South of the Line/Hit or Miss
Hit or Miss
TO-MORROW daylight, then?"
"That's right."
"Good-night."
"Good-night, Frank."
When he had gone, Amery settled back on the cabin locker to smoke a disreputable pipe in slow, methodical puffs, and stare fixedly at the swinging lamp. He knew exactly where his partner was going. He would catch the two-thirty ferry across the harbour and climb the red earth path to the bungalow with the garden overlooking the sea. There he would be as charming as Frank Baird knew how to be. He would balance a tea cup on his knee with the ease of an expert, and talk trivialities until the old man fell asleep. Then he and Dorothy would go into the garden. There was an arbour at the bottom, right on the edge of the cliff, covered with passion-fruit vine....
Here Amery checked the flow of his thoughts as though turning off a tap. He possessed the unusual strength of mind to do this and always did it at the same juncture. He considered it unwise to go further, because once, when he had allowed himself that privilege, he found himself entertaining disturbing and altogether foreign sentiments toward Frank. And that would never do. Better break with your partner than hate him. Besides, the thing was childish.... Amery uncrossed his legs, stood up, and shook himself like a mastiff, then reached down a roll of charts from the rack in the cabin roof, and fell to studying them with knit brows.
So correct had he been in his estimate of Baird's movements, that at that moment his partner was balancing a blue-and-white china cup on his knee, the while he discussed party politics with the old man. An hour later he was sitting in the vine-clad arbour at the bottom of the garden, pretending to watch the ferry boats that scarred the fair face of the harbour, but in reality unconscious of anything save the woman at his side.
"The Islands are a lottery," he was telling her. "Draw the right number, and you're made. That's why we stick to them."
"You and Tom have had a good many draws, haven't you?" said the girl, smiling.
"I suppose we have," he confessed, "but you never know your luck, and this time...." He stopped abruptly, plucked a passion-fruit leaf with a quick, nervous movement, and commenced tearing it to ribbons.
"Yes, this time?" prompted the girl.
"It's hit or miss." He looked into her unwavering eyes. "Hit or miss—this time."
"And Tom told you not to let me know anything about it," suggested the girl, in her low, even voice.
Baird looked down at the shredded leaf in his hand, then flicked it from him and settled back on the cushions.
"Tom doesn't 'tell' me to do things—like that," he said deliberately. "He's nominal skipper aboard, because someone's got to be, and he's the elder man, but we're partners. It was an understanding."
"I see," said the girl softly. "I like the way you and Tom understand one another."
"We ought to, after being shipmates seven years."
"And I envy you Tom."
Baird looked away over the harbour, the tan of his face slowly deepening.
"He's a good fellow," he said shortly.
A silence fell between them, one of those silences that a woman knows intuitively how long to sustain. It was inevitably Baird who broke it.
"We've bought the Spindrift," he announced.
"The Spindrift?"
"Yes, Tatham's auxiliary yacht," he went on hurriedly, as though pent-up thoughts had suddenly found vent. "She's only fifty feet over all, but a picture. The auxiliary motor drives her at six. I've been learning 'em up. I'm engineer." He laughed boyishly. "I tell you, we're all in with the Spindrift."
"But isn't she very small for—for the Islands?"
"In tonnage, perhaps, but you should see her construction. She's a cruiser, fit to go anywhere, and two men can handle her; that's what we want."
"You two—alone?"
"As far as the Islands, yes. We'll pick up a Kanaka crew there—if we want one." Baird grinned mysteriously. "We're on to something this time."
Again there fell a silence, and again it was Baird who broke it.
"Copra and shell are dead," he went on. "Companies with steamers are handling that sort of stuff these days. We're after something better than copra and shell, and if we get it—if we get it" His long, nervous fingers were interlocked and writhing between his knees. "But there's always an 'if,' isn't there?" he ended abruptly.
"You mustn't look at it like that," said the girl. "Of course you'll get it, though I don't know what the 'it' is—no," she added quickly, as he turned to her with parted lips, "and I don't want to know—if Tom would rather not."
"It was only that we thought"
"It was an understanding," the girl reminded him. "Good luck to you both."
"Thanks," he said, staring over the harbour. "And whether it's hit or miss, you'll be the first to hear; but you know that."
"Yes, I know that," she answered.
A grim smile twisted Baird 's mouth, but his eyes never left the harbour.
"Sometimes," he said, "I wonder just what will happen if we do hit."
Across the water a clock boomed the hour of six. It seemed to break Baird's train of thought. He stirred uneasily, then got up.
"I must be going," he said; "we sail at daylight."
