from my feet. I stepped over to the vague blur on the deck and picked
up a slipper--a slipper covered with some woven straw stuff and soled
with a matted felt, perhaps a half-inch thick. Another struck somewhere
abaft the mast, and then McCord reappeared above and began to stagger
down the shrouds. Under his left arm he hugged a curious assortment of
litter, a sheaf of papers, a brace of revolvers, a gray kimono, and a
soiled apron.
"Well," he said when he had come to deck, "I feel like a man who has
gone to hell and come back again. You know I'd come to the place where I
really believed that about the cat. When you think of it--By gracious!
we haven't come so far from the jungle, after all."
We went aft and below and sat down at the table as we had been. McCord
broke a prolonged silence.
"I'm sort of glad he got away--poor cuss! He's probably climbing up
a wharf this minute, shivering and scared to death. Over toward the
gas-tanks, by the way he was swimming. By gracious! now that the world's
turned over straight again, I feel I could sleep a solid week. Poor
cuss! can you imagine him, Ridgeway--"
"Yes," I broke in. "I think I can. He must have lost his nerve when
he made out your smoke and shinnied up there to stow away, taking the
ship's papers with him He would have attached some profound importance
to them--remember, the 'barbarian,' eight thousand miles from home.
Probably couldn't read a word. I suppose the cat followed him--the
traditional source of food He must have wanted water badly."
"I should say! He wouldn't have taken the chances he did."
"Well," I announced, "at any rate, I can say it now--there's another
'mystery of the sea' gone to pot."
McCord lifted his heavy lids.
"No," he mumbled. "The mystery is that a man who has been to sea all
his life could sail around for three days with a man bundled up in his
top and not know it. When I think of him peeking down at me--and playing
off that damn cat--probably without realizing it--scared to death--by
gracious! Ridgeway, there was a pair of funks aboard this craft, eh?
Wow--yow--I could sleep--"
"I should think you could."
McCord did not answer.
"By the way," I speculated. "I guess you were right about Björnsen,
McCord--that is, his fooling with the foretop. He must have been caught
all of a bunch, eh?"
Again McCord failed to answer. I looked up, mildly surprised, and found
his head hanging back over his chair and his mouth opened wide. He was
asleep.
THE BOUNTY-JUMPER[20]
By MARY SYNON
From _Scribner's Magazine_
[20] Copyright, 1915, by Charles Scribner's Sons. Copyright, 1916, by
Mary Synon.
"... While faith, that in the mire was fain to wallow,
Returns at last to find
The cold fanes desolate, the niches hollow,
The windows dim and blind,
"And strown with ruins around, the shattered relic
Of unregardful youth,
Where shapes of beauty once, with tongues angelic,
Whispered the runes of Truth."
--_From "The Burden of Lost Souls_."
On the day before Isador Framberg's body was brought back to Chicago
from Vera Cruz, James Thorold's appointment as ambassador to Forsland
was confirmed by the Senate of the United States. Living, Isador
Framberg might never have wedged into the affairs of nations and the
destinies of James Thorold. Marines in the navy do not intrigue with
chances of knee-breeches at the Court of St. Jerome. More than miles
lie between Forquier Street and the Lake Shore Drive. Dead, Isador
Framberg became, as dead men sometimes become, the archangel of a
nation, standing with flaming sword at the gateway to James Thorold's
paradise.
For ten years the Forsland embassy had been the goal of James Thorold's
ambition. A man past seventy, head of a great importing establishment,
he had shown interest in public affairs only within the decade, although
his very build, tall, erect, commanding, and his manner suavely
courteous and untouched by futile haste, seemed to have equipped him
with a natural bent for public life. Marrying late in life, he seemed
to have found his bent more tardily than did other men. But he had
invested wealth, influence, and wisdom in the future of men who, come
to power, were paying him with this grant of his desire. The news,
coming to him unofficially but authoritatively from Washington, set
him to cabling his wife and daughter in Paris and telegraphing his son
whose steamer was just docking in New York. The boy's answer, delayed
in transit and announcing that he was already on his way to Chicago,
came with the morning newspapers and hurried his father through their
contents in order that he might be on time to meet Peter at the station.
