Angel Island. Inez Haynes Gillmore
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Inez Haynes Gillmore
Angel Island
Published by Good Press, 2021
EAN 4057664620866
Table of Contents
I
It was the morning after the shipwreck. The five men still lay where they had slept. A long time had passed since anybody had spoken. A long time had passed since anybody had moved. Indeed, it, looked almost as if they would never speak or move again. So bruised and bloodless of skin were they, so bleak and sharp of feature, so stark and hollow of eye, so rigid and moveless of limb that they might have been corpses. Mentally, too, they were almost moribund. They stared vacantly, straight out to sea. They stared with the unwinking fixedness of those whose gaze is caught in hypnotic trance.
It was Frank Merrill who broke the silence finally. Merrill still looked like a man of marble and his voice still kept its unnatural tone, level, monotonous, metallic. “If I could only forget the scream that Norton kid gave when he saw the big wave coming. It rings in my head. And the way his mother pressed his head down on her breast—oh, my God!”
His listeners knew that he was going to say this. They knew the very words in which he would put it. All through the night-watches he had said the same thing at intervals. The effect always was of a red-hot wire drawn down the frayed ends of their nerves. But again one by one they themselves fell into line.
“It was that old woman I remember,” said Honey Smith. There were bruises, mottled blue and black, all over Honey’s body. There was a falsetto whistling to Honey’s voice. “That Irish granny! She didn’t say a word. Her mouth just opened until her jaw fell. Then the wave struck!” He paused. He tried to control the falsetto whistling. But it got away from him. “God, I bet she was dead before it touched her!”
“That was the awful thing about it,” Pete Murphy groaned. “It was as inevitable now as an antiphonal chorus. Pete’s little scarred, scratched, bleeding body rocked back and forth. The women and children! But it all came so quick. I was close beside ‘the Newlyweds.’ She put her arms around his neck and said, ‘Your face’ll be the last I’ll look on in this life, dearest! ‘And she stayed there looking into his eyes. It was the last face she saw all right.” Pete stopped and his brow blackened. “While she was sick in her stateroom, he’d been looking into a good many faces besides hers, the—”
“I don’t seem to remember anything definite about it,” Billy Fairfax said. It was strange to hear that beating pulse of horror in Billy’s mild tones and to see that look of terror frozen on his mild face. “I had the same feeling that I’ve had in nightmares lots of times—that it was horrible—and—I didn’t think I could stand it another moment—but—of course it would soon end—like all nightmares and I’d wake up.”
Without reason, they fell again into silence.
They had passed through two distinct psychological changes since the sea spewed them up. When consciousness returned, they gathered into a little terror-stricken, gibbering group. At first they babbled. At first inarticulate, confused, they dripped strings of mere words; expletives, exclamations, detached phrases, broken clauses, sentences that started with subjects and trailed, unpredicated, to stupid silence; sentences beginning subjectless and hobbling to futile conclusion. It was as though mentally they slavered. But every phrase, however confused and inept, voiced their panic, voiced the long strain of their fearful buffeting and their terrific final struggle. And every clause, whether sentimental, sacrilegious, or profane, breathed their wonder, their pathetic, poignant, horrified wonder, that such things could be. All this was intensified by the anarchy of sea and air and sky, by the incessant explosion of the waves, by the wind which seemed to sweep from end to end of a liquefying universe, by a downpour which threatened to beat their sodden bodies to pulp, by all the connotation of terror that lay in the darkness and in their unguarded condition on a barbarous, semi-tropical coast.
Then came the long, log-like stupor of their exhaustion.
With the day, vocabulary, grammar, logic returned. They still iterated and reiterated their experiences, but with a coherence which gradually grew to consistence. In between, however, came sudden, sinister attacks of dumbness.
“I remember wondering,” Billy Fairfax broke their last silence suddenly, “what would become of the ship’s cat.”
This was typical of the astonishing fatuity which marked their comments. Billy Fairfax had made the remark about the ship’s cat a dozen times. And a dozen times, it had elicited from the others a clamor of similar chatter, of insignificant haphazard detail which began anywhere and ended nowhere.
But this time it brought no comment. Perhaps it served to stir faintly an atrophied analytic sense. No one of them had yet lost the shudder and the thrill which lay in his own narrative. But the experiences of the others had begun to bore and irritate.
There came after this one remark another half-hour of stupid and readjusting silence.
The storm, which had seemed to worry the whole universe in its grip, had died finally but it had died hard. On a quieted earth, the sea alone showed signs of revolution. The waves, monstrous, towering, swollen, were still marching on to the beach with a machine-like regularity that was swift and ponderous at the same time. One on one, another on another, they came, not an instant between. When they crested, involuntarily the five men braced themselves as for a shock. When they crashed, involuntarily the five men started as if a bomb had struck. Beyond the wave-line, under a cover of foam, the jaded sea lay feebly palpitant like an old man asleep. Not far off, sucked close to a ragged reef, stretched the black bulk that had once been the Brian Boru. Continually it leaped out of the water, threw itself like a live creature, breast-forward on the rock, clawed furiously at it, retreated a little more shattered, settled back in the trough, brooded an instant, then with the courage of the tortured and the strength of the dying, reared and sprang at the rock again.
Up and down the beach stretched an unbroken line of wreckage. Here and there, things, humanly shaped, lay prone or supine or twisted into crazy attitudes. Some had been flung far up the slope beyond the water-line. Others, rolling back in the torrent of the tide, engaged in a ceaseless, grotesque frolic with the foamy waters. Out of a mass of wood caught between rocks and rising shoulder-high above it, a woman’s head, livid, rigid, stared with a fixed gaze out of her dead eyes straight at their group. Her blonde hair had already dried; it hung in stiff, salt-clogged masses that beat wildly about her face. Beyond something rocking between two wedged sea-chests, but concealed by them, constantly kicked a sodden foot into the air. Straight ahead, the naked body of a child flashed to the crest of each wave.