And he went, leaving the girl, a dainty white figure against the all-pervading green of the garden, looking after him with thoughtful eyes.
Even then he only missed his partner by a few minutes. Once they had met on that red earth path leading up to the bungalow, and it had constituted a situation not to be repeated. Thereafter, through all the years that they had known Dorothy Fielding, it was tacitly agreed between them that Baird should go in the afternoon and Amery in the evening. Their understanding of one another was extraordinarily clear.
"I envy you Tom," the girl had said, and she spoke truth. There was that in Amery that inspired confidence, a quiet solidity that was infinitely restful, especially to a woman. She went on with her needle-work when he came, and Amery sat smoking placidly, saying little, but absorbing her proximity with a thoroughness that converted her every word and movement into a memory.
And at daylight the next morning she stood on the edge of the cliff in a fluttering kimono, her hands at her breast, while a trim white yacht surged down the harbour fairway under power. As the vessel drew level with the bungalow, the helmsman raised an arm, and presently, above the sliding hatch aft, a head appeared and another arm was raised and lowered in farewell.
So the partners put to sea, and the woman they loved watched them from the cliff until their ship dissolved into the rose-tinted haze of dawn.
North-northeast they sailed, the southeast trade serving them well. The Spindrift proved a witch. Sometimes, with tiller lashed for hours on end, she surged through indigo waters, while the partners ate or slept or discussed their undertaking over charts outspread on the cabin table. The fittings of the Spindrift had been reduced to bare necessities. Gone were Tatham's atrocious water colours in gilt frames that had bespattered the white walls of the saloon, flimsy door hangings, tapestry cushion covers, and all the senseless fripperies of an overdressed ship. And the partners were no less business-like. They spoke only when they had something to say. Small talk had long since passed out of their curriculum. They knew instinctively what there was to be done, and did it with a maximum of efficiency and a minimum of fuss. Moreover, they had shed their shore-going clothes as effectively as their party manners. Baird wore a flimsy straw hat, an undervest, and a towel; Amery a battered solar topee, a sleeveless shirt, and a pair of well-beloved dungarees.
One thing only remained unchanged below deck on the Spindrift, and that was the gorgeous mahogany chronometer case in the saloon. It contained, untouched and rated to the last minute of departure, three of the best instruments money could buy, and in another compartment, no less sacred, Amery's disreputable-looking pillar sextant.
After something like two weeks of almost monotonously perfect weather, the Spindrift raised an atoll. It was the first of the Tau group, comprising over three hundred of these fairy rings of the sea. For the rest of the day the yacht sailed along walls of surf-pounded coral enclosing lagoons of unbelievable colour.
At night she anchored to the reef, for no one ventures amongst the Taus when it is impossible to tell blue water from green, and Baird went ashore, returning in a few hours with three sturdy "boys." These had no idea where they were going, nor when, if ever, they would return; neither did they care, provided there was a ship to sail. Coast Kanakas are like that, and they worked the Spindrift to such purpose that in two days their home was well over the rim of the horizon and the yacht lay hove-to on an oily swell.
Amery lowered his binoculars.
"Piper's a bit out," he said, "but that's to be expected.
Baird nodded.
"Better charm her up and have a look round."
Exactly what the Tau "boys" thought of the Spindrift's subsequent antics it is hard to say. A machine was set in motion that had the amazing effect of propelling them through a stark calm at six knots for three days and in ever-widening circles, while the two white men ceaselessly scoured the horizon. What they expected to find, the great spirits alone knew, for it is well known that beyond Tau there is nothing.
It was equally evident that these two were capable of miracles, for at the end of a weary week two bo'sun birds, their long, thread-like tails streaming in their wake, appeared out of nowhere, after the fashion of sea birds, and circled above the ship's truck, swooping now and then to get a closer view of the intruders. Others joined them, and presently, amid the babel of bird voices and the rush of wings, one of the white men, who had stood like a figurehead in the bows for the past hour, flung up an arm, and where he pointed a dull gray mass rose out of the sea. That is what the Tau "boys" claim to this day. It was interesting, too, to see the effect of this miracle upon its workers. The hands of one trembled visibly as he took the wheel and spun it over. The other showed no sign. By such trivialities do the unsophisticated tell the fibre of a man.
The land they were now rapidly nearing was shrouded in mist—a mist of birds that rose and hovered and shrieked. It was necessary to shout above the din. Wings fanned the face. The whale boat was lowered and rowed shoreward under a drumming roof of them.
