“We must save the piano first,” Cartwright says insistently. A lull had fallen, and his voice sounded very clear. Simmons made a desperate gesture.
“It’s gathering for worse,” he muttered. I took a hand.
“If that wind comes up again we’ll have to scramble to save our skins,” I shouted. “It isn’t humanly possible for us to move the piano. Come, sir, while there’s time!”
“And desert it again?” he asks with a strange little smile. “You’re asking too much of me, old chap. What about Charlotte?”
“She won’t care a hang about the piano!” I could have stamped my foot at him. “It’s you she’ll be worrying about. Don’t be an ass.” That shows how beyond myself I was, that I could speak to him that way. A long, ominous roll shook the silence.
“It’s the surf coming over the reefs,” Simmons says in a hushed voice.
“By Jove, you’re right!” Cartwright exclaims, throwing back his head. His voice was boyish and energetic. “Come on, we must make a dash for it.” And jerking up the lantern he fairly herded us through the tangle to the cliff.
There the gale broke loose on us again. We lay flat on our faces, clinging for dear life to the stems of the stout little pandanus palms. It was like a beast, that wind. It sucked the breath from our mouths, it pounded us and shrieked at us and mocked us till we were half dead from the sheer, cruel force of it. We could scarcely think. Once I had a vision of those huddled figures on the mats, and wondered if the house was still standing, and once I thought of Molly, and hoped she was saying a prayer for me. Then all thought was wiped out as, with a shaking of the very cliff, the surf came racing into the lagoon, sending the spray up fifty feet, and drenching us where we lay.
“The piano!” Cartwright shouted, struggling to get up. Simmons hauled him down, crying to him that it was no use to think of the piano. Cartwright staved quiet a moment till another of those uncanny silences fell.
“Now we can go down,” Cartwright said pleadingly. “I can’t lose my chance of happiness again. The piano—”