Burning Boy, page 61
The chapter ends with the first sustained dialogue in the story as the cook and the correspondent begin to argue about “the differences between a life-saving station and a house of refuge,” with the cook saying there is a house of refuge just north of the Mosquito Inlet lighthouse, which means that once their boat is spotted off the shore, rescue boats will be mobilized to bring them in, and the correspondent answering that “houses of refuge don’t have crews.”
“Oh, yes, they do,” said the cook.
“No, they don’t,” said the correspondent.
“Well, we’re not there yet, anyhow,” said the oiler, in the stern.
“Well,” said the cook, “perhaps it’s not a house of refuge that I’m thinking of as being near Mosquito Inlet Light. Perhaps it’s a life-saving station.”
“We’re not there yet,” said the oiler, in the stern.
An example of how the men in the boat interact with one another, and also a brief look at their contrasting personalities: the not too bright cook, the stickler correspondent—who will correct anyone who does not have his facts straight—and the stolid oiler, who prefers to do his job rather than get dragged into useless talk about hypothetical situations that have no bearing on the present. In just a few lines, Crane has given us a clearer notion of who these men are. We are two and a half pages into the story at this point, and already we are in deep.
Details accumulate as the narrative pushes forward, a barrage of precisely rendered descriptions that chart the shifting behavior of the ocean, the ominous arrival of pestering gulls (one of them lands on the captain’s head), the “brown mats of seaweed” that appear on the surface whenever the boat comes within range of the shore (only to be pushed back again and again), and the dogged, muscle-draining work of endless rowing (“In the meantime the oiler and the correspondent rowed. And also they rowed”). Interspersed among the onrush of sensory particulars, there are passages that address the mood among the four men, which seems to fluctuate as rapidly as the wind and water around them. Early on, they scarcely know what to think. They feel it would be “childish and stupid” to express any optimism about their chances, and yet, as the narrator explains, the alternative would be no better, for “the ethics of their condition was decidedly against any open suggestions of hopelessness.” The quandary therefore ends in a standoff: “So they were silent.”
The ethics of their condition means the responsibility each man has assumed for the welfare of the three others, for they are all in the boat together, literally in the same boat, and it would be an ethical violation to say anything that would threaten the morale of the group. In this case, silence is the only solution, and what each man is thinking is known only to himself. In a world that has been reduced to a population of four, each man carries the burden of one-fourth of humanity, and whatever he does or doesn’t do will affect the entire world. “The Open Boat” will turn on this condensation of the real into “a wee thing … at the mercy of five oceans” filled with four little men on their way to an uncertain future, and until that future comes, the oiler and the correspondent rowed. And also they rowed.
The mood lifts toward the end of the second chapter when they sight land for the first time—a tiny pinpoint in the distance, identified by the captain as the lighthouse at Mosquito Inlet—and if the wind holds and the boat doesn’t swamp, the captain assures them, they are bound to make it all the way in. “‘Bail her, cook,’ said the captain, serenely.” And the cook, now described as “cheerful,” happily does as he is told. Which leads to the quasi-ecstatic first paragraph of the third part, in which Crane sets forth his new understanding of the world:
It would be difficult to describe the subtle brotherhood of men that was here established on the seas. No one said that it was so. No one mentioned it. But it dwelt in the boat, and each man felt it warm him. They were a captain, an oiler, a cook, and a correspondent, and they were friends, friends in a more curiously iron-bound degree than may be common. The hurt captain, lying against the water-jar in the bow, spoke always in a low voice and calmly, but he could never command a more ready and swiftly obedient crew than the motley three in the dingey. It was more than a mere recognition of what was best for the common safety. There was surely in it a quality that was personal and heartfelt. And after this devotion to the commander of the boat there was this comradeship that the correspondent, for instance, who had been taught to be cynical of men, knew even at the time was the best experience of his life. But no one said that it was so. No one mentioned it.
Twice before in his work, Crane had commented on a similar revelation, but in both instances he had been talking about others, first in Nebraska, where he had been awed by the solidarity he had witnessed among the suffering farmers, and then in Galveston, where the graciousness and honesty of the people had been “instructive to cynics,” but now the cynic is directly involved in the experience himself, a terrible experience by any objective standard, but because of the “subtle brotherhood of men … established on the seas,” he declares it to be the best experience of his life. He was changed by what happened to him in that little boat, and from then on he found himself living in a different world from the one he had known before, a potentially different world, in any case, depending on whether one lived strictly for oneself or for and with and because of others as well. When The Open Boat and Other Stories was published as a book in 1898, Crane added a formal dedication for the first time in his writing life—a salute to the men who had trained him in the mysteries of the subtle, unarticulated brotherhood, which in a universe without meaning is man’s only defense against unmitigated despair:
TO
THE LATE WILLIAM HIGGINS
AND TO
CAPTAIN EDWARD MURPHY AND STEWARD C. B. MONTGOMERY
OF THE SUNK STEAMER COMMODORE
The men fashion a makeshift sail by attaching an overcoat to an oar, and when they reach the top of the waves now, they can see the land growing larger in front of them, but then, unexpectedly, the wind dies down. The progress of the boat stalls, and the oiler and the correspondent take hold of the oars and start rowing again. Crane remarks:
Shipwrecks are apropos of nothing.… Of the four in the dingey none had slept any time worth mentioning for two days and two nights previous to embarking in the dingey, and in the excitement of clambering about the deck of a foundering ship they had also forgotten to eat heartily.
