$Unique_ID{bob00627} $Pretitle{} $Title{(A) Message From The Sea Chapter IV - Part III} $Subtitle{} $Author{Dickens, Charles} $Affiliation{} $Subject{island enough time first hand left looked myself fire own} $Date{} $Log{} Title: (A) Message From The Sea Author: Dickens, Charles Chapter IV - Part III The hours wore on, and the storm raged on. We had our half-rations of food when hunger took us (I being much the hungrier of the two); and slept, and grumbled, and quarrelled the weary time out somehow. Toward dusk the wind lessened, and when I got up out of the hollow to look out there was a faint watery break in the western heavens. At times, through the watches of the long night, the stars showed in patches for a little while through the rents that opened and closed by fits in the black sky. When I fell asleep toward the dawning the wind had fallen to a moan, though the sea, slower to go down, sounded as loud as ever. From what I could make of the weather, the storm had by that time as good as blown itself out. I had been wise enough (knowing who was near me) to lay myself down, whenever I slept, on the side of me which was next to the flask of ginger-brandy stowed away in my breast-pocket. When I awoke at sunrise it was the supercargo's hand that roused me up, trying to steal my flask while I was asleep. I rolled him over headlong among the stores, out of which I had the humanity to pull him again with my own hands. "I'll tell you what," says I, "if us two keep company any longer we shan't get on smoothly together. You're the oldest man; and you stop here, where we know there is shelter. We will divide the stores fairly, and I'll go and shift for myself at the other end of the island. Do you agree to that?" "Yes," says he; "and the sooner the better." I left him for a minute, and went away to look out on the reef that had wrecked us. The splinters of the Peruvian scattered broadcast over the beach, or tossing up and down darkly, far out in the white surf, were all that remained to tell of the ship. I don't deny that my heart sank when I looked at the place where she struck, and saw nothing before me but sea and sky. But what was the use of standing and looking? It was a deal better to rouse myself by doing something. I returned to Mr. Clissold, and then and there divided the stores into two equal parts, including everything down to the matches in my pocket. Of these parts I gave him first choice. I also left him the whole of the tarpaulin to himself, keeping in my own possession the medicine-chest and the pistol; which last I loaded with powder and shot, in case any sea-birds might fly within reach. When the division was made, and when I had moved my part out of his way and out of his sight, I thought it uncivil to bear malice any longer now that we had agreed to separate. We were cast away on a desert island, and we had death, as well as I could see, within about three weeks' hail of us; but that was no reason for not making things reasonably pleasant as long as we could. I was some time (in consequence of my natural slowness where matters of seafaring duty don't happen to be concerned) before I came to this conclusion. When I did come to it, I acted on it. "Shake hands before parting," I said, suiting the action to the word. "No!" says he, "I don't like you." "Please yourself," says I; and so we parted. Turning my back on the west, which was his territory according to agreement, I walked away toward the southeast, where the sides of the island rose highest. Here I found a sort of half-rift, half-cavern, in the rocky banks, which looked as likely a place as any other; and to this refuge I moved my share of the stores. I thatched it over, as well as I could, with scrub, and heaped up some loose stones at the mouth of it. At home in England I should have been ashamed to put my dog in such a place; but when a man believes his days to be numbered he is not over-particular about his lodgings, and I was not over-particular about mine. When my work was done the heavens were fair, the sun was shining, and it was long past noon. I went up again to the high ground, to see what I could make out in the new clearness of the air. North, east, and west there was nothing but sea and sky; but south I now saw land. It was high, and looked to be a matter of seven or eight miles off. Island or not, it must have been of a good size for me to see it as I did. Known or not known to mariners, it was certainly big enough to have living creatures on it, - animals or men, or both. If I had not lost the boat in my second attempt to reach the vessel we might have easily got to it. But situated as we were now, with no wood to make a boat of but the scattered splinters from the ship, and with no tools to use even that much, there might just as well have been no land in sight at all, so far as we were concerned. The poor hope of a ship coming our road was still the only hope left. To give us all the little chance we might get that