herself that she was resolved--resolved to accept "The Last Dryad"?
Resolved to accept it? Was that true? Had she done so? Had she not made
up her mind long ago to decline it--decline it with full knowledge that
its author would destroy it once the manuscript should be returned?
These thoughts had whisked through her mind with immeasurable rapidity.
The letter still rested half in, half out of the drop. She still held it
there.
By now Rosella knew if she let it fall she would do so deliberately,
with full knowledge of what she was about. She could not afterward
excuse herself by saying that she had been confused, excited, acting
upon an unreasoned impulse. No; it would be deliberate, deliberate,
deliberate. She would have to live up to that decision, whatever it was,
for many months to come, perhaps for years. Perhaps,--who could
say?--perhaps it might affect her character permanently. In a crisis
little forces are important, disproportionately so. And then it was, and
thus it was, that Rosella took her resolve. She raised the iron flap
once more, and saying aloud and with a ring of defiance in her voice:
"Deliberately, deliberately; I don't care," loosed her hold upon the
letter. She heard it fall with a soft rustling impact upon the
accumulated mail-matter in the bottom of the box.
A week later she received her letter back with a stamped legend across
its face informing her with dreadful terseness that the party to whom
the letter was addressed was deceased. She divined a blunder, but for
all that, and with conflicting emotions, sought confirmation in the
daily press. There, at the very end of the column, stood the notice:
VICKERS. At New York, on Sunday, November 12, Harold Anderson
Vickers, in the twenty-third year of his age. Arizona papers please
copy. Notice of funeral hereafter.
Three days later she began to write "Patroclus."
* * * * *
Rosella stood upon the door-step of Trevor's house, closing her umbrella
and shaking the water from the folds of her mackintosh. It was between
eight and nine in the evening, and since morning a fine rain had fallen
steadily. But no stress of weather could have kept Rosella at home that
evening. A week previous she had sent to Trevor the type-written copy of
the completed "Patroclus," and tonight she was to call for the
manuscript and listen to his suggestions and advice.
She had triumphed in the end--triumphed over what, she had not always
cared to inquire. But once the pen in her hand, once "Patroclus" begun,
and the absorption of her mind, her imagination, her every faculty, in
the composition of the story, had not permitted her to think of or to
remember anything else.
And she saw that her work was good. She had tested it by every method,
held it up to her judgment in all positions and from all sides, and in
her mind, so far as she could see, and she was a harsh critic for her
own work, it stood the tests. Not the least of her joys was the pleasure
that she knew Trevor would take in her success. She could foresee just
the expression of his face when he would speak, could forecast just the
tones of the voice, the twinkle of the kindly eyes behind the glasses.
When she entered the study, she found Trevor himself, as she had
expected, waiting for her in slippers and worn velvet jacket, pipe in
hand, and silk skullcap awry upon the silver-white hair. He extended an
inky hand, and still holding it and talking, led her to an easy-chair
near the hearth.
Even through the perturbation of her mind Rosella could not but
wonder--for the hundredth time--at the apparent discrepancy between the
great novelist and the nature of his books. These latter were, each and
all of them, wonders of artistic composition, compared with the hordes
of latter-day pictures. They were the aristocrats of their kind, full of
reserved force, unimpeachable in dignity, stately even, at times
veritably austere.
And Trevor himself was a short, rotund man, rubicund as to face,
bourgeois as to clothes and surroundings (the bisque statuette of a
fisher-boy obtruded the vulgarity of its gilding and tinting from the
mantelpiece), jovial in manner, indulging even in slang. One might
easily have set him down as a retired groceryman--wholesale perhaps, but
none the less a groceryman. Yet touch him upon the subject of his
profession, and the bonhomie lapsed away from him at once. Then he
became serious. Literature was not a thing to be trifled with.
Thus it was tonight. For five minutes Trevor filled the room with the
roaring of his own laughter and the echoes of his own vociferous voice.
He was telling a story--a funny story, about what Rosella, with her
thoughts on "Patroclus," could not for the life of her have said, and
she must needs listen in patience and with perfunctory merriment while
the narrative was conducted to its close with all the accompaniment of
stamped feet and slapped knees.
"'Why, becoth, mithtah,' said that nigger. 'Dat dawg ain' good fo'
nothin' ailse; so I jes rickon he 'th boun' to be a coon dawg;'" and the
author of "Snow in April" pounded the arm of his chair and roared till
the gas-fixtures vibrated.
