CHAPTER XXXIV
"How are you for a climb?" Margaret asked me, shortly after we had
left the table.
She stood challengingly at my open door, in oilskins, sou'wester, and
sea-boots.
"I've never seen you with a foot above the deck since we sailed," she
went on. "Have you a good head?"
I marked my book, rolled out of my bunk in which I had been wedged,
and clapped my hands for Wada.
"Will you?" she cried eagerly.
"If you let me lead," I answered airily, "and if you will promise to
hold on tight. Whither away?"
"Into the top of the jigger. It's the easiest. As for holding on,
please remember that I have often done it. It is with you the doubt
rests."
"Very well," I retorted; "do you lead then. I shall hold on tight."
"I have seen many a landsman funk it," she teased. "There are no
lubber-holes in our tops."
"And most likely I shall," I agreed. "I've never been aloft in my
life, and since there is no hole for a lubber."
She looked at me, half believing my confession of weakness, while I
extended my arms for the oilskin which Wada struggled on to me.
On the poop it was magnificent, and terrible, and sombre. The
universe was very immediately about us. It blanketed us in storming
wind and flying spray and grayness. Our main deck was impassable,
and the relief of the wheel came aft along the bridge. It was two
o'clock, and for over two hours the frozen wretches had laid out upon
the fore-yard. They were still there, weak, feeble, hopeless.
Captain West, stepping out in the lee of the chart-house, gazed at
them for several minutes.
"We'll have to give up that reef," he said to Mr. Pike. "Just make
the sail fast. Better put on double gaskets."
And with lagging feet, from time to time pausing and holding on as
spray and the tops of waves swept over him, the mate went for'ard
along the bridge to vent his scorn on the two watches of a four-
masted ship that could not reef a foresail.
It is true. They could not do it, despite their willingness, for
this I have learned: THE MEN DO THEIR WEAK BEST WHENEVER THE ORDER
IS GIVEN TO SHORTEN SAIL. It must be that they are afraid. They
lack the iron of Mr. Pike, the wisdom and the iron of Captain West.
Always, have I noticed, with all the alacrity of which they are
capable, do they respond to any order to shorten down. That is why
they are for'ard, in that pigsty of a forecastle, because they lack
the iron. Well, I can say only this: If nothing else could have
prevented the funk hinted at by Margaret, the sorry spectacle of
these ironless, spineless creatures was sufficient safeguard. How
could I funk in the face of their weakness--I, who lived aft in the
high place?
Margaret did not disdain the aid of my hand as she climbed upon the
pin-rail at the foot of the weather jigger-rigging. But it was
merely the recognition of a courtesy on her part, for the next moment
she released her mittened hand from mine, swung boldly outboard into
the face of the gale, and around against the ratlines. Then she
began to climb. I followed, almost unaware of the ticklishness of
the exploit to a tyro, so buoyed up was I by her example and by my
scorn of the weaklings for'ard. Where men could go, I could go.
What men could do, I could do. And no daughter of the Samurai could
out-game me.
Yet it was slow work. In the windward rolls against the storm-gusts
one was pinned helplessly, like a butterfly, against the rigging. At
such times, so great was the pressure one could not lift hand nor
foot. Also, there was no need for holding on. As I have said, one
was pinned against the rigging by the wind.
Through the snow beginning to drive the deck grew small beneath me,
until a fall meant a broken back or death, unless one landed in the
sea, in which case the result would be frigid drowning. And still
Margaret climbed. Without pause she went out under the overhanging
platform of the top, shifted her holds to the rigging that went aloft
from it, and swung around this rigging, easily, carelessly, timing
the action to the roll, and stood safely upon the top.
I followed. I breathed no prayers, knew no qualms, as I presented my
back to the deck and climbed out under the overhang, feeling with my
hands for holds I could not see. I was in an ecstasy. I could dare
anything. Had she sprung into the air, stretched out her arms, and
soared away on the breast of the gale, I should have unhesitatingly
followed her.
As my head outpassed the edge of the top so that she came into view,
I could see she was looking at me with storm-bright eyes. And as I
swung around the rigging lightly and joined her, I saw approval in
her eyes that was quickly routed by petulance.