Hunger and exhaustion coupled with the slog of continual rowing, and the correspondent begins to wonder how anyone could possibly think that rowing is “amusing” when in reality it is a “diabolical punishment,” “a horror to the muscles and a crime against the back.” Still, they are all reasonably optimistic at that point. The land is looming closer, the distant lighthouse is well within view, and even if the surf is too strong for them to risk heading into it, they are working on the mistaken assumption that someone is in the lighthouse and they will be seen, and once they are seen, help will come to save them. They expect to be ashore within an hour, and when the correspondent discovers eight cigars in the top pocket of his coat, four of them soaked through with seawater and the four others miraculously dry, they all light up, “and with the assurance of impending rescue in their eyes, [they] puffed at the big cigars and judged well and ill of all men. Everybody took a drink of water.”
But nothing happens. “Funny they don’t see us,” the cook says as the fourth chapter begins, and before long those words are repeated and then repeated again as the men puzzle over the lack of response from the shore: “Funny they don’t see us.”
The light-heartedness of a former time had completely faded. To their sharpened minds it was easy to conjure pictures of all kinds of incompetency and blindness and, indeed, cowardice. There was the shore of the populous land, and it was bitter and bitter to them that from it came no sign.
The captain concludes that they should make a try for it themselves, reasoning that “if we stay out here too long, we’ll none of us have the strength to swim after the boat swamps.” As the oiler turns the dinghy toward the shore, the captain, understanding how perilous this charge on the breakers will be, asks the men if they know where to send the news of his “finish” if he doesn’t make it, and for the first time in the story the subject of death is confronted head-on.
They then briefly exchanged some addresses and admonitions. As for the reflections of the men, there was a great deal of rage in them. Perchance they might be formulated thus: “If I am going to be drowned—if I am going to be drowned—if I am going to be drowned, why, in the name of the seven mad gods who rule the sea, was I allowed to come thus far and contemplate sand and trees? Was I brought here merely to have my nose dragged away as I was about to nibble the sacred cheese of life? It is preposterous. If this old ninny-woman, Fate, cannot do better than this, she should be deprived of the management of men’s fortunes. She is an old hen who knows not her intention. If she has decided to drown me, why did she not do it in the beginning and save me all this trouble. The whole affair is absurd.… But no, she cannot mean to drown me. She dare not drown me. She cannot drown me. Not after all this work.” Afterward the man might have had an impulse to shake his fist at the clouds. “Just you drown me, now, and then hear what I call you!”
It is a complex passage, at once serious and mocking, and as Crane presents his argument, he seems to know how ridiculous he must sound, for shaking your fist at the clouds and cursing Fate after she has killed you are surely empty, meaningless gestures. Man has no say in what nature decides to do with him, and it is a telling point, I think, that Crane should compare man to a mouse, the lowly, insignificant mouse who nibbles the sacred cheese of life, a phrase at once so humorous and dark that it would be difficult not to see it as another one of Crane’s ironic jabs at the platitudes of conventional thinking: the Woe is me response to impending death. But this passage is only a first step on the road toward a deeper understanding of the experience he has lived through. There is more to come, and the rage and petulance of this imagined inner monologue will disappear as the story advances. Bit by bit, the walls of imprisoning selfhood will crumble, and the world will shine through—not just the water, but the sky as well—for what seems at first to be nothing more than a real-life adventure tale is in fact a philosophical journey through the various stages of dawning consciousness toward a somber, stoical, painfully earned wisdom.
The oiler points the boat toward the shore, but the billows are intense, growing “more formidable,” and “they seemed always just about to break and roll over the little boat in a turmoil of foam.” There is still a long way to the shore, but even from that distance the water is too rough to advance in safety. The oiler announces that “she won’t live three minutes more and we’re too far out to swim.” He asks the captain if he should “take her to the sea again,” and the captain answers yes, go ahead. The assault on the beach has failed.
