Now the “kedgers” were passing the small boat, and now they had gained the buoys. Hildegarde saw the officer turn, and knew he was giving some direction. Now they were trying to steady the pitching boat directly over the selected site, shown by a buoy faintly vermilion, bobbing to right and to left.
No easy affair to keep the boat there long enough to plant the great anchor. The officer stood up, and in a sudden lurch all but capsized, steadied himself and seemed to wait. There was a shipping of oars; the picture danced and then dissolved.
No, no, there it was! But what had happened, why did it look so strange? The men! there wasn’t one in the boat. And so many dim buoys—no, heads! Lord, Lord, have mercy! The boat was turned completely over and drowning men were clinging to the keel. Were they all there! Which was Louis? One couldn’t even count, for the waves would wash over a man and wipe him out. A moment, and there he was again! That, that was Louis! Could he keep hold on the plunging keel? (Lord God, be kind!) But he seemed not to have been washed away. He was swimming to the place where a man had been and was no more. Now Louis had hold of him. And there was the other boat—the little one, as though she’d dropped from the skies, or risen from the bed of the ocean; and she was taking a man on board! Not Louis, but the one who had once gone down—the huge German. Two men! Three were hauled in. Not one of them Louis! He kept a hand on the gunwale of the overcrowded little boat, and swam with it toward the buoys. Why was he and those others still struggling in the water, what were they trying to do? To right the long boat? Oh, let it alone and come back!
After endless moments, Louis and the rest, with the help of the men in the small boat, had got the other right side up again. Now both crews were coming back.
When at last in a shower of cheers, Cheviot, the last of the volunteers, climbed the swinging ladder and smiled up at the face bending over—not till then did it seem to Hildegarde that the something he had taken away was restored to her, and her body and her soul made whole again.
The people broke through the barrier and pressed round the dripping figures, hurrahing too loud at first to hear how everything was “all right now.” They’d got the anchor where they wanted it, and they hadn’t lost an inch of cable, and had got a ducking only because a few strands of the confounded rope hung up the falling anchor a fraction of a second longer on one side than on the other.
Very quickly Cheviot seemed to have enough of public enthusiasm. “You might just let us by, so we can get into dry things.” But the horde pressed closer. How was this, and how was that? And how the onlookers felt in that awful moment when the boat capsized. In vain Cheviot assured them, “Nobody’s a penny the worse, and the kedging can begin as soon as the tide comes in.” Nobody the worse? Yes, one man was. Since he couldn’t get away, Cheviot created a diversion by laughing at the wet and angry German, who stood outside the press, oblivious of other people’s excitement, his own face working with emotion, stretching out his arms and apostrophizing his black-and-yellow cap that floated like some gay sea-bird on the troubled waters. He appealed to the officer to let him go back in the small boat and rescue the precious object.
“You’d better go and get dry, Guggenheim, for the sake of your family,” Cheviot called out, and then to those nearest, “You talk about grit. I tell you we had one hero in our crew and one fool, and both together made one large-sized Dutchman.”
“Guggenheim?”