The newspapers, chronicling Thorold's appointment briefly, were heavy
with harbingering of the funeral procession of the boy who had fallen
a fortnight before in the American navy's attack upon Vera Cruz. The
relative values that editors placed upon the marine's death and his own
honoring nettled Thorold. Ambassadors to the Court of St. Jerome were
not chosen from Chicago every day, he reasoned, finding Isador Framberg
already the fly in the amber of his contentment. To change the current
of his thought he read over Peter's telegram, smiling at the exuberant
message of joy in which the boy had vaunted the family glory. The yellow
slip drove home to James Thorold the realization of how largely Peter's
young enthusiasm was responsible for the whetting of his father's desire
to take part in public affairs. For Peter's praise James Thorold would
have moved mountains; and Peter's praise had a way of following the man
on horseback. Thorold's eager anticipation of the boy's pride in him
sped his course through rosy mists of hope as his motor-car threaded
the bright drive and through the crowded Parkway toward the Rush Street
bridge.
A cloud drifted across the sky of his serenity, however, as a blockade
of traffic delayed his car in front of the old Adams homestead, rising
among lilacs that flooded half city square with fragrance. The old
house, famous beyond its own day for Judge Adams's friendship with
Abraham Lincoln and the history-making sessions that the little group
of Illinois idealists had held within its walls, loomed gray above the
flowering shrubs, a saddening reminder of days that James Thorold must
have known; but Thorold, glimpsing the place, turned away from it in a
movement so swift as to betoken some resentment and gave heed instead
to the long line of motors rolling smoothly toward the city's heart.
Over the bridge and through the packed streets of the down-town
district Thorold, shaken from his revery of power and Peter, watched
the film that Chicago unrolled for the boulevard pilgrims. The boats
in the river, the long switch-tracks of the railroads, the tall
grain-elevators, the low warehouses from which drifted alluring
odors of spices linked for James Thorold the older city of his youth
with the newer one of his age as the street linked one division of the
city's geography with another. They were the means by which Chicago had
risen from the sand-flats of the fifties to the Michigan Avenue of the
present, that wide street of the high skyline that fronted the world
as it faced the Great Lakes, squarely, solidly, openly. They were the
means, too, by which James Thorold had augmented his fortune until it
had acquired the power to send him to Forsland. To him, however, they
represented not ladders to prosperity but a social condition of a
passing generation, the Chicago of the seventies, a city distinctively
American in population and in ideals, a youthful city of a single
standard of endeavor, a pleasant place that had been swallowed by the
Chicago of the present, that many-tentacled monster of heterogeneous
races, that affected him as it did so many of the older residents,
with an overwhelming sensation of revolt against its sprawling lack
of cohesion. Even the material advantages that had accrued to him from
the growth of the city could not reconcile James Thorold to the fact
that the elements of the city's growth came from the races of men whom
he held in contempt. What mattered it, he reasoned, that Chicago waxed
huge when her grossness came from the unassimilated, indigestible mass
of Latins and Greeks, Poles and Russians, Czechs, Bulgars, Jews, who
filled the streets, the factories, and the schools?
The prejudice, always strong within him, rose higher as he found his
machine blocked again, this time by the crowd that stood across Jackson
Boulevard at La Salle Street. Even after the peremptory order of a
mounted police officer had cleared the way for him James Thorold frowned
on the lines of men and women pressed back against the curbstones. The
thought that they were waiting the coming of the body of that boy who
had died in Mexico added to his annoyance the realization that he would
have to fight his way through another crowd at the station if he wished
to reach the train-shed where Peter's train would come. The struggle was
spared him, however, by the recognition of a newspaper reporter who took
it for granted that the ambassador to Forsland had come to meet the
funeral cortège of the marine and who led him through a labyrinthine
passage that brought him past the gates and under the glass dome of the
train-shed.
Left alone, Thorold paced the platform a little apart from the group
of men who had evidently been delegated to represent the city. Some
of them he knew. Others of them, men of Isador Framberg's people and
of the ten tribes of Israel, he did not care to know. He turned away
from them to watch the people beyond the gates. Thousands of faces,
typical of every nation of Europe and some of the lands of Asia, fair
Norsemen and Teutons, olive-skinned Italians and men and women of the
swarthier peoples of Palestine, Poles, Finns, Lithuanians, Russians,
Bulgars, Bohemians, units of that mass which had welded in the city
of the Great Lakes of America, looked out from behind the iron fence.
