BOOK III.

THE RETRIEVE.

NIGHT THE FOURTEENTH.

SAN RAMON.

I have never set eyes on the village of San Ramon, but I have heard

it described by two men--by one of them in great detail--and their

descriptions tally.

It is a village or townlet of two hundred houses or so. It lies

about a third of the way down the coast of Peru, close over the sea.

It has no harbour: a population of half-breeds--mestizos? Is that

the word?--sprinkled with whitish cosmopolitans, and here and there a

real white man. But these last, though they wear shoes and keep up

among themselves a pretence to be the aristocracy of the place, have

really resigned life for this anticipatory Paradise where they grow

grey on remittance money, eating the lotus, drinking smoked Scotch in

the hotel veranda, swapping stories, and--since they know one another

all too well in this drowsy decline of their day--feebly and falsely

pretending to one another what gallant knowing fellows they had been

in its morning. As for their shoes, token of their caste, they

usually wear them unlaced by day and not infrequently sleep in them

at night. With the exception of Engelbaum, who keeps the hotel, the

white citizens are unmarried. With the exception of Frau Engelbaum--

aged sixty and stout at that--there are no white ladies in San Ramon.

And yet San Ramon is a Paradise. A tall mountain backs it. The

Pacific kisses its feet. A spring bursting from the mountain, about

four thousand feet up, has cut a gorge down which it tumbles in

cascades to the beach and the salt water. Where the source leaps

from the rock the vegetation begins, as you would expect. It widens

and grows more luxuriant all the way down. The stream comes to a

forty-foot waterfall between sheer rock curtained with creepers;

whence it hurries down through plantations of banana, past San Ramon,

which perches where it can, house by house, on shelves hidden in

greenery. There it takes another great leap into a basin it has

hollowed for itself in the steep-to beach.

We have come down by nature's route. Now we'll climb back by man's.

A sort of stairway, broad-stepped, made of pebbles and pounded earth,

mounts in fairly well engineered zigzags to the plateau above the

lower fall, and in a straighter flight beside the gorge to the hotel

which is the topmost building of San Ramon. Above that it becomes a

gully curved by torrential rains; above that, zigzags again as a

mule-track up to a pass in the mountains--and thereafter God knows

whither. Connecting the lower zigzags (I need scarcely say) are

short-cuts or slides made by the brown-footed children, who plunge

down almost as steeply and quickly as the stream itself when the

fortnightly fruit-steamer blows her siren beyond the point.

There is no harbour, you understand. The small steamer--by name the

_P.M. Diaz_--drops anchor a short mile out in a half-protected

roadstead, and discharges what she has to discharge, or lades what

she has to lade, by boats. Her ladings during the banana-harvest are

feverish, tumultuous, vociferous. Her ladings during the sleepy

remainder of the year comprise canned meats, Scotch whisky,

illustrated magazines, and plantation inspectors.

It was almost twelve months to a day--I am trying to tell the story

to-night as a novelist would tell it, but without going beyond the

material supplied to me--It was almost twelve months from the day Foe

left the portico of the Flaxman Building Hotel, New York, that he

stepped ashore on the beach below San Ramon and resigned his light

suitcase to a herd of bare-legged boys who offered to carry it up to

the hotel, but seemed likelier to dismember it on the way and share

up the shreds. They took him, as a matter of course, for a

plantation inspector, arrived in the off-season. He was the only

passenger landed from the _P.M. Diaz_, which had dropped anchor

comfortably, in perfect weather, but would sail in the morning.

A light land-breeze blew off the mountains: but it passed over a mile

of water before rippling the sea, which, inshore, lay as glass.

The sunset from the Pacific lit up San Ramon above him, all terraced

and embowered.

Halted there, gazing up and taking stock of this Paradise before

scaling it, Foe could not be aware, though he might have guessed,

that half a hundred embrasures in the climbing foliage hid

field-glasses and telescopes of which he was the one and common

focus. Up at the hotel, one idler said to another, "Will it be

Morgansen this time, d'you think?" The other passed on the question

to Engelbaum, who was so far the master of his guests that he had

lazily commandeered the large telescope on the _galeria_, and without

gainsay. "If it's old Morgansen," the second man added, "we might

trot some way down the hill to wish him well. The day's cooling in."

"It's not Morgansen," announced Engelbaum. "A new man--thinnish--Oh,

yes, but an inspector. You can tell these scientific men by their

cut."

"Hope they haven't sacked old Morgansen," said the first idler.

"He's been a bit of a scandal, these three years. But he knows about

bananas more'n a banana would own to, even with a blush."

Half-way over the hill, on a packing-case in a bare veranda, sat a

man who for three months had avoided the hotel and these loungers,

and been given up by all of them (by some enviously) as a lost

friend. A woman reclined--good old novelists' word--in a sort of

deck-chair three paces away. The windows of the house stood wide,

and showed rooms within carpetless, matless, swept if not garnished,

with other packing-cases stacked about and labelled. There was even

a label on the chair in which the woman reclined: but her skirt hid

it.

When the whistle of the fruit-steamer had first sounded, out beyond

the Point, and almost before the alert young population of San Ramon

could tear down the pathway beside the bungalow's discreet garden,

she had risen with a catch of the breath, taken up a pair of

field-glasses and scanned the offing.