Amery and Baird landed without difficulty, and trudged inland through an ankle-deep, grayish dust that rose about them in choking clouds. Neither spoke. All day, without food or drink, they scoured the island in a wilting heat that seemed to affect them not at all. From north to south, east to west, they plodded and paced, always through the same gray dust littered with the skeletons and feathers of birds, and always to the drumming accompaniment of wings.
Toward night they stumbled down to the beach like a pair of weary dustmen, rowed out to the ship, and sat staring at one another across the cabin table.
It was hard to realize even now. The island they had found, the same that old Piper, the consumptive schooner skipper swore he had seen, but was too sick at the time to alter his course and inspect, was a straggler, a lost, uncharted child of the Taus. It was of upheaved coral formation, which means that it had been an atoll until some mighty convulsion of the earth's past had thrust it clear of the sea. What had once been its lagoon was now a bone-dry basin a mile by a mile and a half, filled to the brim with pure guano. And it was theirs.
"Well, that's that, and here's to it!" said Baird, with glass upraised and an excited catch in his voice.
Amery filled his pipe with customary deliberation.
"Piper was a degree out," he complained, "a degree...."
Such was their respective fashion of hailing good fortune.
An hour later the auxiliary was propelling the Spindrift through an oily calm when a shudder ran through the ship, followed by the faint clang of metal and the crazy racing of the engine.
Amery sprang aft, and saw under a bare fathom of crystal-clear water a forest of coral fronds, and above them, protruding from the ship's quarter, the shattered remains of a propeller. They had barely grazed a submerged reef, another atoll in the making, but it was enough; the Spindrift lay helpless as a log. Thus the Islands kiss on one cheek and strike the other within an hour.
The days that followed were in the nature of an accumulative nightmare. For the first three the Tau "boys" squatted in the bows, whistling for a wind that never came, and the partners occupied their thoughts with a garden overlooking the sea and other things worth having. On the fourth, gray clouds assembled, merged into a nondescript murk, and settled down on the face of the waters like a giant hand intent on crushing the breath out of life.
"Looks like a stayer," commented Baird.
Amery nodded. He knew the signs of this pestiferous region on the Line. He could recall the name of a sailing ship that had had her insurance paid before getting clear of the Taus. But what troubled him was the knowledge that on the morrow they must begin to ration the water.
There came a night, as dead as the eternity of days and nights that had preceded it, when Amery woke from a fevered sleep and lay staring at the beams above his bunk. His throat ached abominably, his tongue felt like dry flannel in his mouth, but there was nothing new in this. The ship's company was long since down to half a point of water a day, and all that remained was a bare three gallons in a beaker carefully guarded in the saloon. What struck Amery as unusual was a sound, so faint as to be hardly discernible, but to his fever-sharpened ears maddeningly unmistakable—the gentle trickle of water. For an instant he ascribed it to his own delirium, the next he had moved his head sufficiently to catch a glimpse of the saloon. It was dark, but on the floor it seemed there was something in faint relief, something altogether too close to the water beaker. It moved.
"Swab!" croaked Amery and fired.
Yet, by the time he had sprung from his bunk and switched on the light, there was nothing to be seen but the three startled faces of the Tail "boys," each on his mat in the fo'castle, and Baird raised on an elbow, peevishly demanding to know the cause of the racket.
"Either I'm a rotten bad shot, or I've got 'em," said Amery, flicking the perspiration from his forehead.
"Bit of both, I expect," grumbled Baird. "Finished the quinine?"
He was standing it better than his partner, but then he was a younger man, and fever had never taken a proper hold on him. Amery climbed back to his bunk alternately shivering under a pyramid of blankets and anathematizing himself for a back number.
The next day it rained, but a mile away. It has a knack of doing that on the Line. You may stand on a ship's deck and see the gray pall of the sky burst into a deluge on either hand, hear the maddening patter and plash of fresh water meeting salt, and never a drop come your way. Again the Islands, in whimsical mood.
And then, as though by magic, there came an evening when it was possible to breathe without effort, when one could lean over the rail, at first imagining, then convincing oneself of the blessed motion of air by the faint bellying of the mainsail. The Spindrift was under way.
Baird took over, spuming the wheel with a flourish.
"West-sou'-west," Amery directed between clenched teeth, and staggered to his bunk.
The Kanakas capered in the bows at the sight of the Taus a few days later, swam ashore before the anchor had touched bottom and returned with a canoe load of green cocoanuts.
Baird leant over his partner's bunk.
"It's all over, old man," he said, shaking him gently. "Tom, d'you hear?"
Amery heard, and opened his eyes on a brimming shell of cocoanut milk, that he drained at a draught. But he was weak, pitiably weak.