Then at last, taking advantage of a lull in the talk, Rosella, unable
to contain her patience longer, found breath to remark:
"And 'Patroclus'--my--my little book?"
"Ah--hum, yes. 'Patroclus,' your story. I've read it."
At once another man was before her, or rather the writer--the
novelist--_in_ the man. Something of the dignity of his literary style
immediately seemed to invest him with a new character. He fell quiet,
grave, not a little abstracted, and Rosella felt her heart sink. Her
little book (never had it seemed so insignificant, so presumptuous as
now) had been on trial before a relentless tribunal, had indeed
undergone the ordeal of fire. But the verdict, the verdict! Quietly, but
with cold hands clasped tight together, she listened while the greatest
novelist of America passed judgment upon her effort.
"Yes; I've read it," continued Trevor. "Read it carefully--carefully.
You have worked hard upon it. I can see that. You have put your whole
soul into it, put all of yourself into it. The narrative is all there,
and I have nothing but good words to say to you about the construction,
the mere mechanics of it. But----"
Would he never go on? What was this? What did that "But" mean? What else
but disaster could it mean? Rosella shut her teeth.
"But, to speak frankly, my dear girl, there is something lacking. Oh,
the idea, the motif--that----" he held up a hand. "That is as intact as
when you read me the draft. The central theme, the approach, the
grouping of the characters, the dialogue--all good--all good. The thing
that is lacking I find very hard to define. But the _mood_ of the
story, shall we say?--the mood of the story is----" he stopped, frowning
in perplexity, hesitating. The great master of words for once found
himself at a loss for expression. "The mood is somehow truculent, when
it should be as suave, as quiet, as the very river you describe. Don't
you see? Can't you understand what I mean? In this 'Patroclus' the
atmosphere, the little, delicate, subtle sentiment, is
everything--everything. What was the mere story? Nothing without the
proper treatment. And it was just in this fine, intimate relationship
between theme and treatment that the success of the book was to be
looked for. I thought I could be sure of you there. I thought that you
of all people could work out that motif adequately. But"--he waved a
hand over the manuscript that lay at her elbow--"this--it is not the
thing. This is a poor criticism, you will say, merely a marshaling of
empty phrases, abstractions. Well, that may be; I repeat, it is very
hard for me to define just what there is of failure in your 'Patroclus.'
But it is empty, dry, hard, barren. Am I cruel to speak so frankly? If I
were less frank, my dear girl, I would be less just, less kind. You have
told merely the story, have narrated episodes in their sequence of time,
and where the episodes have stopped there you have ended the book. The
whole animus that should have put the life into it is gone, or, if it is
not gone, it is so perverted that it is incorrigible. To _my_ mind the
book is a failure."
Rosella did not answer when Trevor ceased speaking, and there was a long
silence. Trevor looked at her anxiously. He had hated to hurt her.
Rosella gazed vaguely at the fire. Then at last the tears filled her
eyes.
"I am sorry, very, very sorry," said Trevor, kindly. "But to have told
you anything but the truth would have done you a wrong--and, then, no
earnest work is altogether wasted. Even though 'Patroclus' is--not what
we expected of it, your effort over it will help you in something else.
You did work hard at it. I saw that. You must have put your whole soul
into it."
"That," said Rosella, speaking half to herself--"that was just the
trouble."
But Trevor did not understand.
HANTU
BY
HENRY MILNER RIDEOUT
Reprinted from _The Atlantic Monthly_ of May, 1906 by permission
THE SCHOONER _Fulmar_ lay in a cove on the coast of Banda. Her sails,
half hoisted, dripped still from an equatorial shower, but, aloft, were
already steaming in the afternoon glare. Dr. Forsythe, captain and
owner, lay curled round his teacup on the cabin roof, watching the
horizon thoughtfully, with eyes like points of glass set in the puckered
bronze of his face. The "Seventh Officer," his only white companion,
watched him respectfully. All the Malays were asleep, stretched prone or
supine under the forward awning. Only Wing Kat stirred in the smother of
his galley below, rattling tin dishes, and repeating, in endless
falsetto sing-song, the Hankow ditty which begins,--
"'Yaou-yaou!' remarked the grasshoppers."
