The Spectator Bird by Wallace Stegner Read Free Book Online

totally empty. Rows of closed doors. In robe and. slippers I went up the companionway and into the lounge. It too blazed with light, it too was empty. The broken chairs had been taken away and the piano was once more bolted down, but not a soul, not a sound except the creaking of woodwork as the room warped and tilted to the heavy, helpless wallowing of the ship.
    I went to the doors and looked out across the starboard rail. The ship’s lights shone on the lifting, gray, foam-streaked side of a wave. I watched it rise and rise until it was high above the rail, and I felt the ship shrink and slide from it I looked deep inside it, deeper than I wanted to look, and then it fell off somewhere, and the ship rolled so that I grabbed the doorframe, and the light spread out over the hissing crests of farther waves, an appalling turmoil of water, an uncreated waste without order or end or purpose, heaving and yelling through the dark that the ship’s little brightness only made more total. And rain falling onto it, slashing at the glassy sides, while the wind blew a stiff spray flat off the crests. Whoever would know the age of the earth, Conrad says somewhere, should look upon the sea in storm. The age or disposition of the earth, he should have said.
    Then out of the corner of my eye I saw the glint of moving oilskins out on the foredeck. A cluster of figures huddled out there, hanging onto each other or to the davits of a lifeboat, intent on something at their center. They hulked like conspirators, bent away from wind and rain, and in my scared condition I had the wild idea they were planning like a lot of Lord Jims to abandon ship and let all the pilgrims perish. For a minute or two they leaned and clung together. Then they fell back into a ragged line, two of them bent and lifted, and there went Bertelson down the plank and into that appalling sea.
    There is no word for how instant his obliteration was. The second after they stooped, he was not. With hardly a pause the oilskinned figures started in, and I saw that two of them were supporting a third who sagged and staggered. Mrs. Bertelson. Why they let her watch that, God knows. Maybe, in her piety and wretchedness, she had insisted on seeing her husband go to God.
    I fled ahead of them down the companionway and up to our own safe door. As I took hold of the knob I felt or heard the renewed throb of the engines, and by the time I was back in my berth the Stockholm was beginning once more to drive her nose into the seas.
    So fast, so total an erasure. Spurlos verloren. And now this afternoon, with their raging efficiency or whatever it is, they’ve already got his wife out on the foredeck, wrapped in rugs and shot full of sedatives. The wind has dropped again, but not far, and the sea even in daylight is nothing she should be contemplating. There she sits, staring with dumb, drugged suffering at the North Atlantic. And a strange thing: now that she is stricken, people avoid her more than they did when she was only cowlike and uninteresting. Me too. Ruth sat by her for an hour and tried to talk to her, but I couldn’t. What would I have said? I thought her husband foolish and bigoted and dull, and now that he is dead it would be hypocrisy to pretend differently.
    I would like to be able to suffer fools more gladly. I am too likely to be contemptuous of people when their minds don’t work at least as fast as mine. Curtis too, Curtis too. Maybe, whenever I am tempted to be snobbish, I can make myself remember the chaos and old night that Bertelson vanished into. Not even the most foolish and bigoted member of Lutheran Christendom deserves to be wiped out like that.
    Also I can’t forget that it was in the ocean—another and pleasanter ocean than this one, but part of the same element-that Curtis was knocked from or let go of his surfboard, and his last breath was water.
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