way, I now looked about on the beach for the longest morsel of a wrecked spar that I could find, planted it on the high ground, and rigged up to it the one shirt I had on my back for a signal. While coming and going on this job, I noted with great joy that rain-water enough lay in the hollows of the rocks above the sea-line to save our small store of fresh water for a week at least. Thinking it only fair to the supercargo to let him know what I had found out, I went to his territories, after setting up the morsel of a spar, and discreetly shouted my news down to him without showing myself. "Keep to your own side!" was all the thanks I got for this piece of civility. I went back to my own side immediately, and crawled into my little cavern, quite content to be alone. On that first night, strange as it seems now, I once or twice nearly caught myself feeling happy at the thought of being rid of Mr. Lawrence Clissold. According to my calculations, - which were made by tying a fresh knot every morning in a piece of marline, - we two men were just a week, each on his own side of the island, without seeing or communicating, anyhow, with one another. The first half of the week I had enough to do with cudgeling my brains for a means of helping ourselves, to keep my mind steady. I thought first of picking up all the longest bits of spars that had been cast ashore, lashing them together with ropes twisted out of the long grass on the island, and trusting to raft-navigation to get to that high land away in the south. But when I looked among the spars, there were not half a dozen of them left whole enough for the purpose. And even if there had been more, the short allowance of food would not have given me time sufficient, or strength sufficient, to gather the grass, to twist it into ropes, and to lash a raft together big enough and strong enough for us two men. There was nothing to be done but to give up this notion, - and I gave it up. The next chance I thought of was to keep a fire burning on the shore every night, with the wood of the wreck, in case vessels at sea might notice it on one side, or the people of the high land in the south (if the distance was not too great) might notice it on the other. There was sense in this notion, and it could be turned to account the moment the wood was dry enough to burn. The wood got dry enough before the week was out. Whether it was the end of the stormy season in those latitudes, or whether it was only the shifting of the wind to the west, I don't know; but now, day after day, the heavens were clear, and the sun shone scorching hot. The scrub on the island (which was of no great account) dried up, but the fresh water in the hollows of the rocks (which was, on the other hand, a serious business) dried up too. Troubles seldom come alone; and on the day when I made this discovery I also found out that I had calculated wrong about the food. Eke it out as I might, with scurvy grass and roots, there would not be above eight days more of it left when the first week was past; and as for the fresh water, half a pint a day, unless more rain fell, would leave me at the end of my store, as nearly as I could guess, about the same time. This was a bad look-out, but I don't think the prospect of it upset me in my mind so much as the having nothing to do. Except for the gathering of the wood, and the lighting of the signal-fire every night, I had no work at all toward the end of the week to keep me steady. I checked myself in thinking much about home, for fear of losing heart, and not holding out to the last, as became a man. For the same reasons I likewise kept my mind from raising hopes of help in me which were not likely to come true. What else was there to think about? Nothing but the man on the other side of the island, - and be hanged to him! I thought about those words I heard him say in his sleep; I thought about how he was getting on by himself; how he liked nothing but water to drink, and little enough of that; how he was eking out his food; whether he slept much or not; whether he saw the smoke of my fire at night or not; whether he held up better or worse than I did; whether he would be glad to see me if I went to him to make it up; whether he or I would die first; whether if it was me, he would do for me what I would have done for him, namely, bury him, with the last strength I had left. All these things, and lots more, kept coming and going in my mind, till I could stand it no longer. On the morning of the eighth day I roused up to go to his territories, feeling it would do me good to see him and hear him, even if we quarrelled again the instant we set eyes on each other. I climbed up to the grassy ground; and when I got there, what should I see but the supercargo himself coming to my territories, and wandering up and down in the scrub through not knowing where to find them! It almost kicked me over, when we met, the man was changed so. He looked eighty years old: the little flesh