"'God help us all!—there's hope yet!' he barked through his parched throat, and held up the sinker all clothed about and clogged with greenish-brown shore-weed."
NIGHT THE EIGHTEENTH.
"AND SO THEY CAME TO THE ISLAND…"
(Foe's Narrative Continued)
"That night, as I was steering, I heard a sound as of a bucket dipped over the bows. Needless to say, we had hoisted no lantern on the forestay since the night the other boats had driven away from us or gone down. To help a vessel to pick us up on that expanse of water it would have been about as useful as the tail of a glow-worm—and moreover the crew had drunk all the oil.
"I had the sheet well out and was running under a light, lazy night-waft of breeze. A thin moon was setting somewhere behind my right shoulder, and the glimmer of it played on the canvas.… I had supposed all the others to be sunk in merciful sleep, when Webster stood up and, staggering forward, ducked under the foot of the sail, which at once hid him from me.… When I heard the plunk of a bucket—as I supposed—it suggested at the worst that here was another fool dosing himself mad on sea-water; and, as values counted by this time, it was not worth while to awake four other souls to consciousness and misery for the sake of preventing him. … And then the man's face went swimming past me, upturned to the moonlight, momentarily sinking as I grabbed at his beard which floated up like seaweed.… I grabbed, and missed. God knows what I should have done had my fingers tangled themselves in that beard, to get a clutch on it.
"He had slipped himself overboard, to drown quietly.… And we were now five, and Prout was plainly a dying man. (I'd have you note, Roddy, the order in which the men on board went; for it rather curiously backs up my theory that there's ever so much more vitality in what we call brains than in what we call physique.) Martinez was a weakling, of poor breed: Grimalson, big as bull's beef, had a brain rotten as a pear: Webster, a docile fellow, was strong as Hercules and surprisingly stupid. These were gone, in their order. The two A.B.'s, Jarvis and Prout—canny men, resourceful, full of seamanship—survived, and we three passengers. What kept Farrell going, and saved his reason, was a great capacity for sleep. He slept all the night and most of the day; and though by consequence he helped us little or nothing, seemed (as he declared himself to be) constantly dog-tired. His momentary ferocity, when he fastened on my bleeding forearm, had been a gust only, and after it he sank deeper and deeper into drowsiness. As for Santa—frankly, I don't know. They tell us that women sleep more lightly than men, and can endure suffering far more patiently—which some explain by saying that their nerves are less sensitive to pain, and (I suppose therefore) to pleasure. But I don't know: I have never studied the subject. She sat very quiet, sometimes for hours together, without stirring; but she took very little actual sleep.
"The end of Jarvis and Prout was one of those inhuman, ghastly farces which, as I've said, break the spell of a sudden and are worse than the tragedy itself. They had struck up a quaint, almost canine friendship—Yes, that's the word, though I can't stop to explain what I mean by it more than by saying that they would sit together by the hour, like two dogs before a fire. The odd thing about it was that they had twice been shipwrecked before on the coast; and had come through the double experience respecting one another as capable seamen but forming no attachment until—But it's ludicrous past guessing. On the second day in the boat it was discovered by a chance word that they had a common acquaintance in 'Frisco: and he wasn't much of a friend either. I never heard his name right and full, and I doubt if they knew it. They called him Uncle Tibe, and I gathered from their earlier conversations that he was a Jewish dealer in marine stores and a money-lender; of mature years; and afflicted with a chronic and most Christian thirst, which he alleviated by methods derived from the earliest patriarchs of his race. Of these his favourite was to attach himself to some young seaman with money in his pocket and, having insinuated concurrently the undoubted truths that he possessed great wealth but was averse to spending it (even on Scotch 'smokes'), to insinuate further that the victim had to an extraordinary degree crept into the affections of a childless old man,—yea, might hope indeed, by attentions which in practice worked out to ordering whisky and adding 'Make it two,' to inherit his real and personal estate.
"Silly as you like!—But the discovery that each had been hoaxed by Uncle Tibe, and the comparison of their foolish experiences, with reported tales of the dupes yet more heavily befooled and bled, caught and bound these men in fellowship. They had both met with some queer ones in their travels, and they compared notes: but they always came back to this superlative old fraud. After long wise and disconnected talk about the set of the wind, or the rates of pay on various lines, or stowage, or freights, or rigs, or currents, or the characters of various skippers and mates, or the liveliness or sulkiness or homeliness or fickleness of this or that kind of cargo, they would revert extra-professionally to Uncle Tibe: of whom the old stories would be repeated over and over, with long pauses, chuckles, slow appreciations—'Ay, Tibe!… He was a none-such, if you like!'