"It is she beyond a doubt," she had announced.

"What other could it be?" the man had answered, pretty lazily.

"And that being so--"

Said the woman--I am trying to tell this in correct fashion--"Why are

you so dull?--who, when the boat used to call, would snatch up the

glasses and be no company for anyone until you had counted everything

she discharged."

Farrell--oh! by the way it's about time I told you that the man was

Farrell--Farrell looked at the woman. Farrell said:

No, the devil! I can't tell it the professional way, after all.

There's the woman. Well, the woman was young, and fair to see, dark,

well-bred, with a tinge of lemon, and descended pretty straight from

the Incas--"instead of which" she preferred to call herself Mrs.

M'Kay or M'Kie, having been caught and married in an unguarded moment

by someone who had arrived in San Ramon to push a new brand of whisky

and stayed to push it the wrong way. Since M'Kie's death--or

M'Kay's--whichever it was--new-comers had to choose between

Engelbaum's, on the summit, and the lady, an heiress in a small way,

who played the guitar, half-way down the hill, but frowned on the

drinking-habit.

Farrell, you will perceive, had chosen the better way, and had become

a voluntary exile from Engelbaum's in consequence. That, or the

exercise of running, had done him a power of good. Just now he was

bronzed, spare, even inclining to gauntness. Twelve months before,

he had shortened his whiskers, as a first step to disguise.

Since then, and to please this woman, he had grown a beard which he

kept short and trimmed to a point, naval fashion. It was

straw-coloured, went well with his bronzed complexion and improved

his appearance very considerably. It may be that this growth had

encouraged the hair on his scalp or stimulated it by rivalry to

renewed effort: more likely the play of sunshine and sea-breeze had

done the trick between them; but anyhow Farrell now possessed a light

mat of silky yellowish hair on the top of his head--as the nigger

song has it, in the place where the wool ought to grow. Shoes, blue

dungaree trousers and a striped shirt were his clothing--the shirt

opened at the throat and to the second button, disclosing a V of

naked chest as healthily tanned as his face. His face had thinned

too. His eyes no longer bulged. They had receded well under the

pent of his brow and, in receding, taken colour from its shadow.

"I am not dull, Santa," said Farrell. "I am only content and--well,

a little bit regretful, and--well yes, again, the least bit lazy.

But what does it matter? Ylario has gone down to the beach. He will

send off word to the skipper that all this truck will be ready on the

foreshore by five-thirty to-morrow. In good weather he never weighs

before seven, and the weather is settled."

The woman, at one word of his, had turned and set down her glasses.

"Regretful?" She echoed it as a question, and followed it up with a

question. "At what are you staring so hard?"

He lifted his eyes and met hers very steadily, earnestly. "At your

shape, Santa," was his answer. "When your back is turned, I am

always looking at you so."

"Regretfully?" she asked, mocking.

"As for the regret, you know what it is and must be. How can a man

feel it different, when we leave this place to-morrow? Don't women

feel that way towards places where they have been happy?"

She picked up the glasses again and set them with her gaze seaward

before answering. Thus the shadow of her hands screened any

emotion--if emotion there were--on her face.

"I have not been happy here, all the time," she answered softly,

readjusting the glass, or pretending to. "Not by any means.

San Ramon to me is a hole. . . . Yes," she went on deliberately,

"I know well what you are going to say. I have _you_: but I want

something more--something I have always wanted and, it seems to me,

every woman always wants--something beyond the sky-line. In Sydney,

now--"

"You'll find there's a sky-line waiting for you at Sydney," said

Farrell; "as like to this one as two peas--and just as impossible to

get beyond"--which mayn't seem very good grammar, but is how he said

it. "Now to me a sky-line's a sky-line--just something to have you

standing against."

"You shall have a kiss for that, _caballero_--in a moment," she

purred, and slanted the binoculars down to bear on the beach. "Only

one passenger," she announced.

"Usual inspector, no doubt," said Farrell, rolling a cigarette.

"Ye-es--by the look of him. . . . Oh, there's Ylario, all right,

talking to the boatman! . . . He must be a stranger, I think--by the

way he's staring up at the town."

"Ylario was bred and born here; of uncertain parents, to be sure--"

She laughed. "Foolish! . . . I meant the inspector, of course."

"What's he like?" asked Farrell. "Report."

She lowered the glass, twisted the screw of it idly, and returned to

her hammock-chair, beside which she set it down on the veranda floor.

"Now I'll make a confession to you," she said, picking up her guitar

and throwing her body back in the chair. "I love you," she said.

"When you are close, and alone with me, my heart feels as if it could

melt into yours. . . . No, don't get up: you shall have your kiss, in

good time. But when you--what shall I say?--when you _all-white_ men

are at all far off, or when many of you are together, I cannot well

distinguish. . . . Ah, pardon me, beloved! Haven't you had that

trouble with people of other races than your own--among a crowd of

Japanese, say? And the shepherds on the mountains behind here--have

you not wondered how they can know every sheep in a flock of many

hundred?"

Farrell was on his feet by this time, and in something of a passion.

"Am I, then," he stammered out; "--am I, then, so like any of the

others, up at Engelbaum's?"