he had on his miserable face hung baggy; his blue spectacles had dropped down on his nose, and his eyes showed over them wild and red-brimmed; his lips were black; his legs staggered under him. He came up to me with his eyes all of a glare, and put both his hands on my breast, just over the pocket in which I kept that flask of ginger-brandy which he had tried to steal from me. "Have you got any of it left?" says he, in a whisper. "About two mouthfuls," says I. "Give us one of them, for God's sake," says he. Giving him one of those mouthfuls was just about equal to giving him a day of my life. In the case of a man I liked, I would not have thought twice about giving it. In the case of Mr. Clissold I did think twice. I would have been a better Christian if I could, but just then I couldn't. He thought I was going to say No. His eyes got cunning directly. He reached his hand to my shoulders, and whispered these words in my ear: "I'll tell you what I know about the five hundred pound if you'll give me a drop." I determined to give it to him, and pulled out the flask. I took his hand, and poured the drop into the hollow of it, and held it for a moment. "Tell me first," I said, "and drink afterwards." He looked all around him, as if he thought there were people on the island to hear us. "Hush!" he said, "let's whisper about it." The next question and answer that passed between us was louder than before on my side, and softer than ever on his. This was the question, - "What do you know about the five hundred pound?" And this was the answer, - "It's Stolen Money!" My hand dropped away from his as if he had shot me. He instantly fastened on the drop of liquor in the hollow of his hand, like a hungry wild beast on a bone, and then looked up for more. Something in my face (God knows what) seemed suddenly to frighten him out of his life. Before I could stir a step, or get a word out, down he dropped on his knees, whining and whimpering in the high grass at my feet. "Don't kill me!" says he: "I'm dying, - I'll think of my poor soul. I'll repent while there's time - " Beginning in that way, he maundered awfully, grovelling down in the grass; asking me every other minute for "a drop more, and a drop more"; and talking as if he thought we were both in England. Out of his wanderings, his beseechings for another drop, and his miserable beggars' petitions for his "poor soul," I gathered together these words, - the same which I wrote down on the morsel of paper, and of which nine parts out of ten are now rubbed off! The first I made out - though not the first he said - was that some one, whom he spoke of as "the old man," was alive; and "Lanrean" was the place he lived in. I was to go there, and ask among the old men for "Tregarthen - " (At the mention by me of the name of Tregarthen, my brother, to my great surprise, stopped me with a start; made me say the name over more than once; and then, for the first time, told me of the trouble about his sweetheart and his marriage. We waited a little to talk that matter over, after which I went on again with my story, in these words:) Well, as I made out from Clissold's wanderings, I was to go to Lanrean, to ask among the old men for Tregarthen, and to say to Tregarthen, "Clissold was the man. Clissold bore no malice; Clissold repented like a Christian, for the sake of his poor soul." No! I was to say something else to Tregarthen. I was to say, "Look among the books: look at the leaf you know of, and see for yourself it's not the right leaf to be there." No! I was to say something else to Tregarthen. I was to say, "The right leaf is hidden, not burned. Clissold had time for everything else, but no time to burn that leaf. Tregarthen came in when he had got the candle lit to burn it. There was just time to let it drop from under his hand into the great crack in the desk, and then he was ordered abroad by the House, and there was no chance of doing more." No! I was to say none of these things to Tregarthen. Only this instead: "Look in Clissold's desk, - and if you blame anybody, blame Miser Raybrock for driving him to it." And, O, another drop, - for the Lord's sake, give him another drop! So he went on, over and over again, till I found voice enough to speak and stop him. "Get up and go!" I said to the miserable wretch. "Get back to your own side of the island, or I may do you a mischief, in spite of my own self." "Give me another drop and I will," was all the answer I could get from him. I threw him the flask. He pounced upon it with a howl. I turned my back, - for I could look at him no longer, - and climbed down again to my cavern on the beach. I sat down alone on the sand, and tried to quiet myself fit to think about what I had heard. That father could ever have wilfully done anything unbecoming his character as an honest man, was what I wouldn't believe, in the first place. And that the wretched brute I had just parted from was in his right senses, was what I wouldn't believe in