing in the water, held Mrs. Kinney and lowered her, quite mute now, down to Andrew Burgess. Gloria went next, laughing. Her green silk dress clung wetly to her lithe figure, and she moved with much more assurance than the other woman, and seemed somehow more suited to the watery and difficult background. Her face was not so tense either, but somehow the bright spots of rouge on each cheek, the darkened eyelashes, the scarlet curve of mouth seemed to stand away from her face a little, as if the flesh were shrinking. After Colonel Kinney had followed them with ponderous caution and a very tight grip of Ronny’s shoulder, the four hung there in a row, their eyes looking upward at Bill and Ronny clinging above them, and at the jagged wave crests racing down upon them, with the same look. It was a mute look, guarded, expectant, a little humble. Their lifted eyes made something in Ronny ache with pity for them. They looked so helpless, hanging there, in the smashing dangerous water. They were looking at Bill and him as if the two had suddenly taken on an unguessed power and significance. Ronny tried to think of something else to do for them to still the tightness in his throat.

“Let’s cut some of that wire, Bill,” he said. “Maybe we can put it around them, so that they wouldn’t have to hang on so tightly. Got a knife? I have.”

They worked, balancing, slipping, plunging about on top of the fuselage, over which the highest waves sent a skim of water, twisting and cutting and clinging to the wing frames as they could. When four lengths of the wire had been hacked off, Bill slid down to the Kinneys, Ronny to his father and Gloria. There was enough to twist around the body of each, but it was hard to bend it around a strut so that it would stay fastened against the roll and jerk of the plane. Half the time Ronny was completely in the water, working with one hand, sprawling, while his father helped. When a higher wave reared above them, hissing, they had to stop working and hang on tightly, their heads and shoulders barely above the smother, their bodies banging against the wood.

Once Ronny lost the last piece of wire overboard and had to dive for it, clutching it luckily in the boiling depth below. But the swimming was actually a refreshment to him. To be able to move his cramped limbs freely and surely in this sea removed much of its menace. It was an element with which he was familiar. He came to the surface with a sputtering rush and an overhand that carried him easily back, with a grin for his father’s anxious eyes. Ronny had even time to realize that he had never seen his father look at him like that. As Ronny put the wire about him Andrew’s right hand lingered on his shoulder and he said, “Nice work, old chap.”

Ronny was warm with gratitude for that. His father was being splendid. His colour was good. His voice was assured. He joked occasionally with Gloria or Mrs. Kinney, putting out a hand to help when he could. That was what it meant to have been a good sport all his life, Ronny thought. He simply did not know what fear meant.

Gloria’s hair looked funny, wet and plastered about her forehead like that. She had lost her hat somehow, but she was game all right. She was singing a lot of old songs, making them all sing things like “On the Banks of the Wabash” and “Waiting for the Robert E. Lee.” Even Mrs. Kinney smiled with stiff lips when there was anything to smile about.

There was not much to do after Bill and Ronny got the wires fixed. They all hung there, the four with the wires, Ronny and Bill wherever they could catch hold of something, half supported by the wallowing fuselage, bumping and hanging in the flounder of water, watching to duck a taller wave crest, and talking now and then, little bursts of talk that ran from one to another of the soaking figures. Their words lagged or renewed like a slow pendulum of vitality.

Presently Bill, who did a good deal of scrambling about, shinned up so that he could hang from the upper wing frame and peer, long and earnestly, out over the wave tops. Mutely everyone watched him. Ronny, standing on the fuselage above them, noticed that the whites of their eyes shone a little. Bill had been looking steadily at the same place for several seconds. He drew himself up higher, shading his eyes.

“You’re looking at something!” Gloria called suddenly.

Bill did not answer. The faces were tense and a similar light seemed to be upon them all--a light of pallor and suspense. They knew that Bill was looking at something. Ronny leaped up beside him.

At first he could see nothing but scalloped blue wave tops and the leap and flash of foam. Then, more to the right, he caught a steady flash that was a wave, but a wave breaking before a boat’s bow. When he looked intently he could see, now and then, the gray pointed mass of the bow itself, appearing and disappearing. It was hard to tell how far away it was, or whether it was moving in their direction. Bill waited, motionless, and so did Ronny.

His father called suddenly below them, “For God’s sake, boys, if you see something, tell us! And do something about it, can’t you? Wave something! Shout!”

Mrs. Kinney shrieked suddenly, strained and off key, “Oh, make them hurry! Make them hurry! We can’t stand this any longer!” And the other three all cried things, words and shouts mingled indistinguishably, a babel of sound at the water’s edge, incapable of carrying, in that wind, more than a boat’s length. Bill and Ronny waved their arms, waved Bill’s coat, waved torn strips of canvas, and shouted as if a tension had given way.

Presently the breaking white from the boat’s bow and the occasional glimpse of bow itself were gone. There were only the jagged lift of the wave tops and the foaming white of crests.

When Ronny really believed that the boat had gone, that he could not see it any more, that it had really failed to see them, or had ignored them, he stopped waving and let himself drop down to the fuselage. Bill dropped beside him and they stood looking down at the faces below them, the wet faces with the incredulous eyes raised to theirs. Ronny cleared his throat before he shook his head and said, “It went.”

“You mean it went?” His father’s voice was suddenly harsh and there were reddish veins under the salt water on his forehead. “You didn’t wave hard enough! You didn’t try to shout! The hounds--to leave us--the dirty dogs! I’ll have them arrested for it. I’ll make them suffer for it, the dirty skunks, the lou----”

Gloria stopped him with a hand on his shoulder. Mrs. Kinney had gasped once or twice and her eyes had rolled in her plump white face, but Colonel Kinney had both arms around her.