"Oh, you've done this sort of thing before," she reproached, calling
loudly, so that I might hear, her lips close to my ear.
I shook a denial with my head that brightened her eyes again. She
nodded and smiled, and sat down, dangling her sea-boots into snow-
swirled space from the edge of the top. I sat beside her, looking
down into the snow that hid the deck while it exaggerated the depth
out of which we had climbed.
We were all alone there, a pair of storm petrels perched in mid air
on a steel stick that arose out of snow and that vanished above into
snow. We had come to the tip of the world, and even that tip had
ceased to be. But no. Out of the snow, down wind, with motionless
wings, driving fully eighty or ninety miles an hour, appeared a huge
albatross. He must have been fifteen feet from wing-tip to wing-tip.
He had seen his danger ere we saw him, and, tilting his body on the
blast, he carelessly veered clear of collision. His head and neck
were rimed with age or frost--we could not tell which--and his bright
bead-eye noted us as he passed and whirled away on a great circle
into the snow to leeward.
Margaret's hand shot out to mine.
"It alone was worth the climb!" she cried. And then the Elsinore
flung down, and Margaret's hand clutched tighter for holding, while
from the hidden depths arose the crash and thunder of the great west
wind drift upon our decks.
Quickly as the snow-squall had come, it passed with the same sharp
quickness, and as in a flash we could see the lean length of the ship
beneath us--the main deck full with boiling flood, the forecastle-
head buried in a bursting sea, the lookout, stationed for very life
back on top the for'ard-house, hanging on, head down, to the wind-
drive of ocean, and, directly under us, the streaming poop and Mr.
Mellaire, with a handful of men, rigging relieving tackles on the
tiller. And we saw the Samurai emerge in the lee of the chart-house,
swaying with casual surety on the mad deck, as he spoke what must
have been instructions to Mr. Pike.
The gray circle of the world had removed itself from us for several
hundred yards, and we could see the mighty sweep of sea. Shaggy
gray-beards, sixty feet from trough to crest, leapt out of the
windward murky gray, and in unending procession rushed upon the
Elsinore, one moment overtoppling her slender frailness, the next
moment splashing a hundred tons of water on her deck and flinging her
skyward as they passed beneath and foamed and crested from sight in
the murky gray to leeward. And the great albatrosses veered and
circled about us, beating up into the bitter violence of the gale and
sweeping grandly away before it far faster than it blew.
Margaret forbore from looking to challenge me with eloquent,
questioning eyes. With numb fingers inside my thick mitten, I drew
aside the ear-flap of her sou'wester and shouted:
"It is nothing new. I have been here before. In the lives of all my
fathers have I been here. The frost is on my cheek, the salt bites
my nostrils, the wind chants in my ears, and it is an old happening.
I know, now, that my forbears were Vikings. I was seed of them in
their own day. With them I have raided English coasts, dared the
Pillars of Hercules, forayed the Mediterranean, and sat in the high
place of government over the soft sun-warm peoples. I am Hengist and
Horsa; I am of the ancient heroes, even legendary to them. I have
bearded and bitten the frozen seas, and, aforetime of that, ere ever
the ice-ages came to be, I have dripped my shoulders in reindeer
gore, slain the mastodon and the sabre-tooth, scratched the record of
my prowess on the walls of deep-buried caves--ay, and suckled she-
wolves side by side with my brother-cubs, the scars of whose fangs
are now upon me."
She laughed deliciously, and a snow-squall drove upon us and cut our
cheeks, and the Elsinore flung over and down as if she would never
rise again, while we held on and swept through the air in a dizzying
arc. Margaret released a hand, still laughing, and pressed aside my
ear-flap.
"I don't know anything about it," she cried. "It sounds like poetry.
But I believe it. It has to be, for it has been. I have heard it
aforetime, when skin-clad men sang in fire-circles that pressed back
the frost and night."
"And the books?" she queried maliciously, as we prepared to descend.
"They can go hang, along with all the brain-sick, world-sick fools
that wrote them," I replied.
Again she laughed deliciously, though the wind tore the sound away as
she swung out into space, muscled herself by her arms while she
caught footholds beneath her which she could not see, and passed out
of my sight under the perilous overhang of the top.