"You'd better get on with it," he whispered. "I'm no good for a bit."
Baird looked down on him, a strange expression in his eyes.
"What d'you take me for?" he demanded.
Amery struggled on to an elbow.
"You know what I've taken you for these seven years," he growled, "and if you're anything like it, you'll do what I say. Heave right ahead—register, and lease, and all the rest of it. Piper'll give you a hand. Amery, Baird, and Piper Incorporated, eh?" He chuckled raucously. "A thing like this doesn't want to be left a day longer than need be. I'll follow on the first chance.
Baird turned away and stared through a porthole. He could do that—the best possible for his partner. All his wit and energy must be centred on just that from now on—the best possible for Amery, and perhaps, in time....
"What the devil's got you?" boomed Amery.
Baird started and turned.
"Nothing," he said. "I'll go."
He had not meant to go to the garden overlooking the sea, not until Amery was back. But the first evening, alone with his thoughts after a day of interviewing sleek gentlemen at roll-top desks with entirely satisfactory results, broke down his resolve. There could be no harm, and he must talk to someone or go mad, and wouldn't she think it strange....? Of course she would, and she did, and said so in the arbour at the bottom of the garden. If she had not been the first to hear, as he had promised, she would never have forgiven him.
Baird told her all—or nearly all, and at the end sat staring before him with troubled eyes until the girl's hand touched his arm.
"What's the matter, Frank?" she questioned gently.
He started and stared at her.
"Nothing," he said. "Why?"
"You can't tell me that," she insisted, still very gently.
Baird moved uneasily.
"I was thinking of Tom," he confessed.
The girl leant back on the cushions.
"Oh, you two!" she laughed, and was startled at the look in his eyes as he turned on her.
"I tell you this," he jerked out; "nothing that I can do, nothing, you understand, will ever repay Tom for what I've—for what he's done for me. I..."
And that was probably why half an hour later Dorothy Fielding was in his arms.
"It was never any one else?" he demanded roughly.
"Never," she told him.
"And nothing can make any difference—nothing?"
She looked into his eyes, and he had his answer.
Two months after they were married Amery came back, a trifle thinner, but otherwise his old self.
"And what do you think of an old crock who can't hold his end up?" he asked Dorothy, on the afternoon of his first call.
"Now you're fishing," she bantered. "Frank says"
"But you surely don't take any notice of what Frank says—now?" laughed Amery.
They managed it very well, that first meeting, until Baird left them to afternoon tea, while he interviewed further gentlemen at roll-top desks. Then things seemed to drag. They had never dragged before, and Amery was at a loss until the girl took up her needle-work as of old.
"Tom," she said presently, without looking up, "will you help us? But I needn't have asked that," she added, the colour suffusing her averted face. "Just listen, and don't say anything till the end, like you always do. Frank has something to tell you—something that he has told me. If he didn't tell you, I believe it would kill him; he is like that." Her head bent lower over her work, her voice was a low monotone. "It is a thing that he—that we both think shameful. Nothing will make it right, but something—surely something that a man can say to a man will make it easier for him." She lifted her head for the first time. "Promise me you'll say it."
"I promise," said Amery. "Go on."
She put down her work and went over to the window, standing with her back to the room, her eyes fastened on the little square of suburban garden outside.
"You shot Frank," she said quietly.
For hours after that ghastly interview Amery paced his hotel bedroom. Curiously enough, he felt no resentment, only an overwhelming pity for his partner. Heavens, what a confession for a man to have to make! And he, Amery, must listen to it and say something at the end—"to make it easier for him." He laughed in sheer hopelessness at the task none but a woman would set. Nothing would make it right, she had admitted that.... Amery paused in his stride. Two wrongs did not make a right, he told himself, yet they have been mighty comforting on occasion. The thought seized on him, held him. He was actually chuckling at his own cunning when the bell-boy announced Baird.
It was plain that he laboured under intense excitement.
"I shan't keep you long," he said, declining the chair Amery indicated. "I've only come to let you know that I'm the swab you once called me. Look at this." He rolled up a trouser leg, exposing a clean flesh wound in the calf. "You did that, and you know when. I took water. What have you got to say to that?"
Amery slowly levered himself out of his chair.
"Nothing much," he said, "except that I can't see the necessity of all this song and dance about it."
"Why don't you say what you think?" Baird exploded. "I'll take anything—glad to."
Amery looked at him, a whimsical smile playing under his moustache.
"You fellows with superfine consciences make me sick," he said. "You're a pest. You took water. "Well, for that matter, so did I."