“Think they’ve got any chance if the destroyers haven’t got to them?”

“Gosh, I hope so,” he said; and then, after a pause, “but it don’t look like it.” And then, “So long,” and into the storm again.

I did not go to bed, for I wanted to be ready for any eventuality. As the hour of flood tide neared, I dressed as warmly as I could, turned down my lamp, and went out upon the dunes.

An invisible moon, two days past the full, had risen behind the rushing floor of cloud, and some of its wan light fell on the tortured earth and the torment of the sea. The air was full of sleet, hissing with a strange, terrible, insistent sound on the dead grass, and sand was being whirled up into the air. Being struck on the face by this sand and sleet was like being lashed by a tiny, pin-point whip. I have never looked on such a tide. It had crossed the beach, climbed the five-foot wall of the dune levels that run between the great mounds, and was hurling wreckage fifty and sixty feet into the starved white beach grass; the marsh was an immense flooded bay, and the “cuts” between the dunes and the marsh rivers of breakers. A hundred yards to the north of me was such a river; to the south, the surf was attempting to flank the dune, an attempt which did not succeed. Between these two onslaughts, no longer looking down upon the sea, but directly into it and just over it, the Fo’castle stood like a house built out into the surf on a mound of sand. A third of a mile or so to the north I chanced to see rather a strange thing. The dune bank there was washing away and caving in under the onslaught of the seas, and presently there crumbled out the blackened skeleton of an ancient wreck which the dunes had buried long ago. As the tide rose this ghost floated and lifted itself free, and then washed south close along the dunes. There was something inconceivably spectral in the sight of this dead hulk thus stirring from its grave and yielding its bones again to the fury of the gale.

As I walked in the night I wondered about the birds who live here in the marsh. That great population of gulls, ducks, and geese and their rivals and allies—where were they all crouching, where were they hidden in that wild hour?

All Sunday morning there was sleet—more sleet fell in this storm than the Cape had seen in a generation—and then, about the middle of the afternoon, the wind died down, leaving a wild sea behind. Going to Nauset Station, I had news of the disaster at the Highland. The destroyers, in spite of a splendid battle, had been unable to reach the disabled patrol boat, and the luckless ship had gone to pieces. It is thought that she dragged onto the outer bar. Nine men had perished. Two bodies came ashore next day; their watches had stopped at five o’clock, so we knew that the vessel had weathered the night and gone to pieces in the morning. What a night they must have had, poor souls!

There was wreckage everywhere, great logs, tree stumps, fragments of ships, planking, splintered beams, boards, rough timber, and, by itself in the surf, the enormous rudder of the Hickey, splintered sternpost and all. The day after the storm, people came down from Eastham in farm wagons and Fords, looked at the sea for a while, talked over the storm with whoever happened to be standing by, paid a call on the coast guards, and then went casually to work piling up the best of the timber. I saw Bill Eldredge in one of the cuts sorting out planks to be used in building a henhouse. Gulls were milling over the surf and spume—the greatest numbers gathering where the surf was most discoloured—and gulls were flying back and forth between the breakers and the marsh. From their point of view, perhaps, nothing had happened.

Chapter V
WINTER VISITORS

I

During the winter the world of the dunes and the great beach was entirely my own, and I lived at the Fo’castle as undisturbed as Crusoe on his island. Man disappeared from the world of nature in which I lived almost as if he, too, were a kind of migratory bird. It is true that I could see the houses of Eastham village on the uplands across the marsh, and the passing ships and fishing boats, but these were the works of man rather than man himself. By the middle of February the sight of an unknown someone walking on the beach near the Fo’castle would have been a historical event. Should any ask how I endured this isolation in so wild a place and in the depth of winter, I can only answer that I enjoyed every moment to the full. To be able to see and study undisturbed the processes of nature—I like better the old Biblical phrase “mighty works”—is an opportunity for which any man might well feel reverent gratitude, and here at last, in this silence and isolation of winter, a whole region was mine whose innermost natural life might shape itself to its ancient courses without the hindrance and interferences of man. No one came to kill, no one came to explore, no one even came to see. Earth, ocean, and sky, the triune unity of this coast, pursued each one their vast and mingled purposes as untroubled by man as a planet on its course about the sun.