The tensity written on their faces, eager yet awed, brought back to
James Thorold another time when men and women had stood within a
Chicago railway terminal waiting for a funeral cortège, the time when
Illinois waited in sorrow to take Abraham Lincoln, dead, to her heart.
The memory of that other day of dirges linked itself suddenly in the
mind of James Thorold with the picture of the lilacs blooming in the
yard of the Adams homestead on the parkway, that old house where Abraham
Lincoln had been wont to come; and the fusing recollections spun the
ambassador to Forsland upon his heel and sent him far down the platform,
where he stood, gloomily apart, until the limited, rolling in from the
end of the yards, brought him hastening to its side.
Peter Thorold was the first to alight.
A boy of sixteen, fair-haired, blue-eyed, ruddy-cheeked, springing
from the platform of the Pullman into his father's arms, he brought
with him the atmosphere of high adventure. In height, in poise of
shoulders, in bearing, in a certain trick of lifting his chin, he
was a replica of the dignified man who welcomed him with deep emotion;
but a difference--of dream rather than of dogma--in the quality of their
temperaments accoladed the boy. It was not only that his voice thrilled
with the higher enthusiasms of youth. It held besides an inflexibility
of tone that James Thorold's lacked. Its timbre told that Peter
Thorold's spirit had been tempered in a furnace fierier than the one
which had given forth the older man's. The voice rang out now in excited
pleasure as the boy gripped his father's shoulders. "Oh, but it's good
to see you again, dad," he cried. "You're a great old boy, and I'm proud
of you, sir. Think of it!" he almost shouted. "Ambassador to Forsland!
Say, but that's bully!" He slipped his arm around his father's shoulder,
while James Thorold watched him with eyes that shone with joy. "What do
you call an ambassador?" he demanded laughingly.
"Fortunately," the older man said, "there is no title accompanying the
office."
"Well, I should think not," the boy exclaimed. "Oh, dad, isn't it the
greatest thing in the world that you're to represent the United States
of America?"
James Thorold smiled. "No doubt," he said dryly. His gaze passed his
son to glimpse the crowd at the gate, frantic now with excitement, all
looking forward toward some point on the platform just beyond where the
man and boy were standing. "These United States of America have grown
past my thought of them," he added. The boy caught up the idea eagerly.
"Haven't they, though?" he demanded. "And isn't it wonderful to think
that it's all the same old America, 'the land of the free and the home
of the brave?' Gee, but it's good to be back in it again. I came up
into New York alongside the battleship that brought our boys home from
Mexico," he went on, "and, oh, say, dad, you should have seen that
harbor! I've seen a lot of things for a fellow," he pursued with a touch
of boyish boastfulness, "but I never saw anything in all my life like
that port yesterday. People, and people, and people, waiting, and flags
at half-mast, and a band off somewhere playing a funeral march, and that
battleship with the dead sailors--the fellows who died for our country
at Vera Cruz, you know--creeping up to the dock. Oh, it was--well, I
cried!" He made confession proudly, then hastened into less personal
narrative.
"One of them came from Chicago here," he said. "He was only nineteen
years old, and he was one of the first on the beach after the order to
cross to the customhouse. He lived over on Forquier Street, one of the
men was telling me--there are six of them, the guard of honor for him,
on the train--and his name was Isador Framberg. He was born in Russia,
too, in Kiev, the place of the massacres, you remember. See, dad, here
comes the guard!"
Peter Thorold swung his father around until he faced six uniformed
men who fell into step as they went forward toward the baggage-car.
