Her use of Aunt Mehitable's phrase touched off that cursed temper of mine again, and if I had made any reply at all it would have been one that I should have repented of. So we walked back to the haphazard landing place in sober silence.
When we joined the main body of castaways it seemed that Van Dyck had contrived by some means to stem the storm of question and reproach and to quiet it, for the time, at least. The women were sitting apart on the boxes of canned things, and Grey and Grisdale, under Bonteck's directions, and with his help, were setting up the three tents which the mutineers' generosity, or chivalry, had included in our dunnage. Somebody had kindled a small fire on the beach, but the night was so warm that, apart from the cheer of it, the blaze served no purpose other than to light up the somber faces turned toward it.
After the tent-pegging—in which I hastened to share a part when I saw what was toward—we four made an attack upon the boxed stores. There were provisions in plenty; meats in canvas and meats in tins, vegetables fresh and vegetables in cans, ship's biscuit, and a variety of the other more ornamental—and less filling—kind; tea, coffee, sugar and evaporated cream; all of the calories to make a balanced ration. Last, but not least, there was a beaker of fresh water, though as to this, there were two good springs on the island, and a rill from one of them was trickling into the lagoon a few yards from our landing place.
Besides the necessary proteins, hydrocarbons and the like, there were a few of the luxuries; a case of liquors, a box of candles, another of cigars, cigarettes and tobacco, soap and towels, and even a couple of mirrors ravished from the bulkheads of the Andromeda—these last, I dare swear, a thought of the dancing-master Lequat's.
For beds there was a bale of canvas hammocks; and somebody's chivalric promptings—Lequat's or another's—had gone the length of including the baggage-hold-stored steamer trunks of the women, though we men had only the clothes we stood in.
Before our amateur camp was fully pitched the dark cloud of dismay and disheartenment began to show rifts here and there. After all was said, we were all alive and well, with plenty to eat and drink, and with no immediate prospect of hardship. Perhaps it was no matter for surprise that Sanford, the absent-minded professor of mathematics, was the first to rise to the philosophical demands of the occasion.
"I dare say there isn't a civilized human being in the world who hasn't, at one time or another, wished to be situated just as we find ourselves at the present moment," he began, after Grey and Billy Grisdale and the Van Tromp girls had goaded him into his proper class-room-lecturer's attitude. "For the time being—which we may very properly hope will not be unduly extended beyond the pleasant and profitable limit—we shall be able to live in a little world of our own making. If we have any resources of our own to fall back upon—and I trust none of us is wholly lacking in that respect—we may prove and try them, and quite possibly we may discover that, after all, environment, the conventions, the social machinery with which our civilization has surrounded us, are by no means strictly necessary to the sane, normal human being. Let us, therefore, eat and drink, and be thankful that things are no worse with us than we are at present finding them."
As if he had been an after-dinner speaker rising to express his pleasure at being among us, the professor was heartily applauded, and, following his suggestion, we had a bed-time snack of biscuits and tea around the handful of camp-fire. And, such is the force of good example, by the time the second pannikin of water was boiling, the younger members were making a jest of the most serious adventure that had ever befallen any of them. Jerry Dupuyster was pouring tea for Beatrice Van Tromp; Conetta had deliberately left her aunt's side to come and sit on the sand between Annette Grey and me; and Madeleine Barclay, as fetchingly beautiful in her white yachting flannels as she had ever appeared in her richest dinner gown, was listening patiently—nay, sympathetically, I thought—to Bonteck's well-worn explanation (which did not explain) of how it had all come about.
To offset these cheerful ameliorations there were a sufficient number of death's heads at the feast, as a matter of course. Major Terwilliger, contemplating a prospect which promised little in the way of his cherished diversions, sat apart and grumbled peevishly because the tea tasted smoky. Holly Barclay, robbed at one sheer stroke of all the little refinements and luxuries which made the sum of his aimless and worthless life, was still in the bickering stage; and Ingerson, with the few restraints which he recognized stricken away, was a plain brute, taking no pains to conceal his angry disgust, and making snappish bids to be let alone when any one was charitable enough to speak to him.
As for the women, the three who would be the first to feel the pinch of any privations that might come upon us were behaving beautifully, putting the major's gloom and Barclay's pettishness and Ingerson's grumpy rage to shame. Mrs. Van Tromp—a most easy-going soul when she could forget for the moment that she had three marriageable, and as yet unmarried, daughters on her hands—had already forgotten her reproachful complainings. Conetta's Aunt Mehitable was arguing peacefully with the professor on the philosophical aspect of the situation, though quite without prejudice, I fancied, to the sharp eye she was keeping upon Conetta in her new juxtaposition between Annette Grey and me. Mrs. Sanford, who, in spite of her motherliness, was a frail little body physically, was apparently regarding the hammock beds with some degree of trepidation; nevertheless, she went on sipping her tea with evident relish, and she found time and the spirit to smile understandingly across the circle at Billy Grisdale and Edie Van Tromp, and to stoop and pat Billy's bull pup, when the dog, finding that his master had no present use for him, wandered from one to another to stick his extremely retroussé nose into any hospitable palm that offered.