Ashore, the coolies on the nutmeg plantations had already brought out
their mace to dry, and the baskets lay in vermilion patches on the
sun-smitten green, like gouts of arterial blood. White vapors round the
mountain peaks rose tortuously toward the blue; while seaward, rain
still filled the air as with black sand drifting down aslant, through
gaps in which we could descry far off a steel-bright strip of fair
weather that joined sea and sky, cutting under a fairy island so that it
seemed suspended in the air.
"That's a pretty bit of land," said the doctor lazily. "'_Jam medio
apparet fluctu nemorosa Zacynthos_'. It might be, eh?--Humph!--Virgil
and Shakespeare are the only ones who sometimes make poetry endurable.
All the others are just little swollen Egos."
This was an unusual excursion, and he quickly returned to practical
matters.
"There's a better anchorage over there," he drawled, waving the milk-tin
toward Zacynthos. "And less danger of our being caught than here. But no
use; we've got to humor the crew, of course. When they say '_pulo
burrantu_,' that settles it. Haunted islands--ghosts--fatal to
discipline. I used to have cruises spoiled by that sort of thing. We
must stay here and chance being found."
He shot a stream of Java sugar into the tea, and, staring at the
sleepers, rubbed his shaven head thoughtfully.
"Oh, yes, 'superstition,' all very easy to say," he muttered, half to
himself. "But who _knows_, eh? Must be something in it, at times."
His mood this afternoon was new and surprising. Nor was it likely to
occur often in such a man. He had brought the _Fulmar_ round the south
of Celebes, making for Ceram; but as the Dutch had forbidden him to
travel in the interior, saying that the natives were too dangerous just
then; and as Sidin, the mate, had sighted the Dutch tricolor flying
above drab hulls that came nosing southward from Amboina way, we had
dodged behind the Bandas till nightfall. The crew laughed at the _babi
blanda_--Dutch pigs; but every man of them would have fled ashore had
they known that among the hampers and bundled spears in our hold lay the
dried head of a little girl, a human sacrifice from Engano. If we got
into Ceram (and got out again), the doctor would reduce the whole affair
to a few tables of anthropological measurements, a few more hampers of
birds, beasts, and native rubbish in the hold, and a score of paragraphs
couched in the evaporated, millimetric terms of science. There would be
a few duplicates for Raffles, some tin-lined cases, including the
clotted head of the little girl, for the British Museum; the total
upshot would attract much less public notice than the invention of a new
"part" for a motor car; and the august structure of science, like a
coral tree, would increase by another atom. In the meantime, we lay
anchored, avoiding ironclads and ghosts.
Dinner we ate below, with seaward port-holes blinded, and sweat dripping
from our chins. Then we lay on the cabin roof again, in breech-clouts,
waiting for a breeze, and showing no light except the red coals of two
Burmah cheroots.
For long spaces we said nothing. Trilling of crickets ashore, sleepy
cooing of nutmeg-pigeons, chatter of monkeys, hiccough of tree lizards,
were as nothing in the immense, starlit silence of the night, heavily
sweet with cassia and mace. Forward, the Malays murmured now and then,
in sentences of monotonous cadence.
"No, you can't blame them," said the captain abruptly, with decision.
"Considering the unholy strangeness of the world we live in----" He
puffed twice, the palm of his hand glowing. "Things you can't explain,"
he continued vaguely. "Now this--I thought of it today, speaking of
_hantu_. Perhaps you can explain it, being a youngster without theories.
The point is, of what follows, how much, if any, was a dream? Where were
the partition lines between sleep and waking,--between what we call
Certainty, and--the other thing? Or else, by a freak of nature, might a
man live so long--Nonsense!--Never mind; here are the facts."
* * * * *
Eleven years ago, I had the _Fulmar_ a ten months' cruise out of
Singapore, and was finally coming down along Celebes, intending to go
over to Batavia. We anchored on just such a day as this has been, off a
little old river-mouth, so badly silted that she had to lie well out. A
chief in a _campong_ half a day inland had promised to send some
specimens down that evening,--armor, harps, stone Priapuses, and birds
of paradise. The men were to come overland, and would have no boats. So
I went ashore with three or four Malays, and the Old Boy's time we had
poking in and out over the silt to find fairway, even for the gig. At
last we could make round toward a little clearing in the bamboos, with a
big canary tree in the middle. All was going well, when suddenly the
mate grunted, pointing dead ahead. That man Sidin has the most
magnificent eyes: we were steering straight into a dazzling glare. I
couldn't see anything, neither could the crew, for some time.