"Calm yourself, O beloved," said Santa, brushing her finger-nails,

gipsy-wise and soft as butterflies, over, the strings of her guitar.

"Calm yourself, and hearken. You are all the world to me, and you

know it. Yet there is something--something I could explain to you

better, maybe, if I knew English better . . . and yet I am not sure.

. . . Let me try, however. . . . It always seems to me with you

English, you Americans, you white-skinned men--with all the ones I

have known--that the fault is not all mine when I find you alike just

at first; that every one of you ought to be a man quite different

from all other men; that you, of your race--yes, every one--were

meant for something you have missed--were meant to be--Oh, what is

the word?"

"'Distinguished?'" suggested Farrell, standing up. "I never was

that, Santa--though, back in England, at one time, I had a notion to

make some sort of a mark."

Santa let the neck of the guitar fall back against her breast and

clasped her hands suddenly. "Yes, that is it;--to make your mark!

Every woman who loves a man wants him to make his mark somehow,

somewhere. . . . I cannot tell you why: but it is so."

Farrell took a turn on the veranda. "My dear," he said tenderly,

coming back and halting before her, "do you realise that I am fifty

years old?"

She pressed her palms over her eyes. "You keep telling me that, and

it hurts! Besides, you grow younger every day . . . and--and I

cannot bear to hear you say it!" She lowered her hands and smiled

up, but through tears.

"The men who find their way to San Ramon from my country or from the

States," he went on, picking up the binoculars absently while his

eyes sought the sky-line, "do not come in any hope of making their

mark--not even plantation-inspectors." Farrell fumbled with the

screw, adjusting the focus. "If that is why we are going to

Sydney--"

"Whatever happens," declared Santa, "I will love you better anywhere

than in San Ramon: and I have loved you well enough here! The men

who come to San Ramon--pah! this for them!" She thrummed an air--

_La Camisa de la Lola_--on the guitar and broke off with another

small sound of scorn from her throat. "_That's_ what suits them, and

what all of them are worth!"

She brushed the strings again: and if Farrell made any sound at all,

the buzz of them covered it. He had brought the glasses to bear on

the beach.

Santa started to thrum on the lower strings. Farrell swung about

suddenly, set the glasses down, and walked back into the dismantled

house.

Now so far I have evidence for all I'm telling you. From this point

for thirty seconds or so, I am going to guess what happened.

Santa went on thrumming. She heard his footsteps on the bare floor

as he went through the echoing, dismantled room behind her.

She heard them on the brick of the broad passage which separated the

living-rooms of the bungalow from its bed-chambers. She heard him

lift the latch of the outer door. She heard the outer door shut

behind him. Then she waited for his footsteps to sound again on the

sunken pathway which ran downhill beside her patch of garden, hidden

by the cactus fence--or rather, deep below it. "He is standing on

the doorstep," she said to herself, "lighting a cigarette"; and then,

"but he is a long while about it. This is strange." Still as her

ear caught no sound of him, Santa sprang up and slipped, guitar in

hand, to the outer door--the fence being too tall for her to

over-pry, and moreover prickly. She opened the door and peeped out.

There was no one down the pathway. There was no one up the pathway,

which here, for some fifty or sixty yards, climbed straight, full in

view. "And what on earth has become of him?" wondered Santa.

"He did not go down--I should have heard him. But why should he go

up? He has broken with those drinkers at Engelbaum's. . . . Besides,

it is unbelievable that, in this short time, he should have vanished.

. . ."

So much for guesswork. Now I come back to the story as it was

afterwards related to me.

Santa, standing there in the porch, guitar in hand and leaning

forward over the rail which guarded a long flight of stone

steps, heard a footfall on the road below--an ascending footfall.

For a moment she mistook it for Farrell's: she believed she could

distinguish Farrell's from any other man's: and so for a moment she

stood mystified.

Then a man hove in view around the corner . . . not Farrell, but the

newly-landed stranger she had spied through her binoculars--the

presumed Inspector. His eyes were lifted as he calculated the new

gradient ahead of him, and thus on the instant he caught sight of

Santa aloft in the porch-way. Something held Santa's feet.

"Many pardons, _senora_," said the Stranger, halting a little before

he came abreast of the stairway and lifting his hat. "But can you

tell me if this path leads to the Hotel?"

Now Santa was confused and a little abashed--it may have been because

in her haste she had forgotten to drape her head in her mantilla--a

rite proper to be observed by Peruvian ladies before showing

themselves out-of-doors. But she could not help smiling: the

question being so absurd.

"Seeing, _sentor_, that there can be no other," she answered, with a

small wave of the hand out and towards the gorge down which the river

cascaded always so loudly that they both had unconsciously raised the

pitch of their voices.

From the pathway above came the sound of stray stones dislodged under

a heavy plunging tread; and there was Farrell striding down, with his

hands in his trousers' pockets.

In the right pocket he carried a revolver, which he had picked up on

his way through the house. His forefinger felt about its trigger.

He had recognised Foe through the glass. He had pelted up the path

in the old sweating terror, making for the mountain as if driven, to

call on it to cover him.

