“‘For God’s sake, keep them cattle to th’ track!’ he screamed, beside himself; and a young farmer snatched the axe from him and ran round to the nearest ash. The delay cost us a quarter of an hour, and then we moved forward again. We were savage now, and the farmers flogged the horses and kicked them cruelly under their bellies. The next check was a deep ravine with a beck at the bottom, and the team was in heaps, slipping, stumbling, pulling all ways at once. We lifted her over,—lifted her, with shoulders at spokes, sweeps and spars for levers, men at the ropes among the horses. Then Joe served brandy round. Nunan trotted off to warn the men of High Lee that we were coming, and to get their help. We didn’t stop. We forced back bushes with our bodies, and tore at branches, and wedged the wheels with stones while we chopped partly through trees and then fetched them down with ropes. A rage of cursing took us as we laboured, and some shook torn and bleeding fists at trees. Joe Barker gesticulated impotently, and whimpered that this was bird-nesting, nutting, black-berrying; and he danced up and down whenever a sapling gave with a loud crack, or twenty yards of clear track showed ahead.
“I don’t know how long we were in the wood,—no very great time, I suppose, as time is reckoned; and then all at once I seemed to see John Swire of High Lee among us, and Nunan again, and a dozen axes going at once. Dreaming? Oh no, I wasn’t; there really were the axes. The High Lee men had come to help us out, and their horses were waiting at the edge of the wood. We soon came through then, of course, and saw, a field’s-length away, dark shapes and lanterns in the snow.
“John Swire was right: she didn’t look much like a new boat by this time. Not that she was splintered much,—double cross mahogany from gunnel to gunnel doesn’t splinter much,—but half her life-lines were gone from the ring-bolts, and her new paint was fouled with bark and earth and tree-scrapings—a sight to see. Men swarmed up and overhauled her anxiously; but she was little the worse save in appearance, and they swarmed down again and began to take out our exhausted horses and to put in their own. They were at the knotted cordage thick as flies round a treacle-string in summer—lengthening, splicing, piecing, sheepshanking, stretching all out, it seemed interminably; for they had twice our number of horses—too many, I think. They fixed another spar for a double-tree, and set oars across at intervals to keep that monstrous cat’s-cradle in something like position: men were told off specially to watch it. A fellow came shouting up with some oxen; but we couldn’t begin to make yokes for his oxen—the fool hadn’t brought any; and they were sent back with the lads and worn-out horses to High Lee.
“I forget lots of things that happened just then; but I remember one thing distinctly—I laughed at the High Lee men when we set off again, for they cheered. I suppose it seemed silly to me. Cheer when you’ve done things, if you’ve nothing better to do; but where on earth is the sense in.... We knew what cheering was worth. Cheering didn’t help Nunan much, who was fretting again about his horses; nor Joe Barker, who was bewailing the time his blunder had lost us—for we remembered now and then that we were going to Portsannet. It didn’t help anybody except perhaps the High Lee men themselves, and they’d come to their senses before we were over the moonlit Heights.... We let them do the work for a bit: it was digging, digging again, and the rise and fall of their backs was wearisome to watch. There was little choice of roads now, Osa said (we woke him to ask him). As nearly as he could tell, he’d come fairly straight past the alum-works; and for the alum-works we made. Soon our feet felt the rise....”
* * * * *
He seemed very tired, as if the memory of the weariness wearied him again. He rested for three or four minutes. He nodded; and it is possible that again he had lost the direct thread of his tale, for when he resumed after his rest it was apparently nowhere.
