The Rescue | Page 5

after
another I made out the familiar faces watching my approach with faint
smiles of amused recognition. They had known well enough that I was
bound to come back to them. But their eyes met mine seriously as was
only to be expected since I, myself, felt very serious as I stood amongst
them again after years of absence. At once, without wasting words, we
went to work together on our renewed life; and every moment I felt
more strongly that They Who had Waited bore no grudge to the man
who however widely he may have wandered at times had played truant
only once in his life.
1920. J. C.

CONTENTS

PART I. THE MAN AND THE BRIG

PART II. THE SHORE OF REFUGE

PART III. THE CAPTURE

PART IV. THE GIFT OF THE
SHALLOWS

PART V. THE POINT OF HONOUR AND
THE POINT OF PASSION

PART VI. THE CLAIM OF LIFE AND
THE TOLL OF DEATH


PART I. THE MAN AND THE BRIG
The shallow sea that foams and murmurs on the shores of the thousand
islands, big and little, which make up the Malay Archipelago has been
for centuries the scene of adventurous undertakings. The vices and the
virtues of four nations have been displayed in the conquest of that
region that even to this day has not been robbed of all the mystery and

romance of its past--and the race of men who had fought against the
Portuguese, the Spaniards, the Dutch and the English, has not been
changed by the unavoidable defeat. They have kept to this day their
love of liberty, their fanatical devotion to their chiefs, their blind
fidelity in friendship and hate--all their lawful and unlawful instincts.
Their country of land and water--for the sea was as much their country
as the earth of their islands--has fallen a prey to the western race--the
reward of superior strength if not of superior virtue. To-morrow the
advancing civilization will obliterate the marks of a long struggle in the
accomplishment of its inevitable victory.
The adventurers who began that struggle have left no descendants. The
ideas of the world changed too quickly for that. But even far into the
present century they have had successors. Almost in our own day we
have seen one of them--a true adventurer in his devotion to his
impulse--a man of high mind and of pure heart, lay the foundation of a
flourishing state on the ideas of pity and justice. He recognized
chivalrously the claims of the conquered; he was a disinterested
adventurer, and the reward of his noble instincts is in the veneration
with which a strange and faithful race cherish his memory.
Misunderstood and traduced in life, the glory of his achievement has
vindicated the purity of his motives. He belongs to history. But there
were others--obscure adventurers who had not his advantages of birth,
position, and intelligence; who had only his sympathy with the people
of forests and sea he understood and loved so well. They can not be
said to be forgotten since they have not been known at all. They were
lost in the common crowd of seamen-traders of the Archipelago, and if
they emerged from their obscurity it was only to be condemned as
law-breakers. Their lives were thrown away for a cause that had no
right to exist in the face of an irresistible and orderly progress-- their
thoughtless lives guided by a simple feeling.
But the wasted lives, for the few who know, have tinged with romance
the region of shallow waters and forest-clad islands, that lies far east,
and still mysterious between the deep waters of two oceans.
I

Out of the level blue of a shallow sea Carimata raises a lofty barrenness
of grey and yellow tints, the drab eminence of its arid heights.
Separated by a narrow strip of water, Suroeton, to the west, shows a
curved and ridged outline resembling the backbone of a stooping giant.
And to the eastward a troop of insignificant islets stand effaced,
indistinct, with vague features that seem to melt into the gathering
shadows. The night following from the eastward the retreat of the
setting sun advanced slowly, swallowing the land and the sea; the land
broken, tormented and abrupt; the sea smooth and inviting with its easy
polish of continuous surface to wanderings facile and endless.
There was no wind, and a small brig that had lain all the afternoon a
few miles to the northward and westward of Carimata had hardly
altered its position half a mile during all these hours. The calm was
absolute, a dead, flat calm, the stillness of a dead sea and of a dead
atmosphere. As far as the eye could reach there was nothing but an
impressive immobility. Nothing