"_Tuggur_!" cried the mate. He was getting nervous. Then all of a
sudden--"_Brenti_!"
The crew stopped like a shot. Then they saw, too, and began to back
water and turn, all pulling different ways and yelling: "_Prau hantu!...
sampar_! _...Sakit lepra! Kolera!... hantu!_"
As we swung, I saw what it was,--a little carved prau like a child's toy
boat, perhaps four feet long, with red fiber sails and red and gilt
flags from stem to stern. It was rocking there in our swell, innocently,
but the crew were pulling for the schooner like crazy men.
I was griffin enough at the time, but I knew what it meant, of
course,--it was an enchanted boat, that the priests in some
village--perhaps clear over in New Guinea--had charmed the cholera or
the plague on board of. Same idea as the Hebrew scapegoat.
"_Brenti_!" I shouted. The Malays stopped rowing, but let her run.
Nothing would have tempted them within oar's-length of that prau.
"See here, Sidin," I protested, "I go ashore to meet the _kapala's_
men."
"We do not go," the fellow said. "If you go, Tuan, you die: the priest
has laid the cholera on board that prau. It has come to this shore. Do
not go, Tuan."
"She hasn't touched the land yet," I said.
This seemed to have effect.
"Row me round to that point and land me," I ordered. "_Hantu_ does not
come to white men. You go out to the ship; when I have met the
soldier-messengers, row back, and take me on board with the gifts."
The mate persuaded them, and they landed me on the point, half a mile
away, with a box of cheroots, and a roll of matting to take my nap on.
I walked round to the clearing, and spread my mat under the canary tree,
close to the shore. All that blessed afternoon I waited, and smoked, and
killed a snake, and made notes in a pocket Virgil, and slept, and smoked
again; but no sign of the bearers from the _campong_. I made signals to
the schooner,--she was too far out to hail,--but the crew took no
notice. It was plain they meant to wait and see whether the _hantu_ prau
went out with the ebb or not; and as it was then flood, and dusk, they
couldn't see before morning. So I picked some bananas and chicos, and
made a dinner of them; then I lighted a fire under the tree, to smoke
and read Virgil by,--in fact, spent the evening over my notes. That
editor was a _pukkah_ ass! It must have been pretty late before I
stretched out on my matting.
I was a long time going to sleep,--if I went to sleep at all. I lay and
watched the firelight and shadows in the _lianas_, the bats fluttering
in and out across my patch of stars, and an ape that stole down from
time to time and peered at me, sticking his blue face out from among the
creepers. At one time a shower fell in the clearing, but only pattered
on my ceiling of broad leaves.
After a period of drowsiness, something moved and glittered on the
water, close to the bank; and there bobbed the ghost prau, the gilt and
vermilion flags shining in the firelight. She had come clear in on the
flood,--a piece of luck. I got up, cut a withe of bamboo, and made her
fast to a root. Then I fed the fire, lay down again, and watched her
back and fill on her tether,--all clear and ruddy in the flame, even
the carvings, and the little wooden figures of wizards on her deck. And
while I looked, I grew drowsier and drowsier; my eyes would close, then
half open, and there would be the _hantu_ sails and the fire for
company, growing more and more indistinct.
So much for Certainty; now begins the Other. Did I fall asleep at all?
If so, was my first waking a dream-waking, and the real one only when
the thing was gone? I'm not an imaginative man; my mind, at home,
usually worked with some precision; but this,--there seems to be, you
might say, a blur, a--film over my mental retina. You see, I'm not a
psychologist, and therefore can't use the big, foggy terms of man's
conceit to explain what he never can explain,--himself, and Life.
* * * * *
The captain tossed his cheroot overboard, and was silent for a space.
"The psychologists forget Æsop's frog story," he said at last. "Little
swollen Egos, again."
Then his voice flowed on, slowly, in the dark.
* * * * *
I ask you just to believe this much: that I for my part feel sure
(except sometimes by daylight) that I was not more than half asleep when
a footfall seemed to come in the path, and waked me entirely. It didn't
sound,--only seemed to come. I believe, then, that I woke, roused up on
my elbow, and stared over at the opening among the bamboos where the
path came into the clearing. Some one moved down the bank, and drew
slowly forward to the edge of the firelight. A strange, whispering,
uncertain kind of voice said something,--something in Dutch.