"It's too bad, isn't it," the boy continued, "that any of the boys had
to die down in that greaser town? But, if they did, I'm proud that we
proved up that Chicago had a hero to send. Aren't you, dad?" James
Thorold did not answer. Peter's hands closed over his arm. "It reminds
me," he said, lowering his voice as they came closer to the place where
the marines stood beside the iron carrier that awaited the casket of
Isador Framberg's body, "of something the tutor at Westbury taught us
in Greek last year, something in a funeral oration that a fellow in
Athens made on the men who died in the Peloponnesian War. 'Such was
the end of these men,'" he quoted slowly, pausing now and then for a
word while his father looked wonderingly upon his rapt fervor, "'and
they were worthy of Athens. The living need not desire to have a more
heroic spirit. I would have you fix your eyes upon the greatness of
Athens, until you become filled with the love of her; and, when you
are impressed by the spectacle of her glory, reflect that this empire
has been acquired by men who knew their duty and who had the courage
to do it, who in the hour of conflict had the fear of dishonor always
present to them.'" With the solemnity of the chant the young voice
went on while the flag-covered casket was lifted from car to bier.
"'For the whole earth is the sepulchre of famous men; not only are
they commemorated by columns and inscriptions in their own country,
but in foreign lands there dwells also an unwritten memorial of them,
graven not in stone but in the hearts of men. Make them your examples,
and, esteeming courage to be freedom and freedom to be happiness, do
not weigh too nicely the perils of war.'"
He pulled off his cap, tucking it under his arm and dragging his
father with him to follow the men who had fallen in behind the marines
as they moved forward toward the gates and the silent crowd beyond.
Almost unwillingly James Thorold doffed his hat. The words of Peter's
unexpected declamation of Pericles's oration resounded in his ears.
"Once before," he said to the boy, "I heard that speech. Judge Adams
said it one night to Abraham Lincoln."
"Father!" Peter's eyes flashed back from the cortège to meet James
Thorold's. "I never knew that you knew Abraham Lincoln." His tone
betokened an impression of having been cheated of some joy the older
man had been hoarding. But James Thorold's voice held no joy. "Yes,"
he said. "I knew him."
The gates, sliding back, opened the way for the officers who led the
procession with which Isador Framberg came back to the city of his
adoption. The crowd yawned to give space to the guard of honor, walking
erectly beside the flag-draped coffin, to the mourners, men and women
alien as if they had come from Kiev but yesterday, to the little group
of men, public officials and rabbis, who trailed in their wake, and to
James Thorold and Peter, reverently following. Then it closed in upon
the cortège, urging it silently down the broad stairways and out into
the street where other crowds fell in with the strange procession.
Surging away after the shabby hearse, drawn by its listless horses and
attended by the marines, the crowd left the Thorolds, father and son,
on the pavement beside the station. "Don't you want to go?" There was
a wistfulness in Peter's voice that told his father that the boy had
sensed some lack of responsiveness in him. "He's going to lie in state
to-day at the city hall. Don't you think we should go, dad?" Not Peter's
query but Peter's eyes won his father's answer. "After a while," he
promised. "Then let's find a breakfast," the boy laughed. "I spent my
last dollar sending you that telegram."
All the way over to his father's club on Michigan Avenue, and all
through the breakfast that he ordered with lusty young appetite, Peter
kept up a running fire of reminiscence of his European adventures. That
the fire held grapeshot for his father when he talked of the latter's
worthiness for the ambassadorship to Forsland he could not guess; but
he found that he was pouring salt in a wound when he went back to
comment upon Isador Framberg's death. "Why make so much of a boy who
happened to be at Vera Cruz?" the older man said at last, nettled that
even his son found greater occasion for commendation in the circumstance
of the Forquier Street hero than in his father's selection to the most
important diplomatic post in the gift of the government. Peter's brows
rose swiftly at his father's annoyance. He opened his lips for argument,
then swiftly changed his intention. "Tell me about Judge Adams, dad," he
said, bungling over his desire to change the topic, "the fellow who knew
his Pericles."
"It's too long a story," James Thorold said. He watched Peter closely
in the fashion of an advocate studying the characteristics of a judge.
The boy's idealism, his vivid young patriotism, his eager championship
of those elements of the new America that his father contemned, had
fired his personality with a glaze that left James Thorold's smoothly
diplomatic fingers wandering over its surface, unable to hold it within
his grasp. He had a story to tell Peter--some time--a story of Judge
Adams, of the house among the lilacs, of days of war, of Abraham
Lincoln; but the time for its telling must wait upon circumstance that
would make Peter Thorold more ready to understand weakness and failure
than he now seemed. Consciously James Thorold took a change of venue
from Peter Thorold of the visions to Peter Thorold of the inevitable
disillusions. But to the former he made concession. "Shall we go to the
city hall now?" he asked as they rose from the table.
