THE SHIP.
The morning after, his birthday, on meeting him at the breakfast-table
as the clock struck eight, I observed to him that he couldn’t have had
much sleep: to which, glancing up from his book, he answered, “Enough
for the needs of my nature, sir, I think, though I was at work at four
minutes before five. The old have greater need of repose, it appears,
while, as to the young, the demagogue Cataline, it is written, could
dispense with sleep almost altogether.”
“Oho,” said I; “well, let us be eating,” and we sat to the old jug of
porridge and oaten loaf.
Presently, as we ate, I said to him, “By the way, I want you now to
understand that you are not to knock my servant’s head about any more.”
His answer was that he had discovered that such occasional visitations
had the effect of slightly heightening the functioning of the idiot’s
wit.
“Never mind your discoveries,” said I: “you are not to do it, sir.”
“I will not, sir,” says he with his formal bow, and buries his brow
anew in his volume.
I for my part could hardly eat, for I was uneasy and excited, and my
fingers kept on going to feel the old stele, which I had in my pocket;
so, fidgeted by his cool reading and feeding, said I to him, “Didn’t
I beg you some time since not to be for ever eating and reading
together, since it is injurious to the digestion, and there’s a time
for everything, as the mightiest minds among men well know.”
“True, sir,” says my man, “you did speak to me on this subject on
the third of June two years ago, but your words did not give me an
impression of great urgency, so I have dared to disregard them, since,
after all, the digestion of the young is hearty and strong, and the
days are hardly born but they are fled, and it is hard to the foot
to race after the fastness of the horses of time; hence the greater
masters, the minds of white-hot ardour, like Cæsar, always delighted
themselves in the most entangled exercises, like the dictating of a
vast host of letters at once, so as to harbour in their mood a habit of
keeping pace with the fleetness of the passing days.”
“So true,” said I, “so true; still, it is as well not to eat and read
together; nor are you any longer so ‘young’ as you have been; you know,
of course, that to-day is your birthday.”
“So I calculate, sir,” says he: “I have now existed apart from the womb
nineteen times as many as three hundred and sixty-five days, less four;
that is to say, six thousand nine hundred and thirty-one days, without
counting some odd hours.”
“Oho,” said I; “and how are you going to spend the day?”
“I am engaged in a chemical investigation, sir,” says he, leaning back
now, and balancing a plate on the edge of his forefinger nail, for he
always speedily devoured his food, though with complete mastication, I
believe, and was generally done before I was nearly through.
“Ah, and what is the investigation?” I asked.
“You must have noticed, sir,” says he, “the agitation I call it, with
which bismuth acts——”
“I know exactly what you are going to say,” said I—God forgive
us—“quite so; but look here, before you go I want to show you
something, something that will amuse you; just read me that.”
On a sudden now, Reid, the moment long waited for had come, for I now
caught the old basalt stele out of my pocket, and laid it before him;
whereat immediately the fellow seemed to feel an interest in the mere
sight of this object, took it up, looked it up and down and round
about, smiling his smile, his brow twitching into momentary frowns.
“Why, sir,” says he suddenly, “where did you come upon this stone?”
“That’s not the point,” said I; “I got it in Abyssinia, but that’s not
the point; just read it.”
“It is mainly enchorial and alphabetic,” he breathes aloud, peering
into the thing, “but with a great number of syllabary signs, and vowel
matres lectionis——”
“Yes, I know; read it,” said I, painfully conscious within myself of
being pale in the face.
“Strange,” says he to himself: “both Sahidic and Memphitic, but mainly
Memphitic——”
“Yes, I tell you, I know,” said I; “read it, read it, boy.”
He hesitated, sir, and I felt growing within me an agitation almost too
great to be any more restrained.
“Have _you_ read it, sir?” he suddenly asks, raising his eyes to my
face; and I was foolishly conscious that my eyes drooped before his,
even as in a tone of protest I answered, “Why, naturally! I only give
it to you as a little exercise to amuse you; just read the whole thing
right off.”