the second place. What I had myself seen of drinkers, at sea and ashore, helped me to understand the condition into which he had fallen. I knew that when a man who had been a drunkard for years is suddenly cut off his drink, he drops to pieces like, body and mind, for the want of it. I had also heard ship-doctors talk, by some name of their own, of a drink-madness, which we ignorant men call the Horrors. And I made it out, easy enough, that I had seen the supercargo in the first of these conditions; and that if we both lived long enough without help coming to us, I might soon see him in the second. But when I tried to get farther, and settle how much of what I had heard was wandering and how much truth, and what it meant if any of it was truth, my slowness got in my way again; and where a quicker man might have made up his mind in an hour or two, I was all day, in sore distress, making up mine. The upshot of what I settled with myself was, in two words, this: having mother's writing-case handy about me, I determined first to set down for my own self's reminder, all that I had heard. Second, to clear the matter up if ever I got back to England alive; and if wrong had been done to that old man, or to anybody else, in father's name (without father's knowledge), to make restoration for his sake. All that day I neither saw nor heard more of the supercargo. I passed a miserable night of it, after writing my memorandum, fighting with my loneliness and my own thoughts. The remembrance of those words in father's will, saying that the five hundred pound was money which he had once run a risk with, kept putting into my mind suspicious I was ashamed of. When daylight came, I almost felt as if I was going to have the Horrors too, and got up to walk them off, if possible, in the morning air. I kept on the northern side of the island, walking backward and forward for an hour or more. Then I returned to my cavern; and the first thing I saw, on getting near it, was other footsteps than mine marked on the sand. I suspected at once that the supercargo had been lurking about watching me instead of going back to his own side; and that, in my absence, he had been at his thieving tricks again. The stores were what I looked at first. The food he had not touched; but the water he had either drunk or wasted, - there was not half a pint of it left. The medicine-chest was open, and the bottle with the hartshorn was gone. When I looked next for the pistol, which I had loaded with powder and shot for the chance of bird-shooting that never came, the pistol was gone too. After making this last discovery, there was but one thing to be done, -namely to find out where he was, and to take the pistol away from him. I set off to search first on the western side. It was a beautiful, clear, calm, sunshiny morning; and as I crossed the island, looking out on my left hand and my right I stopped on a sudden, with my heart in my mouth, as the saying is. Something caught my eye, far out at sea, in the northwest. I looked again, - and there as true as the heavens above me, I saw a ship, with the sunlight on her top-sails, hull down, on the water-line in the offing. All thought of the errand I was bent on went out of my mind in an instant. I ran as fast as my weak legs would carry me to the northern beach; gathered up the broken wood which was still lying there plentifully, and, with the help of the dry scrub, lit the largest fire I had made yet. This was the only signal it was in my power to make that there were men on the island. The fire in the bright daylight would never be visible to the ship; but the smoke curling up from it in the clear sky might be seen, if they had a look-out at the mast-head. While I was still feeding the fire, and so rapt up in doing it that I had neither eyes nor ears for anything else, I heard the supercargo's voice, on a sudden, at my back. He had stolen on me along the sand. When I faced him he was swinging his arms about in the air, and saying to himself, over and over again, "I see the ship! I see the ship!" After a little he came close up to me. By the look of him he had been drinking the hartshorn, and it had strung him up a bit, body and mind, for the time. He kept his right hand behind him, as if he was hiding something. I suspected that "something" to be the pistol I was in search of. "Will the ship come here?" says he. "Yes, if they see the smoke," says I, keeping my eye on him. He waited a bit, frowning suspiciously, and looking hard at me all the time. "What did I say to you yesterday?" he asked. "What I have got written down here," I made answer, smacking my hand over the writing-case in my breast-pocket; "and what I mean to put to the proof, if the ship sees us and we get back to England." He whipped his right hand round from behind him like lightning, and snapped the pistol at me. It missed fire. I wrenched it from him in a moment, and was just within one hair's breadth of knocking him on the head with the