It was no use, and seeing we must float past, I echoed Harry’s scream. Joshua sprang out and forward on the instant, and, with a mighty flounder of water, disappeared. But the impetus of his leap carried him towards me, and suddenly, like a crooked bough borne on a flood, an arm of him was stuck out within a yard of my reach. I let go my hold to dash and clutch it, and as I swerved, Harry, snapping down, caught at one of my kicking ankles and held on. My head went under; but I had the wrist like a vice; and in another minute I and my quarry were drawn to the spar side, and our noddles, gobbling and clucking and purple with suffocation, helped right way up.
We were saved! So far we had won free. Vogue la galère!
CHAPTER XI.
JOSHUA SPEAKS.
What a fantastic nightmare in my memory is that amazing voyage! Were souls as oddly consorted ever launched on an odder? Looking back at this date on all the circumstances, our isolation, our helplessness, our exhaustion of mind and body following on the strain—and that, by long hours yet, not to be withdrawn—it appears to me little less than miraculous that we ever won to harbour. Had it not been for the strange distraction of a certain recital which the occasion called forth, and which, occupying our thoughts both during and after its telling, rendered us partly oblivious to our condition, a very creeping paralysis of terror would, I believe, have ended by destroying us. To swing there unrelated to any visible hold on life but the sodden, weltering stick beneath us: lost atoms in a vast immensity of mist and water! My mind, save I gripped it frenziedly to its own consciousness, would have reeled and forsaken me, I think. Sometimes for a moment, indeed, it would be almost gone, dropping through the seeming clouds on which we swam into immeasurable abysses of space; and it was only on these occasions by grappling aghast with the figures of reality before it, that it could recover and control itself. If only we could have seen the shore—could have steadied nothing more than our vision on that ghost of moral support, it would have been something. But by now the haze had shut down, and we were derelicts utterly committed to the waste. It was a bad time—a bad, forsaken time, and I do not much like to recall it, that is the truth.
We had perched Joshua, having with some distress got him on board, between us on the twin spar, where he could set his back against the broken top and hold on mechanically till he was in the way to convalescence. Fore and aft of him, squatting or straddling on our slippery bed, we made at first fitful attempts to dig a little way on our craft with our feet; but the load was too heavy thus lightly to be influenced, and we soon gave up the effort. We might, perhaps, have affected our course a trifle by swimming and pushing; we did not dare. It had been a different matter in the first excitement of escape, with the sand under our feet. Now, in the reaction to a consciousness of our drenched, and overwrought, and half benumbed condition, the water had become a fathomless horror, lapping after us with hiss and hurry to devour what it had seduced from its shallows. There was a heaviness, a deadliness in it, level and undisturbed as it seemed, which it was sickening to contemplate. And so we sat close and drifted, and essayed—did Harry and I, while Joshua was recovering—to reassure ourselves and one another with fitful banter—the most cheerless, hollow stuff, God knew, and soon to expire of its own pretence.
For a time, undoubtedly, the tide carried us shorewards, leisurely and with no affectation of charity. The wreck sunk and disappeared behind us: was a wreck—a bulwark—a stile in mid-desert—a post—a stump—was gone. We distanced it so slowly that scarce a quarter of a mile could have separated us from it when its last token was submerged—and our hearts seemed to founder with it.
“Harry!” I cried, in a sudden shock of terror: “what if, at this rate, we never reach the shore at all, and are carried out again by the ebb!”
He wriggled and snarled.
“What’s the use of meeting trouble half-way? We’ve four or five hours before us, and if we can’t drift close enough by then to finish swimming, the deuce is in it. Hold tight, Dicky—that’s all you’ve got to do; and I’ll answer for the rest.”
His self-confidence soothed me supremely. And I was the more comforted to see Joshua stir himself at that moment and sit upright.