* * * * *
“You need purpose, you see. No amount of work kills if you have the purpose. You needn’t achieve it; they say it’s often as well for you when you don’t; but without it you’re hitting the air. Practically, you must have a little reward, too—just enough to make it worth your while to go on; it’s only once in five centuries that a hero’s born who can see his work apparently swallowed up in the ocean with equanimity. Yes, yes; principle’s the biggest thing—the vision, the ideal; nobody denies that. But, as the world’s arranged, it’s much if you can get forward a step at a time and catch a glimpse of your vision between whiles. If you’d asked us, we should have told you, of course, that we were going to Portsannet. We should have thought you a fool; and yet I doubt if it really occurred to us. I don’t say that I myself didn’t think (if you call it that) of the Lizzie Martin. We’ve all thought we’ve been thinking things all our lives, till one day something happens and we think them really and piercingly; but I do say I think we went on mainly because we’d started. It wasn’t what we thought—it was what we didn’t think: we didn’t think of stopping.... They used to call me ambitious when, as a youngster, I sometimes spoke of my grammar-school. Well, every fool’s ambitious, if ambition is only thinking that your grammar-school, whatever it is, would be a nice comfortable thing to have. Ambition—purpose—means a lot more than that to me. It’s a positive, a vital thing—not mere patience and endurance. It’s never to forget that first presumptuous cheer; it’s both to see your goal and never to lose sight of the means to it. You haven’t got to let the work get its grind in.... But we were half way there, you say?—we had a little reward to encourage us? Yes, more than half way. We were past the first lift of the Heights. But what besides? Twice the boat had slid clean off the tail of the carriage, spilling belts and jackets and paraphernalia in the snow; and twice we lashed her on again; and there’s so mighty little carriage to lash a big lifeboat to that we had to tauten up every few minutes, and men were hauling direct on the boat to keep her somewhere near the wheels. And what besides? Till we’d come to the Heights we hadn’t done enough work to keep us warm, and the High Lee men were frenzied, as we’d been in the wood. Nunan was seeing his quarry every hundred yards, and looking for air-holes, as if his horses had been sheep. Willie Harverson had been left half a mile back at a house—ribs crushed the first time the boat shifted. We digged and hauled and righted the boat, and digged again. The horses rolled with their legs among the ropes; ... the load, ... the keel alone weighed half a ton.... Men were sleeping as they went, and shoving as they slept.... I tell you, you don’t know anything about it. It’s the purposeless work that kills, and practically we had no purpose. You can’t have purpose and be frantic.... Wait a bit....
“And I knew it was silly to keep on thinking with every step, ‘This brings you nearer the grammar-school—Portsannet—Portsannet and the grammar-school.’ Rousseau did it, you know. But once in a while, when you’ve laboured till your spirit seems freed from your body, it does seem all one—all part of something you’re trying to do, you don’t know what—something you’re trying to make of your life.... It was only seven miles; but seven miles or seven hundred isn’t the point. The point is just the limit of your endurance: if it’s only seven yards, seven hundred, or seven million, it comes to just that.... Wait a minute.... The moon was very little higher, so we couldn’t have been very long. I remember noticing this and shouting it out, but I don’t know whether it steadied them or not. My mind was somewhere in advance, over the Heights. I was thinking that, once over the top, the men who were pulling would fall back to check her; that without a pole the team would be useless; that a pole might be made of a long spar; that we might zigzag down; put props through the valve-holes; elementary mechanics, parallelogram of forces, grammar-school again, and a lot more light-witted stuff. Then somebody sighted the alum-works, a quarter of a mile to the left.... One minute....
“We were at the top. It’s forty-five years ago, and you can persuade yourself of a lot in less than that time. We persuaded ourselves afterwards that it was a moment of triumph—there was no harm in that; but we knew better really. We knew in our hearts that the Portsannet men would have to man the boat for themselves, for we reeled like drunkards, went forward like drunkards, with the drunkard’s instinct for his bed. But we boasted foolishly: we would put out ourselves—take her back that night—show what men could do,—I don’t know what. Nobody said it was nonsense. Joe Barker alone seemed to realise that it didn’t follow that because we’d got through, the Lizzie Martin had. We could hear the sea now, a dull roar, and far on our right the Abbey light flashed white and red. There was a babel of talking. Men with horses seemed to join us every few minutes. A man called Lockwood came from Lizzie’s old home with two Galloways and a mare in foal, and they hitched them on behind. As they did so we stood for a moment looking down on Portsannet, the river, the scattered lights far up the valley, the grey beyond the harbour-wall....