“how I hate the unfamiliar air of everything. I’d like to put my lamps on something I know. A ranch and a round-up would look pretty good to me at this moment. Or a New England farmhouse with the cows coming home. That would set me up quicker than a highball.”
“The University campus would seem like heaven to me,” Frank Merrill confessed drearily, “and I’d got so the very sight of it nearly drove me insane.”
“The Great White Way for mine,” said Pete Murphy, “at night—all the corset and whisky signs flashing, the streets jammed with benzine-buggies, the sidewalks crowded with boobs, and every lobster palace filled to the roof with chorus girls.”
“Say,” Billy Fairfax burst out suddenly; and for the first time since the shipwreck a voice among them carried a clear business-like note of curiosity. “You fellows troubled with your eyes? As sure as shooting, I’m seeing things. Out in the west there—black spots—any of the rest of you get them?”
One or two of the group glanced cursorily backwards. A pair of perfunctory “Noes!” greeted Billy’s inquiry.
“Well, I’m daffy then,” Billy decided. He went on with a sudden abnormal volubility. “Queer thing about it is I’ve been seeing them the whole morning. I’ve just got back to that Point where I realized there was something wrong. I’ve always had a remarkably far sight.” He rushed on at the same speed; but now he had the air of one who is trying to reconcile puzzling phenomena with natural laws. “And it seems as if—but there are no birds large enough—wish it would stop, though. Perhaps you get a different angle of vision down in these parts. Did any of you ever hear of that Russian peasant who could see the four moons of Jupiter without a glass? The astronomers tell about him.”
Nobody answered his question. But it seemed suddenly to bring them back to the normal.
“See here, boys,” Frank Merrill said, an unexpected note of authority in his voice, “we can’t sit here all the morning like this. We ought to rig up a signal, in case any ship—. Moreover, we’ve got to get together and save as much as we can. We’ll be hungry in a little while. We can’t lie down on that job too long.”
Honey Smith jumped to his feet. “Well, Lord knows, I want to get busy. I don’t want to do any more thinking, thank you. How I ache! Every muscle in my body is raising particular Hades at this moment.”
The others pulled themselves up, groaned, stretched, eased protesting muscles. Suddenly Honey Smith pounded Billy Fairfax on the shoulder, “You’re it, Billy,” he said and ran down the beach. In another instant they were all playing tag. This changed after five minutes to baseball with a lemon for a ball and a chair-leg for a bat. A mood of wild exhilaration caught them. The inevitable psychological reaction had set in. Their morbid horror of Nature vanished in its vitalizing flood like a cobweb in a flame. Never had sea or sky or earth seemed more lovely, more lusciously, voluptuously lovely. The sparkle of the salt wind tingled through their bodies like an electric current. The warmth in the air lapped them like a hot bath. Joy-in-life flared up in them to such a height that it kept them running and leaping meaninglessly. They shouted wild phrases to each other. They burst into song. At times they yelled scraps of verse.
“We’ll come across something to eat soon,” said Frank Merrill, breathing hard. “Then we’ll be all right.”
“I feel—better—for that run—already,” panted Billy Fairfax. “Haven’t seen a black spot for five minutes.”
Nobody paid any attention to him, and in a few minutes he was paying no attention to himself. Their expedition was offering too many shocks of horror and pathos. Fortunately the change in their mood held. It was, indeed, as unnatural as their torpor, and must inevitably bring its own reaction. But after each of these tragic encounters, they recovered buoyancy, recovered it with a resiliency that had something almost light-headed about it.
“We won’t touch any of them now,” Frank Merrill ordered peremptorily. “We can attend to them later. They’ll keep coming back. What we’ve got to do is to think of the future. Get everything out of the water that looks useful—immediately useful,” he corrected himself. “Don’t bother about anything above high-water mark—that’s there to stay. And work like hell every one of you!”
Work they did for three hours, worked with a kind of frenzied delight in action and pricked on by a ravenous hunger. In and out of the combers they dashed, playing a desperate game of chance with Death. Helter-skelter, hit-or-miss, in a blind orgy of rescue, at first they pulled out everything they could reach. Repeatedly, Frank Merrill stopped to lecture them on the foolish risks they were taking, on the stupidity of such a waste of energy. “Save what we need!” he iterated and reiterated, bellowing to make himself heard. “What we can use now—canned stuff, tools, clothes! This lumber’ll come back on the next tide.”
He seemed to keep a supervising eye on all of them; for his voice, shouting individual orders, boomed constantly over the crash of the waves. Realizing finally that he was the man of the hour, the others ended by following his instructions blindly.
Merrill, himself, was no shirk. His strength seemed prodigious. When any of the others attempted to land something too big to handle alone, he was always near to help; and yet, unaided, he accomplished twice as much as the busiest.
Frank Merrill, professor of a small university in the Middle West, was the scholar of the group, a sociologist traveling in the Orient to study conditions. He was not especially popular with his companions, although they admired him and deferred to him. On the other hand, he was not unpopular; it was more that they stood a little in awe of him.
On his mental side, he was a typical academic product. Normally his conversation, both in subject-matter and in verbal form, bore towards pedantry. It was one curious effect of this crisis that he had reverted to the crisp Anglo-Saxon of his farm-nurtured youth.
On his moral side, he was a typical reformer, a man of impeccable private character, solitary, a little austere. He had never married; he had never sought the company of women, and in fact he knew nothing about them. Women had had no more bearing on his life than the fourth dimension.
On his physical side he was a wonder.
Six feet four in height, two hundred and fifty pounds in weight, he looked the viking. He had carried to the verge of middle age the habits of an athletic youth. It was said that half his popularity in his university world was due to the respect he commanded from the students because of his extraordinary feats in walking and lifting. He was impressive, almost handsome. For what of his face his ragged, rusty beard left uncovered was regularly if coldly featured. He was ascetic in type. Moreover, the look of the born disciplinarian lay on him. His blue eyes carried a glacial gleam. Even through his thick mustache, the lines of his mouth showed iron.
After a while, Honey Smith came across a water-tight tin of matches. “Great Scott, fellows!” he exclaimed. “I’m hungry enough to drop. Let’s knock off for a while and feed our faces. How about mock turtle, chicken livers, and red-headed duck?”
They built a fire, opened cans of soup and vegetables.
“The Waldorf has nothing on that,” Pete Murphy said when they stopped, gorged.
“Say, remember to look for smokes, all of you,” Ralph Addington admonished them suddenly.
“You betchu!” groaned Honey Smith, and his look became lugubrious. But his instinct to turn to the humorous side of things immediately crumpled his brown face into its attractive smile. “Say, aren’t we going to be the immaculate little lads? I can’t think of a single bad habit we can acquire in this place. No smokes, no drinks, few if any eats—and not a chorister in sight. Let’s organize the Robinson Crusoe Purity League, Parlor Number One.”
“Oh, gee!” Pete Murphy burst out. “It’s just struck me. The Wilmington ‘Blue,’ is lost forever—it must have gone down with everything else.”
Nobody spoke. It was an interesting indication of how their sense of values had already shifted that the loss to the world of one of its biggest diamonds seemed the least of