Now, sir, he puts the bit of a stele on the table, and he bends his
brow studiously over it, supporting his head between his hands.
“Seven of the words are purposely secret,” says he to himself; “it is
not an easy cypher....”
“Well, I know, I know that,” said I, deadly anxious now, “that’s why
I give it to you—for a little fun on your birthday; just read it off,
boy, to please me.”
“Ah, I see,” says he all at once: “this whole half-line is a long rebus
or pun; the sound of each ideograph combines with the third following
to form a word: that is clearly the idea of the inventor; I can trace
his thought; I see. Oh, it is not difficult, sir!”
“Good—very good,” said I; “then just read it right off, and go up to
your science, boy,” for I felt my face growing white with excitement,
seeing that, in spite of his brave words, the man’s manner showed some
hesitation, and lower and lower bent his head over the thing.
“A moment, sir,” he murmurs, “one moment; your servant is slow and
dull, but”—something; and another minute went by in a silence that
was most bitter to me to bear, till, all in a scare, I called to him,
“Well, but haven’t you done it _yet_?”
“Yes, sir, I think——” he falters.
“Then read it!”
“In Coptic?”
“In English.”
Now, very deliberately, my man begins to utter syllables, his brow
between his hands bent low down over the symbols, and, syllable by
syllable, says he, “It is graved on a golden brick within the grave of
Arunzebe, that when the white strangers from over the Great Hill came
with fire and warfare, then did eighty princes bear together their
braveries for safety, and they heaped them into the grave of Arunzebe.
Even a spirit (_nat_) could scarce penetrate to their secret place, nor
could a rain of men, straining through many days, attain to them. There
is the Silence that annihilates. Let no man strive to visit them at——”
There my man stopped short. “At,” he repeated, but couldn’t go on, and
there in the shameful silence he sat now frowning into the thing with a
sort of haughty, excruciated self-surprise, but without progress.
“Well?” said I, and my looks, I know, were ghastly, for all that he had
read of the thing I, too, long ago had read, though I admit that it had
cost me some few months of effort.
“At, sir,” says he, more to himself than to me, “at—something; fifteen
other ideographs remain, making three words, I am certain. But they are
without determinatives, and their outlines are so blurred, they bring
no meaning, no meaning—to my mind; they seem to belong....”
“Better say at once, Hannibal, that you can’t read the epigraph!” I
cried out.
“_You_ have read it, sir, no doubt?” says he for the second time with,
I fancied now, just a touch of scepticism somewhere.
“Why, naturally, boy!” I cried, with such a noise that, at the moment,
I almost believed it myself. “Can’t _you_, then?”
“It is strange, sir,” says he, “it seems to contain _htar_, and the old
verb _secha_, to write.... Pray, bear with your servant a little, sir,
I shall read the words, I see clearly that I _can_, if you will only
vouchsafe me a little time—down by the seashore.”
“Time,” said I, with some disdain; “why _time_? The human mind should
strike and divide like the very scythe of the lightning!... And how
much time?”
“If I may have half an hour on the shore, sir,” says he, rather
down-heartedly, and as I knew that his mind usually rose to the height
of any problem which bothered him with a lighter spring down there amid
the droning of the waves, I said nothing when he took up the little
stone, and passed out through the door. And so, Reid, we parted without
one last clasp of the hand after nineteen years, for that was four
days ago, and neither Shan nor I have since seen him. He is gone, he
is no longer on Shunter, that is our one certainty: he may be drowned,
or he may be living, but on Shunter he no longer is, I’ll vow. After
waiting in suspense an hour, nearly two hours, for him to return with
the basalt stele, I despatched Shan Healy from the castle to seek him
over the shore, and to command him to come back to me. When Shan was
gone on this errand, I took my stand at a window, looking anxiously out
over the eastern shores and over the rolling ground of the sea: and
while there I chanced to catch sight of a schooner, about the size of
a dove, some two leagues to eastward, breasting southward through that
gaudy kind of haze that shrowds with a gauze of azure the bridal and
gala glances of the brighter days on these islands. But little did I
heed her then, nor to this moment do I know that she had anything to
do with the vanishing of the young man. Meantime, Shan did not come
back, Hannibal did not come back, and at last, angry and anxious, I
ran out of the castle, and had got some half a mile over the western
shore before I encountered Shan Healy dashing back to the castle in
a white heat, with a wild countenance, hardly able to gasp out the
words, “Found this, doctor,” as he paraded before my marvelling gaze
a paltry square of cloth and lace, a lady’s handkerchief, marked with
the initials “R. V.,” and tainted with some effluvium of stale perfume.