The city hall, a massive white granite pile covering half of the square
east of La Salle Street and north of Washington and meeting its twin
of the county building to form a solid mass of masonry, flaunted black
drapings over the doorways through which James Thorold and his son
entered. Through a wide corridor of bronze and marble they found their
way, passing a few stragglers from the great crowd that had filled the
lower floors of the huge structures when Isador Framberg's body had
been brought from its hearse and carried to the centre of the aisles,
the place where the intersecting thoroughfares met. Under a great bronze
lamp stood the catafalque, covered with the Stars and Stripes and
guarded by the men of the fleet.
Peter Thorold, pressing forward, took his place, his cap thrust under
his arm, at the foot of the bier, giving his tribute of silence to the
boy who had died for his country. But James Thorold went aside to stand
beside an elevator-shaft. Had his son watched him as he was watching
Peter, he would have seen the swift emotions that took their way across
his father's face. He would have seen the older man's look dilate with
the strained horror of one who gazed back through the dimming years to
see a ghost. He would have seen sorrow, and grief, and a great remorse
rising to James Thorold's eyes. He might even have seen the shadow of
another bier cast upon the retina of his father's sight. He might have
seen through his father's watching the memory of another man who had
once lain on the very spot where Isador Framberg was lying, a man who
had died for his country after he had lived to set his country among the
free nations of the earth. But Peter Thorold saw only the boy who had
gone from a Forquier Street tenement to the Mexican sands that he might
prove by his dying that, with Irish, and Germans, and French, he too,
the lad who had been born in Kiev of the massacres, was an American.
With the surge of strange emotions flooding his heart, Peter Thorold
crossed to where his father stood apart. The tide of his thought
overflowed the shore of prose and landed his expression high on a
cliff of poetry. No chance, but the urging of his own exalted mood,
brought him the last lines of Moody's "Ode in Time of Hesitation":
"Then on your guiltier head
Shall our intolerable self-disdain
Wreak suddenly its anger and its pain;
For manifest in that disastrous light
We shall discern the right
And do it, tardily.--O ye who lead,
Take heed!
Blindness we may forgive, but baseness we will smite."
But to the older man, seeing as he stood the picture of that other
catafalque to which he had crept one night in the lilac time of a year
nearly a half century agone, the words flung anathema. He leaned back
against the bronze grating of the shaft with a sudden look of age that
brought Peter's protective arm to his shoulder. Then, with Peter
following, he went out to the sun-bright street.
Like a man in a daze he dismissed his car, crossing pavements under
Peter's guiding until he came to the building where the fortunes of
the great Thorold mercantile business were administered. Through the
outer room, where clerks looked up in surprise at the appearance which
their chief presented on the morning when they had learned of the
Forsland embassy, he led Peter until they came to the room where he
had reigned for twenty years. It was a room that had always mirrored
James Thorold to his son. Tall bookcases, stiff, old-fashioned, held
long rows of legal works, books on history, essays on ethical topics,
and bound volumes of periodicals. Except for its maps, it was a lawyer's
room, although James Thorold never claimed either legal ability or legal
standing. Peter seldom entered it without interest in its possibilities
of entertainment, but to-day his father's strange and sudden
preoccupation of manner ingulfed all the boy's thought. "What is it,
dad?" he asked, a tightening fear screwing down upon his brain as he
noted the change that had come over the mask that James Thorold's
face held to the world.
James Thorold made him no answer. He was standing at the wide walnut
table, turning over and over in his hands the letters which his
secretary had left for his perusal. Finally, he opened one of them,
the bulkiest. He scanned it for a moment, then flung it upon the floor.
Then he began to pace the room till in his striding he struck his foot
against the paper he had cast aside. He picked it up, tossing it toward
Peter. The boy turned from his strained watching of his father's face
to read the letter. It was the official notification of the Senate's
confirmation of the President's appointment of James Thorold as
ambassador to the Court of St. Jerome.