Close by Engelbaum's gate he overtook three small boys contending

around a suit-case: the point being that all three could not demand

reward for carrying so light a burden. If the owner were a fool, or

generously inclined (which amounted to the same thing), two of the

three might put in a colourable claim for services rendered.

In white countries one boy fights with another. In San Ramon as many

as fifteen can fight indiscriminately, and the vanquished are weeded

out by gradual process. Farrell shook the urchins apart, driving

them for a moment from the suit-case as one would drive three wasps

off a honey-pot. . . . It lay at his feet. Yes, he'd have recognised

it anywhere, even without help of the half-effaced "J. F." painted on

its canvas cover. It was a far-travelled piece of luggage, and

much-enduring--What are those adjectives by which Homer is always

calling Ulysses? . . . It bore many labels. One, with "Southampton"

upon it, was apparently pretty recent . . . and another with

"Waterloo."

He turned the case over while the boys eyed him, keeping their

distance. His brain worked more and more clearly. . . Foe had

returned to England, then, to pick up the trail. But how had he

struck it? . . . There was only one way. . . . He had, of course,

been obliged to send letters home from time to time--letters to his

firm, to his bankers for money--instructions to pay his housekeeper--

possibly a score of letters in all. Foe must have obtained

possession of one and spotted the postmark on the Peruvian stamp.

. . .

Of a sudden he realised his cowardice; and flushed, with shame and

manhood together, there in the pathway. . . . This thing was no

longer a duel. Three were in it now, and the third was Santa. . . .

The old scare had caught him, surprised him, and he had run from

recollected habit. . . . It had been base. . . . Why, of course,

Santa made all the difference! He must go back to protect Santa.

At the thought of her he felt a second flush of shame sweep up in

him, quite different from the first and quite horrible. The tide of

it scorched his face as if flaying it. And so--if you'll

understand--in the very moment of knowing himself twice vulnerable--

no, ten times as vulnerable--this Farrell, loving this woman, became

a man: and three small ragamuffins stood about him and witnessed the

outward process.

The outward process ended in his fishing out three _dineros_ from his

trouser pocket and bestowing one on each of them--twopence-halfpenny

or thereabouts is a godsend to a juvenile in San Ramon.

"There, little fools!" he said. "Take the stranger's bag along and

don't quarrel any more. There is nothing in this world so silly as

quarrelling."

With that he went back down the hill, and so came on Foe and on

Santa, talking down to Foe from the balcony porch.

"Hallo, old man!" said Farrell, looking Foe straight in the eyes: and

"Hallo!" answered Foe, looking Farrell straight in the eyes. Santa,

gazing down from the rail, thought it strange that they did not shake

hands, as Britons and Americans do when they met.

"I found three rascals," said Farrell easily, "scrapping for the

honour of delivering a suit-case at Engelbaum's hotel--a suit-case

that I recognised. I rescued it, and it is now safe in the porch.

. . . Oh, by the way, though you seem to have made acquaintance, let

me do the formal and introduce you to my wife. Santa, this is Doctor

Foe, an old fellow-traveller."

Foe gave him one glance, shrewd and steady, before looking aloft and

again raising his hat. The thrust did not penetrate Farrell's

defence.

"It's awkward," said Farrell, "that we can't even offer you a bed.

We're all packed up, ready to sail by the steamer to-morrow.

Mrs. Farrell and I in fact are shifting quarters. . . . Staying?"

"No," said Foe imperturbably. "I shall be sailing to-morrow, too.

. . . I just heard of this place, and thought I'd like to have a

look at it before going on. . . . Shouldn't think of troubling you."

"Curious, how small the world is," went on Farrell in a level voice.

"You won't mind my talking a bit in the old manner? . . . It sort of

puts us back at the old ease, eh? . . . Well then, we can't offer to

put you up. But if you don't mind a packing-case for a chair and

another for a table--eh, Santa?"

"We shall be charmed," said Santa.

"You understand that it will be a picnic," added Farrell.

"My good sir!" protested Foe.

"Yes? . . . It will be better than Engelbaum's, any way. I don't

mind promising," said Farrell. "We will talk over old times, and

Santa shall play her guitar to us."

That is how the two men met.

The _P.M. Diaz_ plied no farther than Callao. From Callao the

Farrells, with their furniture, and Foe in company, worked down by

coasters to Valparaiso.

Does any one of you remember the mystery of the _Eurotas_? which

regularly for about four months occupied from an inch-and-a-half to

four inches space in the newspapers. In 1909 . . . pretty late in

the year. She happened to be the first ship of a new line started

between Valparaiso and Sydney, and her owners had so well boomed the

adventure in the Press that, when she began to be reported as

overdue, the public woke up and she became as interesting as a lost

dog. She was of 12,000 tons, new, Clyde-built, well-found, and

carried a mixed cargo, with about twenty passengers. Two vessels

reported having passed her, about three hundred miles out. After

that she had become as a ship that had never been.

In his casual way--for I must remind you that he and I had lost all

trace of Foe and Farrell in New York--Jimmy lit on the next item of

news.

Long before the _Eurotas_ was posted as "missing," the newspapers

published a list of her passengers. Jimmy, seizing on this, ran his

eye down it, and let out the sort of cry with which he greets all

news, good, bad, or indifferent.