That thing on Shunter shore! My heart failed me, Reid: for the young
man’s notions of female man had so far been gathered only from certain
Greek and Egyptian urn-traceries, meagre things; and I thought that
if eye of his had indeed fallen that morning upon the carnal fact of
womanhood, then it would be small wonder if all were lost, and his
parting from me an everlasting parting. For fourteen years, so far as
we know, no human foot but those of us three has passed over those
peats and marshes of Shunter; no spar nor oar has approached within
even half a league of its shores; but when Shan and I had run together
to the little harbour at the north, where the bit of a flag-staff
stands, we found the boat empty of the two pairs of half-tame
_motacillæ lugubres_ which had made nests in her, and half-way down
to the edge of the low tide I found the sands much trampled. Unknown
to us, some craft had put in there, had anchored, and had departed,
perhaps taking with her what far surpassed the understanding of those
on her. Shan and I, having separated, searched each of us one of the
promontories which enclose the harbour like claws, since, being dark
with growths of bush, they seemed worth the searching: and on the east
side I found, far out toward the last rocks, a track of footsteps going
down to the sea, going, alas, without return: and they seemed to me,
though I could hardly be certain, rather like the track of sandals
than of boots, in which case he may have chosen that place to swim
off to the craft in the harbour, so as to stow himself away below—I
don’t know. If so, it is remarkable that he should have acted in that
fashion. At first we fancied that, maddened by the sight of man and
woman, the boy might have started to swim to Barra, and have been
destroyed by a shark or a narwhal _en route_. But we are still quite
in the dark as to the actual truth. Shan afterwards discovered half a
bon-bon—a bitten bit of chocolate—amid the kelp on the shore, and no
more know we of it....
Such, then, is the close of our eighteen years of the cloister on
Shunter. Without a message of good-bye to his father the boy is gone.
But, after all, I should have known beforehand, I should have guessed:
for latterly he has been most museful, given to porings over the ocean
through half a night, with more, perhaps, going on in the soul of him
than I had any notion of, for we least of all see and know those that
are nearest us, Reid; we see their faces and only fancy that we see
themselves. Anyhow, it is all passed and over now; the little castle
that was our home, that I had grown to love, and hoped that he, too,
had grown to love, stands now lone through grey days, and darkling
through nightlongs of thunderous weather without us: for, as I have
told you, we have passed over to Barra in the boat, we two and the dog,
and the poor mare and cows and goats will go hungry now, no doubt, or
will soon grow to the humour of the guillemots and herring-gulls on the
crags, and become sea-things, goblin of eye, like the tangles of kelp
on the shore, or the stench of the ocean’s throat, or the pools remote
from the foot of men with little bleaks brooding in their green glooms,
or the inclemency of gales that gather over this sea. I tell you truth,
man, I am sad, for nineteen years of life is not nothing, Reid. The
young man’s gone, and how he is going to adjust himself to the world,
and how the world is going to manage to adjust itself to _him_—God
only knows. His books will become covered with particles of peat now;
our little garth, with its darg of peat heaped in one corner for our
fire next winter, will hearken now no more, alas, to the echoes of our
passing; our little garden will grow wild; and Shunter will forget
the unlasting foot of man and boy, to go back anew with joy to the
largeness and boisterous ocean-mood of her past, and the charm of her
harsh old solitude. To-morrow, I hope, we shall be able to take boat to
Uist, and so to the mainland, but I’m not sure, this poor Shan Healy is
so beastly seedy and down in the mouth ... etc., etc.