They remove themselves to a safer distance, studying the beach for signs of life, anything that would offer some hope that they will, in the end, be rescued. Several pages go by in which the men do nothing but watch, wait, and row. Then one of them spots a man on the beach. The four men in the boat turn their full attention on him, studying his gestures, commenting on what he is doing, and in the long skein of dialogue that follows Crane holds back from attributing a speaker to what is said: the words hang in the air, and we have no idea who is saying them—whether it is the captain, the correspondent, the oiler, or the cook, for by now they are of one mind, one purpose, and it no longer matters who is saying what. This is the subtle brotherhood in action, and no further gloss is required. The action speaks for itself, which in this case is the act of speaking, and who speaks is in fact all of them together, each one in his turn, for what happens to one of them will be something that happens to all of them. Their fates have become indistinguishable.
The man seems to be waving at them. Then he is no longer waving, he is running. Then he has stopped running. Suddenly another man appears, running, it seems, but no, he is on a bicycle, and he has joined the other man. They both wave. Then something comes rolling along the beach. It could be a boat on wheels, they think, but no, it is an omnibus—one of the omnibuses from the large hotels nearby. A man on the bus is waving a black flag, but no, it isn’t a flag, it’s an overcoat, and why would a man wave an overcoat around his head? The men in the boat speculate. The people from the hotel have come to the shore to watch them drown. Or the people think the four men in the boat are fishing. Or what? It goes on, it goes on and on until the men in the boat are trapped on the uncertain dividing line between coherence and a blur, and then, little by little, the light steadily dims, and the day has been lost.
The shore grew dusky. The man waving a coat blended gradually into this gloom, and it swallowed in the same manner the omnibus and the group of people. The spray, when it dashed uproariously over the side, made the voyagers shrink and swear like men who were being branded.
“I’d like to catch the chump who waved the coat. I feel like soaking him one, just for luck.”
“Why? What did he do?”
“Oh, nothing, but then he seemed so damned cheerful.”
In the meantime the oiler rowed, and then the correspondent rowed, and then the oiler rowed. Gray-faced and bowed forward, they mechanically, turn by turn, plied the leaden oars. The form of the lighthouse had vanished from the southern horizon, but finally a pale star appeared, just lifting from the sea. The streaked saffron in the west passed before the all-merging darkness, and the sea to the east was black. The land had vanished, and was expressed only by the low and drear thunder of the surf.
As the fifth chapter begins, Crane pushes further into the darkness that surrounds the boat:
A night on the sea in an open boat is a long night. As darkness settled finally, the shine of the light, lifting from the sea in the south, changed to full gold. On the northern horizon a new light appeared, a small bluish gleam on the edge of the waters. These two lights were the furniture of the world. Otherwise there was nothing but waves.
“Furniture of the world” is both stunning and unexpected—stunning in the sense of beautiful, unexpected in the primary sense of stunning—especially because the furniture is no more substantial than two distant sources of light, and coming just after the unexpected conclusion to the fourth chapter, when the cook suddenly turns to the oiler and asks, apropos of nothing (in the same way shipwrecks are apropos of nothing), “Billie, what kind of pie do you like best?,” the weave of textures and tones in the story has attained a new thickness, a new complexity of meaning. With the continual return to several key phrases throughout (“the oiler rowed, and then the correspondent rowed, and then the oiler rowed” along with the refrain of “If I am going to be drowned—if I am going to be drowned—if I am going to be drowned,” which has been repeated toward the end of the fourth chapter and will be repeated again at the beginning of the sixth, each time somewhat shorter, with fewer sentences from the original version left in), it is becoming clear that “The Open Boat” has been structured as a piece of music, a fugue in which the separate voices or strands increasingly overlap until they begin to merge, and with the coming of night the fugue has entered the early stages of its stretto, the finale that will gather up the disparate voices and turn them into one, a resolution that will create a different sound from the ones heard in the earlier portions of the text, a sound as deep as the thunder of the surf.
The oiler and the correspondent take turns rowing in the darkness. While one sleeps in the cold water sloshing around the bottom of the boat, the other mans the oars until he is too exhausted to go on. When that happens, he gently rouses the sleeper from the “dead sleep” and asks if he will spell him for a little while, and if it is the correspondent who happens to be sleeping, he will answer, “Sure, Billie,” and then the two of them will trade places until the time comes for them to trade places again. Their politeness with each other is both serene and courtly, and not once does either of them complain.
The correspondent rows on alone in the night, looking down at the sleeping cook and oiler, one with his arm thrown around the other’s shoulder, and thinks of them as “the babes of the sea, a grotesque rendering of the old babes in the wood.” Even the ever-wakeful captain seems to have dozed off, “and the correspondent thought that he was the one man afloat on all the oceans. The wind had a voice as it came over the waves, and it was sadder than the end.” A shark appears alongside the boat, no more than an oar’s length away—“a long flash of bluish light … an enormous fin speed[ing] like a shadow through the water”—but the threat leaves the correspondent strangely unmoved. He wishes that one of the others was awake to share the experience with him, but all three are dead to the world, fast asleep in the sloshing water at the bottom of the boat, and the solitary correspondent rows on.
