“We beached her by hand, and already the wheelwright had a wrench and was unscrewing the nuts of the broken shaft. We carried four men to the boathouse, two of them with their hands on their chests where the broken oars had caught them. Eh? Oh yes, they’d jackets on.... We tried again, waiting till the breaker had spread away roaring in the darkness, and she rose again. She seemed to hang for a dreadful long time between the two crests of curling white that rushed together to meet her,—the wave was a slanting wall all laced over with a pattern of grey foam,—and then she disappeared. But she was on the wrong side still, and her rudder was smashed. A man struck at me as I dragged him out of the water: it was John Broadwood. I’d got hold of his right wrist, and it dangled when I let it go; so I took him by the other arm. We headed the horses round to try again, edging close under the shelter of the jetty and the plunging cobles; and that time I turned my face away as she lifted—she was so frightfully near the jetty. But when I looked again, there she was. She’d neither ridden it nor got through it; and the Spit, booming a mile away, seemed to mock us that we couldn’t get through the breakers.
“We all gathered in the boathouse again—farmers, fishermen, injured men, gipsies. Osa Couper was talking to old Joe Barker, and a fellow who was listening turned suddenly away and pulled out his pipe. That cut us—cut those who saw him: it seemed all there was to do—to light your pipe. And then we heard women’s voices again: Lizzie and the gipsy woman were among us. What were we waiting for? they asked; and the man who was lighting his pipe nodded at the injured men. Lizzie’s bosom lifted, and she began to talk again. She talked as she had talked before in the ‘Dotterel’....
“The boat was high on the beach, and they’d taken the horses out; they put them in again and made a fourth attempt—a fifth—a sixth. After the sixth we went back to the boathouse; another man had given it up now, and had taken up an old lobster-pot and was setting the broken ends straight. Useful occupation....
“I told you—did I tell you?—about old Joe Barker. He had turned sixty then. He’d a wrinkled, nut-cracker face, and his mouth and chin chopped up and down together when he spoke, like one of these talking dolls; he’d deep furrows from the corners of his mouth, just like one of these ventriloquist’s dolls. He was chopping and chewing now to Osa Couper; and all at once he cried out, ‘Have ye done all ye can, ye fishermen?’ They scowled at him.
“‘Then let th’ farmers have a try; Jerry—Tom—Matthy Dodd——’ He jumped about here and there, singling out men and giving orders, all about horses. Broadwood sprawled on a locker, and he raised himself on his sound arm. ‘Yours is no good if ours won’t face it,’ he cried; but Joe took no notice. He and Dodd began to fetch out sweeps and spars and ropes and tackle, and the men outside pitched them into the boat. ‘Up!’ he cried to Broadwood; and John slid down while he got a stone jar of brandy and a couple of pannikins out of the locker. Some walked slowly out and up the beach, looking back over their shoulders, and then all at once a man broke into a quick trot. A dozen hangers-about followed, questioning as they ran. In ten minutes the clattering of horses was heard on the beach; and a man, coming in for more ropes, said that a hundred shovels were clearing the village street....
“Well, you’ve heard the tale, or you wouldn’t have come to me: you know what we did and how it ended. What more do you want? To be told what you don’t know, you’ll say. Not you. Nobody wants to be told what they don’t know. They want to be told what they do know, or think they know. Why, all the fellows we glorify are those who tell us in the main what we already know—tell us we’re nearly quite right; a bit—eh?—here, or a trifle there that our worships have overlooked in our general rightness, but wonderfully right on the whole. You’ll listen as long as I tell this tale as you already know it; then you’ll go away and say, Queer old chap; been master of a grammar-school—disappointed—disillusioned; but for all that he was one of ’em.... Well, just as you like.
“A hundred yards out of the village we turned the women back. All of a sudden Willie Harverson’s wife sprang forward and kissed him, and then the pent cheer broke out. It was as if for the first time we had all thought clearly what we had begun to do. The wind scattered it, but our hearts rose passionately. We hadn’t spoken coming up through the village; we had started beaten, or at least just to endure as much as men could endure; and now that shout made all the difference. It was arrogant, boastful, young, foolish, victorious. Heigho! You see, we forget all the shouts of the same sort that end in failure: we only remember them when they come off. The other sort are like the revolts that never succeed: they’re revolutions when they do. But then, I suppose we could never endure to remember all our pride and confidence that’s come to nothing.... So the men kissed their wives. I had nobody to kiss—I’ve never been married. I saw Reuben’s rocket rise clear above the gale, and then we started.
“We had twenty horses, and perhaps twice as many men with shovels. We’d lashed a spar to the boat-carriage, a sort of whiffle-tree, and from that to the ten pair of horses ran such a tackle of ropes and traces as you never saw—all thicknesses, plain and hawser, pieced out and joined everywhere with sailors’ knots and hitches. Willie Harverson, on the frame of the carriage, was shouting orders through the speaking-trumpet—to find the ridge past the mill, to rouse High Lee village on the way—I don’t suppose anybody heard half he said, for already the digging had begun. Old Joe Barker had donned a cork jacket for warmth, and was flat on the fore air-chamber: he was directing, and Willie, off and on the carriage continually, was his spokesman. Without a captain, you see, forty diggers are little better than a dozen. The men who weren’t digging were scouting, starting her after each halt, or standing by to see that the traces didn’t get mixed.
“I said the snow was dry: it was so dry that half of it fell from the shovels of the diggers, blown away by the wind. That meant twice as much stooping, and the men were up to their waists in it. The fellows who scouted for rising ground appeared and disappeared in the drifts, and the snow crusted on their lanterns, melting and freezing both at once. We couldn’t hear the sea now; instead there rose the shrill notes of trees and the silky soft whistle of the ice particles over the snow. We came to a quickset hedge: they dug through the drift to it, slapped the quarters of the horses with the shovels, and we came through with branches of briar and thorn caught in the trace-ropes.
“It’s seven miles to Portsannet, with High Lee village half way, and after that the Heights, seven hundred feet of them. I came on to shovel with the second shift. You can dig till you can’t straighten your back. I thought myself strong, but—well, a grammar-school was what I was really working for in those days. You may be strong, but you can’t pitch stuff behind you at three times the ordinary rate with men who are always forking hay, or hoeing turnips, or loading peats; and by the time my turn came round to dig for the second time and the third, I wasn’t the only one who was fagging. Then you can go on digging till you don’t mind so much; you’re getting stupid then—what employers of bodily labour call a ‘good man’; and I began to be a good man—except that a good man shouldn’t quarrel with his tools, and at the last change I’d got hold of a garden spade instead of a flanged shovel—a thing that carried about half a pound—and a self-emptier, like the new boat. I became so good a man that when a fellow took that spade from me I asked him what an odd hum of vibrating iron was that I’d heard for some time past; and he pointed to Rhodes’s mill not a dozen yards away. It was the pin-shaft that hummed. I can’t tell you how it had managed to stop up there while the rest of the top storey lay a heap of wreckage below; I suppose things don’t smash quite as you expect ’em to.... During my rest I’d been hanging on to one of the flapping life-lines of the boat. Another man had now got it, and I felt irritated, as if he might have found one of his own; but I clutched the next one, and by and by noticed that the moon was rising. And somewhere about that time we struck the ridge to High Lee.