“Hush, Momma, hush,” he said. “Never mind. That means we’ll see others. The next one will come nearer.”

There was then nothing to do but keep on waiting and keep on hanging on. There was no way of knowing what time it was, except that the blazing sun had moved slightly westward down from the zenith. The waves rolled as high, but it almost seemed as if the six had adjusted to their rolling, so that they did it automatically, knowing how high the highest would come. But the ferocity of the sun was an increasing agony. Ronny felt the sting of it under his wet shirt, along his tanned shoulders, and knew how much the others must feel it on the tenderer skin of their faces and shoulders. Colonel Kinney’s bald spot glowed an angry crimson. He had lost his helmet long since. And Ronny tore a big piece from his wet shirt and made Colonel Kinney tie it over his head like a hood.

All Gloria’s make-up had washed off and her cheeks were red with sunburn and her nose already blistered. Mrs. Kinney’s pale face was bright rose colour, and both women’s lips were swollen and blistered from the salt water and the sun. Ronny tore other pieces from his shirt to tie over their faces, and the sun was instantly angry on the bared places on his neck and back.

It was a relief to dive into the water after a dropped cushion or to swim around a bit, after their various positions on the fuselage, and yet Bill was right when he warned him, in a low voice, not to tire himself. Ronny contented himself by hanging over the cockpit edge with one hand and letting his body float on the lift and drop of the waves. The sense of high adventure was burning steadily in him; the sense that here at last he was encountering an experience which he could remember all his life.

The waves that came racing at them from the southeast, with their curious impersonal violence, surprised him with their endlessness. It was amazing that there could be so many of them, hurrying and shoving forward, in their leaping up and down. As the blazing sun crept slowly down the long afternoon slope, so that it shone redly in their smarting eyelids, the light changed upon the waves, whitening their leaping tops, intensifying the dark sapphire of their hollows, shadowed in the trough with glossy black. It might have been a gloriously exhilarating sea to sail a boat over. But sunk almost to the chin as they were here, there was little gaiety in it. Deep blue could be bleak, Ronny was learning slowly, and flashes of white sinister, just as the plane that had been so powerful and assured, taking off from water only that morning, floated here so incongruously; alien wreckage that just was able to support itself and their clutched and uncomfortable lives.

The silences were longer between the choppy snatches of talk. Gloria did no more singing. Ronny remembered, as if she had been some other woman, how she had looked that morning, waiting on the pier. That gay brilliant figure had practically no point of resemblance to this sodden one with the drenched, salt-matted hair, the pale swollen lips, the brilliant green silk only dank clinging fabric on the arms and shoulders, the nose and eyelids reddened. Her consciousness of charm, too, had gone--that powerful vibration.

Ronny looked at her now only with pity and concern for the pale woman, silent, with closed eyes and miserably clutching hands where the great emerald still flashed incongruously in the wet. Mrs. Kinney managed somehow to look more like herself, with her plump short figure in the soaked yellow silk clutched by her husband’s arm, with a piece of Ronny’s shirt tied over her head and forehead. There was in all the faces, it seemed to him, a growing look of withdrawal, of remoteness, as if each one were drifting away from their relations with others to the silent place where ultimately human life exists alone. When one spoke, it was with a forced utterance. A smile took more strength than it had and was more automatic. All their attention was centring, more and more, on the sheer act of endurance.

The sun, just above the western horizon, burned and flared upon their faces, under their blinking eyelids, and the blue waves changed slowly to a cold green against a vast rosecoloured afterglow that held no loveliness for them. In half an hour it would be night, and there was no boat.

Ronny was thinking lingeringly of juicy beefsteak and baked potatoes and a steaming cup of coffee, or fried onions, or even just an orange. Anything to relieve this withering, abominable taste of salt in the mouth. It seemed to him he must have swallowed quarts of salt water already, and his tongue and the lining of his mouth were blistered with it. The feeling of too much salt water swallowed was cold and uneasy also in his stomach.

Bill came floundering beside him. “Look here, buddy, le’s you and me try to turn this bus around, so the plane’ll be away from the wind. Maybe she’ll ride better that way for the night.”

Suddenly Ronny saw the night--the night. “Sure,” he said to Bill, grateful for activity. But something about his heart was cold.

It was harder to swim than it had been. There was no longer refreshment in the swash of water over his body. The wind skimmed stinging hatfuls of spray over a wave top into their faces. When they reached the rudder they clung to it and breathed a trifle hard, planning their concerted effort. Presently they let go and began pushing, thrashing tremendously with their legs, breathing or gasping when they could. The huge thing was unwieldy and hard to start and, once started, the wind often caught and forced it back on top of them. Ronny’s legs began to feel the strain of it and there was a pain in his labouring lungs. Floundering and struggling side by side there, Ronny found that he and Bill were staring grimly into each other’s eyes, as if the very abstract intentness of the look, in such moments as their faces were clear of water, was some sort of permanence. And at the moment when they got the thing half about and the wind took it from the new angle, whirling it as they wanted it to go, Ronny caught a twisted grin on Bill’s face, a grin and gasp of triumph that reached to him as a glorious thing. It was tremendous. It was unconquerable, he felt, grinning back as best he could as they both hung and panted on the turned plane. He felt warm all over, as if with a great achievement.