"I say, Otty!--here it is, and what do you make of it?--'The s.s.

_Eurotas_. . . . List of Passengers.

"Mr. and Mrs. P. Farrell, San Ramon, Peru.

Professor J. Foe, of London. . . .'"

And after that there was silence for four years. The bell at Lloyd's

never rang to announce the arrival of the _Eurotas_. By Christmas

her underwriters were paying up, and the newspapers had lost interest

in her fate.

NIGHT THE FIFTEENTH.

REDIVIVUS.

About seven weeks later Norgate called on me with evidence that

settled the last doubt: a letter from Foe, written from Valparaiso.

It was brief enough. It merely announced that he was on the eve of

sailing for Sydney and wished to have credit for 600 pounds opened

with the Bank of New South Wales. "I have booked a berth on the

_Eurotas_," it concluded, "and go aboard to-night. She's a new ship,

owned by a new line, of which you may or may not have heard--the

'Southern Cross Line.' We hear enough about it in this town, the

Company having contrived to fall foul of the dock labour here.

I don't know the rights or wrongs of it, but some sort of boycott is

threatened. However, this sort of dispute usually gets itself

settled at the last moment; and anyhow I shall get to Sydney by some

means or other. So you may safely mail there. No need to cable.

I have plenty of money for immediate purposes."

"What had I best do?" asked Norgate. "Lloyd's are about giving the

_Eurotas_ up."

"Cable out and make sure," said I. "If he calls at the Bank, he

calls; and if he doesn't, there are no bones broken. _Something_ has

gone wrong with the ship; and in the mix-up he may easily have lost

his ready cash and be landed at Sydney without a cent."

I should have told you that, about a fortnight before this, Jimmy had

solved, or partially solved, the puzzle of that entry "Mr. and Mrs.

P. Farrell" on the passenger-list. Jimmy had found a good girl, and

as pretty almost as she was good, and yet imprudent enough to consent

to marry him. This had the effect of rendering him at once and

surprisingly prudent. As the poet puts it, "he had found out a flat

for his fair," and as he himself put it, "We have heard the chimes at

midnight, Master Shallow: but be-shrew me, we never thought of making

my bank-manager one of the party, to break him in to our ways;

the consequence being that Elinor's maid will have to stick a

bedroom-suite priced five-pounds-ten, while the other domestics,

unless dividends improve, sleep (poor souls, insecurely) upon

bedsteads liable to be spirited from under them at any moment by a

Hire System that knows no bowels. . . . By George!" sighed Jimmy.

"If we hadn't let Farrell slip through our fingers! Do you know,

Otty, I've an idea," he announced. "Why shouldn't I take the

Tottenham Court Road to-morrow, visit Farrell's old place of

business, and kill two birds with one stone?"

"It sounds a sporting proposition," I agreed, "though sketchily

presented."

"Adumbrated," suggested Jimmy. "That's a good word. I found it in

yesterday's _Observer_."

"Adumbrated, then," said I. "The Tottenham Court Road--"

"--_And_ two birds with one stone. No moors for me this year: I'm

back on the simple life and the catapult. . . . You just wait."

There really is no resisting Jimmy, nor ever will be. He went up the

Tottenham Court Road next day, walked into Farrell's late place of

business and demanded to see the General Manager; and--if you'll

believe it--that dignitary was fetched amid a hush of awe.

"I dropped in," explained Jimmy, "to see one of those cheap bedroom

suites you advertise, in pickled walnut--or is it _marron glace?_--

suitable for a house-parlourmaid. The fact is, I'm going to get

married--well, you've guessed that--otherwise, of course, I shouldn't

be here. . . . My intended wife--she's a Devonshire lady, by the

way--from near Honiton. Anything wrong about Honiton? . . . No? I

beg your pardon--I thought you smiled. . . . Well, as I was about to

explain, my intended wife, coming as she does from near Honiton--

that's where they make the lace--likes her servants to be

comfortable: at least, so she says. Your late Managing Director, had

he lived--" Here Jimmy made a pause.

"You knew our Mr. Farrell, sir?" asked the present Managing Director,

sympathetically.

"He honoured me with his acquaintance. If he had lived," said Jimmy

. . . "But there! . . . By the way . . . that second marriage of

his--wasn't it rather sudden? I understood him to be a confirmed

widower."

"We know nothing about it, sir: nothing beyond what he conveyed in a

letter to our Vice-Chairman. In fact, sir, during the last year or

so of his life, when Mr. Farrell took his strange fancy for foreign

parts, it seemed to us--well, it seemed to us that, in his strange

condition of mind, anything might happen. To this day, sir, we

haven't what you might call any certitude of his demise. It is not,

up to this moment, legally proven--as they say. Our last letter from

him was dated from far up the coast--from a place called San Ramon,

which I understand to be in Peru. In it he announced that he was

married again, and to a lady (as we gathered) of Peruvian descent.

He added that he had never, previously to the time of writing or

thereabouts, known complete happiness."

Jimmy brought back this information, having, on top of it, acquired a

bedroom suite of painted deal. "And there," said he, "the matter

must rest. Foe's gone, and Farrell's gone. Both decent, in their

way; and both, but for foolish temper, alive now and hearty."