I didn't catch the words, and it spoke again:--
"What night of the month is this night?"
If awake, I was just enough so to think this a natural question to be
asked first off, out here in the wilds.
"It's the 6th," I answered in Dutch. "Come down to the fire, Mynheer."
You know how bleary and sightless your eyes are for a moment, waking,
after the glare of these days. The figure seemed to come a little
nearer, but I could only see that it was a man dressed in black. Even
that didn't seem odd.
"Of what month?" the stranger said. The voice was what the French call
"veiled."
"June," I answered.
"And what year?" he asked.
I told him--or It.
"He is very late," said the voice, like a sigh. "He should have sent
long ago."
Only at this point did the whole thing begin to seem queer. As evidence
that I must have been awake, I recalled afterwards that my arm had been
made numb by the pressure of my head upon it while lying down, and now
began to tingle.
"It is very late," the voice repeated. "Perhaps too late----"
The fire settled, flared up fresh, and lighted the man's face dimly,--a
long, pale face with gray mustache and pointed beard. He was all in
black, so that his outline was lost in darkness; but I saw that round
his neck was a short white ruff, and that heavy leather boots hung in
folds, cavalier-fashion, from his knees. He wavered there in the dark,
against the flicker of the bamboo shadows, like a picture by that Dutch
fellow--What's-his-name-again--a very dim, shaky, misty Rembrandt.
"And you, Mynheer," he went on, in the same toneless voice, "from where
do you come to this shore?"
"From Singapore," I managed to reply.
"From Singapura," he murmured. "And so white men live there now?--_Ja,
ja_, time has passed."
Up till now I may have only been startled, but this set me in a blue
funk. It struck me all at once that this shaky old whisper of a voice
was not speaking the Dutch of nowadays. I never before knew the depths,
the essence, of that uncertainty which we call fear. In the silence, I
thought a drum was beating,--it was the pulse in my ears. The fire close
by was suddenly cold.
"And now you go whither?" it said.
"To Batavia," I must have answered, for it went on:--
"Then you may do a great service to me and to another. Go to Jacatra in
Batavia, and ask for Pieter Erberveld. Hendrik van der Have tells him to
cease--before it is too late, before the thing becomes accursed. Tell
him this. You will have done well, and I--shall sleep again. Give him
the message----"
The voice did not stop, so much as fade away unfinished. And the man,
the appearance, the eyes, moved away further into the dark, dissolving,
retreating. A shock like waking came over me--a rush of clear
consciousness----
Humph! Yes, been too long away from home; for I know (mind you, _know_)
that I saw the white of that ruff, the shadowy sweep of a cloak, as
something turned its back and moved up the path under the pointed arch
of bamboos, and was gone slowly in the blackness. I'm as sure of this as
I am that the fire gave no heat. But whether the time of it all had been
seconds or hours, I can't tell you.
What? Yes, naturally. I jumped and ran up the path after it. Nothing
there but starlight. I must have gone on for half a mile. Nothing: only
ahead of me, along the path, the monkeys would chatter and break into an
uproar, and then stop short--every treetop silent, as they do when a
python comes along. I went back to the clearing, sat down on the mat,
stayed there by clinching my will power, so to speak,--and watched
myself for other symptoms, till morning. None came. The fire, when I
heaped it, was as hot as any could be. By dawn I had persuaded myself
that it was a dream. No footprints in the path, though I mentioned a
shower before.
At sunrise, the _kapala's_ men came down the path, little chaps in black
mediæval armor made of petroleum tins, and coolies carrying piculs of
stuff that I wanted. So I was busy,--but managed to dismast the _hantu_
prau and wrap it up in matting, so that it went aboard with the plunder.
Yet this other thing bothered me so that I held the schooner over, and
made pretexts to stay ashore two more nights. Nothing happened. Then I
called myself a grandmother, and sailed for Batavia.
Two nights later, a very singular thing happened. The mate--this one
with the sharp eyes--is a quiet chap; seldom speaks to me except on
business. He was standing aft that evening, and suddenly, without any
preliminaries, said:
"Tuan was not alone the other night."
"What's that, Sidin?" I spoke sharply, for it made me feel quite angry
and upset, of a sudden. He laughed a little, softly.
"I saw that the fire was a cold fire," he said. That was all he would
say, and we've never referred to it again.