butt-end afterwards. I lifted my hand, - then thought better, and dropped it again. "No," says I, fixing my eyes on him steadily: "I'll wait till the ship finds us." He slunk away from me; and, as he slunk, looked, hard into the fire. He stopped a minute so, thinking to himself; then he looked back at me again, with some mad mischief in him, that twinkled through his blue spectacles, and grinned on his dry black lips. "The ship shall never find you," he said. With which words he turned himself about towards his own side of the island, and left me. He only meant that saying to be a threat, - but, bird of ill-omen that he was, it turned out as good as a prophecy! All my hard work with the fire proved work in vain; all hope was quenched in me long before the embers I had set light to were burned out. Whether the smoke was seen or not from the vessel is more than I can tell. I only know that she filled away on the other tack, not ten minutes after the supercargo left me. In less than an hour's time the last glimpse of the bright top-sails had vanished out of view. I went back to my cavern, - which was now likelier than ever to be my grave as well. In that hot climate, with all the moisture on the island dried up, with not quite so much as a tumblerful of fresh water left, with my strength wasted by living on half-rations of food, - two days more, at most, would see me out. It was hard enough for a man at my age, with all that I had left at home to make life precious, to die such a death as was now before me. It was harder still to have the sting of death sharpened - as I felt it then - by what had just happened between the supercargo and myself. There was no hope now that the wanderings, the day before, had more falsehood than truth in them. The secret he had let out was plainly true enough and serious enough to have scared him into attempting my life, rather than let me keep possession of it, when there was a chance of the ship rescuing us. That secret had father's good name mixed up with it, - and here was I, instead of clearing the villanous darkness from off of it, carrying it with me, black as ever, into my grave. It was out of the horror I felt at doing that, and out of the yearning of my heart toward you, Alfred, when I thought of it, that the notion came to comfort me, of writing the Message at the top of the paper, and of committing it in the bottle to the sea. Drowning men, they say, catch at straws, - and the straw of comfort I caught at was the one chance in ten thousand that the Message might float till it was picked up, and that it might reach you. My mind might, or might not, have been failing me by this time, - but it is true, either way, that I did feel comforted when I had emptied one of the two bottles left in the medicine chest, had put the paper inside, had tied the stopper carefully over with the oil-skin, and had laid the whole by in my pocket, ready, when I felt my time coming, to drop into the sea. I was rid of the secret, I thought to myself; and, if it pleased God, I was rid of it, Alfred, to you. The day waned, and the sun set, all cloudless and golden, in a dead calm. There was not a ripple anywhere on the long oily heaving of the sea. Before night came I strengthened myself with a better meal than usual as to food, - for where was the use of keeping meat and biscuit when I had not water enough to last along with them? When the stars came out and the moon rose I gathered the wood together and lit the signal-fire, according to custom, on the beach outside my cavern. I had no hope from it, - but the fire was company to me; the looking into it quieted my thoughts, and the crackling of it was a relief in the silence. I don't know why it was, but the breathless stillness of that night had something awful in it, and went near to frightening me. The moon got high in the heavens, and the light of her lay all in a flood on the sand before me, on the rocks that jutted out from it, and on the calm sea beyond. I was thinking of Margaret - wondering if the moon was shining on our little bay at Steepways and if she was looking at it too, - when I saw a man's shadow steal over the white of the sand. He was lurking near me again! In a minute he came into view. The moonshine glinted on his blue spectacles, and glimmered on his bald head. He stopped as he passed the rocks and looked about for a loose stone; he found a large one, and came straight with it on tiptoe up to the fire. I showed myself to him on a sudden, in the red of the flame, with the pistol in my hand. He dropped the stone and shrank back at the sight of it. When he was close to the sea he stopped, and screamed out at me, "The ship's coming! The ship's coming! The ship shall never find you!" The notion of the ship, and that other notion of killing me before help came to us, seemed never to have left him. When he turned, and went back by the way he had come, he was still shouting out those same words. For a quarter of an hour or more