So it seemed to be, and the book to be closed. I mourned for Jack,

yet not as I should have mourned for him a year or two before.

Jimmy married and left me, and soon after I moved from our old

quarters in the Temple to my present rooms in Jermyn Street.

Four years passed: and then, one fine morning, my door opened, and

John Foe called me by name.

"Hallo, Roddy! How goes it?"

I jumped up, in a pretty bad scare. It was the voice that did it:

for, my door making an angle with the window, and the day being

sunny, he stood there against a strong light--sort of silhouette

effect, as you might put it. And there was a something about him,

thus gloomed--but we'll talk of that by and by. The voice was Jack

Foe's, and none other.

"It's all right," he went on easily. "Pull yourself together.

. . . It _is_ the Ancient Mariner come home, but you needn't

imitate the Pilot and fall down in a fit. . . . Where's the Pilot's

Boy, by the way--young Jimmy Collingwood? You still keep Jephson, I

see. . . . I happened on Jephson at your street-door, just returned

from posting a letter. Jephson performed the holy Hermit very

creditably: he raised his eyes and almost sat down on the doorstep

and prayed where he did sit. 'Doctor Foe!' said Jephson.

'Good Lord, send may I never--!'--which amounts to a prayer,

eh? . . . He let me in with his latchkey, and I told him I'd run up

unannounced. . . . Well?"

He came forward. In the old days Jack and I never shook hands; nor

did we now. He set down hat, gloves, and umbrella carelessly on my

knee-hole table and dropped into a chair with a long-drawn sigh.

"Reminds one--eh?--of the famous stage-direction in _The Rovers--

Several soldiers cross the stage wearily, as if returning from the

Thirty Years' War_. . . . Well? What are you still staring at?

. . . Oh, I perceive! It's my clothes. . . . Yes; I should inform

you that they are expensive, and the nearest compromise a Valparaiso

tailor and I could reach in realising our several ideas of a Harley

Street doctor. I am going to open a practice in that neighbourhood,

and thought I would lose no time. The hat and umbrella over there

are all right, if you'll give yourself the trouble to examine them.

I bought them on the way along."

He was right, in a way, about his clothes. (I believe I have already

mentioned that Jack had always dressed himself carefully and in good

form.) His frock-coat had a fullness of skirt, and his trousers a

bluish aggressive tint, that I couldn't pass for metropolitan.

His boots were worse--of some wrong sort of patent leather. But they

ought not to have altered the man as I felt that he was altered.

. . . Yes, cheapened and coarsened, in some indefinable way.

His hair had thinned and showed a bald patch: not a large patch:

still, there it was. His shape had been rather noticeably slim.

I won't say that it had grown pursy, but it had run to seed somehow.

Least of all I liked the change in his eyes, which bulged somewhat,

showing an unhealthy white glitter. I set down this glitter as due

to long weeks at sea: but the explanation couldn't quite satisfy me.

When a lost friend returns as it were from the grave--from shipwreck,

at any rate, and uncharted travel--you look to find him gaunt, brown,

leathery, hollow of cheek and eye, eh? Foe's appearance didn't

answer to this conception . . . not one little bit.

"Then you didn't sail in the _Eurotas_, after all?" said I, finding

speech. "We saw your name on the list."

"Oh, yes, I did," he interrupted. "And, by the way, we shall have to

talk about her--or, rather, about what I ought to do. . . . Yes, I

know what you'll be advising. 'Go straight to Lloyd's,' no doubt."

"Man alive," said I, "why not? If you were aboard of her--and if, as

you tell me, you fetched somehow to Sydney--why in God's name hasn't

Lloyd's heard of it months ago? There are such things as cables.

. . . Unless, to be sure, you have a reason?"

"I have and I haven't," said Jack. "My turning-up doesn't hurt

anyone, does it? The _Eurotas_ went down, sure enough: and _I_

didn't scuttle her, if that's what you suspect."

"Please don't be an ass, Jack," I pleaded.

"Well, I don't see," he continued, ruminating, "--I don't see any way

but to go to Lloyd's and tell them about it. Yet equally I don't see

what good it can do. The underwriters have paid up, eh?"

"More than three years ago," I told him.

"Well, then . . . I was perfectly well prepared to answer any

questions at Valparaiso. I landed in my own name. I went back to

the same hotel. And 'Foe' is not the most common of names,

especially when you write 'Doctor' before it. . . . No, I'm wrong.

Farrell had entered our names on the register, and had entered mine

as 'Professor.' On my return I wrote it 'John Foe, M.D.' But anyway,

not a soul in the hotel recognised me. . . . I think my looks must

have altered, somehow. . . . So I let it go. I dare say you won't

understand, not knowing the kind of experiences I've been through,

nor the number of 'em. But you may understand that after a goodish

while as a castaway I was tired beyond the point of answering more

questions than I should happen to be asked. . . . So I gave

Valparaiso a silent blessing, and came home by the first ship, to

consult you and Collingwood. What--let me repeat--have you done with

Collingwood?"

"Jimmy?" said I. "He's married, a year since, and is already the

father of a bouncing boy. I acted as his best man, by request.

