Cale Young Rice

The Colonel's Story

No, no, my friend; there is an agony
Not to be exorcised out of the world
By any voice of hope.--But, I will tell you.

The _Sonia_ was sailing without lights--
Bearing three hundred souls--and without bells;
For she had reached the "Zone," where the Hun sharks
With their torpedo tongues could spit death at us
Out of the inky sea-hells where they hid.
On the main deck we stood, in a wind-shelter,--
My wife, and by us a pale girl whose eyes
Had all disaster in them. And my thought was,
"I hope to God the moon is shut so deep
In cloud-murk there in the East that hurricanes
Can't blow her out of it." For in the Zone
The moon had come to mean only betrayal,
And now, if ever, was her wanton chance.

The slipping water soaked with soulless dark
Fell under and around us shudderingly,
Yet somehow brought an anxious hopefulness.
"We're making twenty knots," I said; and felt
Our bow cut thro the tangle of the waves
As if the No Man's _Sea_ ahead of us
Would soon be crossed; and I, out to rejoin
My regiment, could set my wife safe somewhere,
And help again to stab that curst amphibian,
Autocracy--whose spawn in the sea gave it
A terror greater than infinitude's.
For God knows, with the woman that one loves
Aboard a ship, and only a cloud perhaps
Between the Hun's shark eyes and sure escape
From the black icy fathoms that would choke her,
There's little left within a man but nerves.
So when I drew her closer into the shelter,
Out of the sheering wind, the life belt
She wore seemed like a coffin in that sepulchre
Of night and sea. And when the other, there,
With the disaster eyes and pallid face,
Turned half toward us, I was shaken as if
The moon had suddenly walked out of her shroud
With phosphorescent purpose to reveal us.

But on we plunged and tumbled, till at last
The blank monotonous sink and swell lulled me
To faith. And I was only thinking softly
Of her--my wife's--first kiss on a summer night
Under the moonlit laurels of our home,
When came a cry from the wan girl gazing
Frozenly on the sea--where the moon now
Indeed was pointing at us pallidly
A death-path. And my throat was gripped by it,
That clutching cry, as if the glacial depths
Down under us already had risen up.
So starting toward the slipping rail I called,
"What is it? where?" For, tense as a clairvoyant,
With eyes that seemed to feel under the tide
The stealthy peril stalking us, she stood there.

After a moment's gazing, I too saw--
What she foresensed--destruction seething toward us.
"The boats!" I cried, "the rafts!" And stumbled back
Over the streaming deck to her I loved.
Then the shock came, as if the sea's wild heart
Had broken under us, and ripped the entrails,
The human hundreds, out of our vessel's hold,
To strew the foam with mania and despair,
With shrieks strangled by wind and wave and terror.
And thro that floating, mangled, blind confusion,
Where hands reached at the infinite then sank,
Where faces clung to wreckage as to eternity,
I sought for her who shared my life's voyage,
Who had been my heart's pilot; and who now,
Wrecked with me, swirled, too, in the torn waters....
And soon I saw her, still by that wan girl,
Tossed on a watery omnipotence.

Blind with brine I swam for her--as the moon,
Her treachery done, again got to a cloud.
Flung back by every wave, I fought; beating
Against them as against God. And soon, somehow,
Had reached to a limp body on the surge,
Limp and strange--but living ... and not drowned!
Then seeing a raft near, I struggled onward,
Gulping the sea and being gulped by it,
But finding arms at last that drew my burden
And me from horror to half-swooning safety.

I could have died, I think, of the relief.
But the moon came again, nakedly out,
As if to see what she had done. Then I,
Bending over the form that I had fought for,
And chafing it, saw ... not her I loved!
Infinite Cruelty, not her I loved!...
But that pale girl, with the eyes of all disaster.

Oh, yes, I raved, and said God was a Hun,
A Kaiser of a Universe that loathed him.
And back, too, would have leapt, into the waves,
But the same hands that saved were ready to hold me.