I heard him, till the silence swallowed up his ravings, and led me back again to my thoughts of home. Those thoughts kept with me till the moon was on the wane. It was darker now, and stiller than ever. I had not fed the signal-fire for half an hour or more, and had roused myself up, at the mouth of the cavern, to do it, when I saw the dying gleams of moonshine over the sea on either side of me change colour and turn red. Black shadows, as from low-flying clouds, swept after each other over the deepening redness. The air grew hot, - a sound came nearer and nearer, from above me and behind me, like the rush of wind and the roar of water both together, and both far off. I ran out on the sand and looked back. The island was on fire! On fire at the point of it opposite to me, - on fire in one great sheet of flame that stretched right across the island, and bore down on me steadily before the light westerly wind which was blowing at the time. Only one hand could have kindled that terrible flame, - the hand of the lost wretch who had left me, with the mad threat on his lips and the murderous notion of burning me out of my refuge, working in his crazy brain. On his side of the island (where the fire had begun), the dry grass and scrub grew all round the little hollow in the earth which I had left to him for his place of refuge. If he had had a thousand lives to lose he would have lost that thousand already! Having nothing to feed on but the dry scrub, the flame swept forward with such a frightful swiftness that I had barely time, after mastering my own scattered senses, to turn back into the cavern to get my last drink of water and my last mouthful of food, before I heard the fiery scorch crackling over the thatched roof which my own hands had raised. I ran across the beach to the spur of rock which jutted out into the sea, and there crouched down on the farthest edge I could reach to. There was nothing for the fire to lay hold of between me and the top of the island bank. I was far enough away to be out of the lick of the flames, and low enough away to be out of the lick of the flames and low enough down to get air under the sweep of the smoke. You may well wonder why, with death by starvation threatening me close at hand, I should have schemed and struggled as I did to save myself from a quicker death by suffocation in the smoke. I can only answer to that, that I wonder too, - but so it was. The flames ate their way to the edge of the bank, and lapped over it as if they longed to lick me up. The heat scorched nearer than I had thought, and the smoke poured lower and thicker. I lay down sick and weak on the rock, with my face over the calm, cool water. When I ventured to lift myself up again, the top of the island was of a ruby red, the smoke rose slowly in little streams, and the air above was quivering with the heat. While I looked at it I felt a kind of surging and singing in my head, and a deadly faintness and coldness crept all over me. I took the bottle that held the Message from my pocket, and dropped it into the sea, - then crawled a little way back over the rocks, and fell forward on them before I could get as far as the sand. The last I remember was trying to say my prayers, - losing the words, - losing my sight, - losing the sense of where I was, - losing everything. The day was breaking again when I was roused up by feeling rough hands on me. Naked savages - some on the rocks, some in the water, some in two long canoes - were clamouring and crowding about on all sides. They bound me and took me off at once to one of the canoes. The other kept company, and both were paddled back to that high land which I had seen in the south. Death had passed me by once more, and Captivity had come in its place. The story of my life among the savages, having no concern with the matter now in hand, may be passed by here in few words. They had seen the fire on the island; and paddling over to reconnoitre, had found me. Not one of them had ever set eyes on a white man before. I was taken away to be shown about among them for a curiosity. When they were tired of showing me, they spared my life, finding my knowledge and general handiness as a civilized man useful to them in various ways. I lost all count of time in my captivity, and can only guess now that it lasted more than one year and less than two. I made two attempts to escape, each time in a canoe, and was balked in both. Nobody at home in England would ever, as I believe, have seen me again if an outward-bound vessel had not touched at the little desert island for fresh water. Finding none there she came on to the territory of the savages (which was an island too). When they took me on board I looked little better than a savage myself, and could hardly talk my own language. By the help of the kindness shown to me I was right again by the time we spoke the first ship homeward-bound. To that vessel I was transferred; and in her I worked my passage back to Falmouth.