He has a delightful and tiny wife who keeps him in order, which he

passes on to the County of Warwickshire as Justice of the Peace and

Coram. . . . But about the _Eurotas_?" I persisted. "I don't think

you quite realise. There were passengers on board: and for months--"

"Of course there were passengers," Foe agreed. "It won't help their

relatives (will it?) to know for certain what they pretty well know

already. As I hinted to Norgate in my last letter, there was a

labour crisis on when we sailed. Some aggrieved blackguard on the

dock, acting on his own or under command of his 'Union,' shovelled

half a dozen bombs in with the coal. Simple process. Between seven

hundred and a thousand miles out, this particular batch of coal was

reached and shovelled into the forward furnaces. I counted four

explosions. Two of them blew her bows to pieces, and she sank by the

head and was gone in twenty minutes.

"Must I tell it, when I am home and dying to ask questions?--Oh, very

well, then. . . . I shall be perfectly truthful so far as the history

goes; but I warn you that at a certain point you won't like it, and

you'll go on to like it less. You and I have been friends, Roddy,

and you naturally suppose that I've come straight to you, as my first

friend, to be welcomed and to ask for counsel. But you suppose

wrong. I am come asking neither for advice, nor for a sympathy--

which I know I shan't get."

"My dear Jack--" I began to protest.

"Oh, be quiet," said he, "and let _me_ do the talking! I've had no

one to talk to, these five months around the Horn, but a Norwegian

skipper, a first mate of the same country, a fellow-passenger shipped

off as a dipsomaniac for a cure (we lost him somewhere in the worst

of it--I've an idea he let himself be swept overboard), and a mixed

crew that I helped to cure of _beri-beri_ at St. Helena. So I want

to do the talking, with your leave.

"--And I want to say this first, foremost, once and for all. I am

come _simply to tell you_. I understand the devil of a lot about

hatred by this time--more than you will ever begin to guess. But you

taught me, anyhow, this much about friendship, that I couldn't bear

to go along with you without your knowing every atom of the truth.

That means, we're going to be clean cuts, when I've done. . . .

You'll loathe the tale. But, damn it, you shall respect me for this,

that I cut clean, for old sake's sake, and wiped up the account,

before we parted as strangers and I started life afresh."

"All this is pretty mysterious, Jack," said I. "You know that, for

all the hurt he'd done you, I shied out of helping your pursuit of

Farrell. . . . Tell me, what happened to Farrell? Went down in the

_Eurotas_, I guess, and so squared accounts. That's what you mean--

eh?--by your clean cut and starting life afresh? . . . If so, for

your sake I'm glad of it."

"He didn't go down in the _Eurotas_," Foe answered gravely: "As a

matter of fact I dragged him on board one of the boats with my own

hands."

"What?" said I. "Farrell another survivor?"

"Upon my word," he answered, lighting a cigarette, "I can't swear to

Farrell's being alive or dead. Probably he's dead; but anyway I've

no further use for him, and that's where the clean cut comes in.

I had to quit hold of him because a woman beat me. . . . Now sit

quiet and listen."

FOE'S NARRATIVE.

"Did you know that Farrell had married? . . . Yes, at San Ramon, a

little portless place some way down the coast of Peru. The woman was

a Peruvian and owned a banana-strip there, left to her by her first

husband, a drunkard, in part-compensation for having ill-used and

beaten her.

"When I ran Farrell to earth there, after he'd given me the slip for

twelve months and more, this woman had married him and almost made a

new man of him. In another month or so I don't doubt she'd have

converted him into man enough to tell her all the truth, and let her

deliver him.

"As it was, he passed me off for his friend--the ass! . . .

I shipped with them, and we worked down the coast, by fruit-ship and

sloop, to Valparaiso, intending for Sydney. . . . Now at this point I

might easily make myself out a calculating villain. Farrell was

enamoured to feebleness, and to make love to his Santa was an

opportunity cast into my lap by the gods. . . . But actually, before

I could even meditate this simple villainy, I had fallen in love with

her because I couldn't help it.

"Now I had never been in love before, and I took the disease pretty

severely. And I should say that I took it rather curiously: but you

shall judge, for I'll set out the credit side of the account just as

plainly as the other.

"I hated the man, as you know: I loved the woman, as I've told you.

But--here's the puzzle--strange to say, at that time, and for a long

while, these two passions did not conflict or even contend at all, as

neither did they help. I couldn't hate Farrell any worse than I did

already. If I'd hated him just a little less, I might have killed

him, to get him out of the way. But I give you my word, I never

thought of shortening the chase in that way. Farrell, you may say,

had become necessary to me: by this time I couldn't think of living

without him. . . . Now I know what's crossing your mind. I might

have piled up the torture on Farrell, and at the same time have

played on that other passion, by setting myself to debauch Santa.

No, I'm not complaining. You shall have as bad to condemn before

I've done, so you needn't apologise. But, as it happens, I wasn't

that sort of blackguard. Moreover, it wouldn't have worked, anyhow.

Santa was as good as her name--

"No, damn it! I will clear myself of _that_! . . . You'll understand

that I loved the woman, and--well, in the old days, as you'll do me

the justice to remember, I hated men who played loose among women.

As for 'making love' to Santa--oh, I can't explain to you, who never

saw her, how utterly that was beyond question on either side. . . .

Almost white she was, with the blood of the Incas in her--blood of

Castile, too, belike--and yet all of a woman, with funny rustic ways

that turned at any moment to royal. . . . And she loved Farrell--my

God!

"I wonder now if she guessed--guessed at the time, I mean. They say

that women always guess; which in these matters is as good as

knowing. . . . But I'm holding up my story."

"The _Eurotas_ went down in something like 36, south latitude,

longitude 105 and a half west. That's as near as I make it: that is

to say, some three or four hundred miles from any known land save

Easter Island, which lay well away north and to windward, for we were

down where the main winds set between W. and N. That's as close as I

can give it to you. In seafaring matters I leave seamen to their own

job, and don't worry about reckonings and day's runs. It's their

business to take me, mine to trust their skill. You will own, Roddy,

that if fools had only kept their noses out of _my_ job in life, I

shouldn't be having to tell you this story.

"Anyhow, Macnaughten--that was the skipper's name--took all the

ship's instruments with him on board his own boat, which was the last

to quit.

"He was a good man, and I couldn't but admire his behaviour, first

and last. The _Eurotas_ went down within half an hour of the first

explosion; which had surprised us passengers on deck as we were

chatting and watching the sunset. The sea was calm as a pond, with a

bank of cloud to northward, all edged with gold on its western

fringes.

"I think this calm, resting over sea and sky, may have helped us

through the catastrophe. The only irritation I felt was at the

slowness of it all, between the moment we knew we were lost and

the moment when the vessel went down. Yet every moment between

was used to a nicety, almost as if Captain Macnaughten had been

preparing for the test. He commanded us, crew and passengers alike.

Four stokers had been killed below: another and the engineer officer

badly hurt. These two were fetched up while some of us lowered the

accommodation-ladder and others swung out the boats on the davits.

These two sick men were carried down to the first of the three boats

launched. Four women passengers followed; three married, one a

spinster. The three husbands were ordered down after them.

"The _Eurotas_, as I've told you, was a new ship, well found to the

last life-buoy. The directors of the Company had lunched on board

before she sailed and drunk to her health, having seen that

everything answered to advertisement. The boats were staunch, newly

painted and smart: the crew as well-picked a lot as the Board could

find. So far as I can recall those hurrying minutes, I remember them

as being almost intolerably slow. I cannot say how many of them it

took before we realised for a certainty that the ship was going down.

But I know that as, by order, I went down the ladder to the second

boat, I had a sense of irritation at the long time it was taking and

the methodical way the skipper was getting out stores and

water-breakers and having them hefted down.

"Another thing I must tell you. As I went down the ladder--the

ship's bows already beginning to dip steeply--I had a sense of being

in no _time_ at all, but in eternity. There around us, spread and

placid, stretched the emptiest waste of the Pacific, with God's sun

deserting the sky above it, sinking almost as fast as the ship was

sinking.

"Santa had wrapped her mantilla over her head. She went down the

ladder before me, following Farrell. Our boat was white-painted on

thwarts and stern-sheets. . . . I was keeping my foothold with

difficulty, loaded with a water-breaker. . . . A man took it from

me, all in silence. I gripped Farrell's hand and hoiked him on

board. There was a great silence hanging, as it seemed, about those

last moments.

"We pushed off a little way. The third and last boat was lowered

down, and we saw the last half-dozen, with the captain at their

heels, tumbling down in a stampede.

"The _Eurotas_ took her plunge just as we heard them unhook from the

davit-blocks."

NIGHT THE SIXTEENTH.

CAPTAIN MACNAUGHTEN.

(Foe's Narrative Continued.)

"I once read a novel called _One Traveller Returns_. That's all I

remember of it--the title.

"Well, I am that traveller: and if ever I write down the story of the

_Eurotas_, and in particular of what was suffered on board her boat

No. 2, I have no doubt that nine readers out of ten will forget the

details just as soon and just as completely. There is a horrible

sameness about these narratives, Roddy; and the truer they are (as

I've proved) the nearer they resemble one another. Monotonous they

are--these drawn-out agonies--as the sea itself upon which they are

enacted. From time to time you sit up half-awake out of your stupor,

and then you know that something is going to happen, and also that it

is something you've read about somewhere, something that you've

_lived_ through (or so it seems) in dreams, or in a previous

existence. You hardly know which; and you don't care, much.

It's going to be horrible, you know: it's going to be all the more

horrible, in its way, for being conventional. You want to get it

over and pass on to the next stereotyped nightmare. That's the

feeling.

"So I'm going to confine my tale pretty closely to myself and what

pulled me through. . . . But before I get to this I must tell you of

two shocks that fell on me before I came to it, and seemed to promise

that the books were all wrong and not half vivid enough. I dare say

that quite a number of survivors have tried to paint the sense of

loneliness that swooped on them in the first few seconds after their

ship had slid down. But I'll swear I had read nothing to prepare me

for it. . . . It's not a ship--it's a continent--that vanishes.

The little hole it has made in the water calls to the whole ocean to

cover it, and the ocean widens out its horizon by ten times all

around, at once pouring in and spreading itself to isolate you ten

times farther from help. . . . Nobody who hasn't been through this

and felt it for himself can understand how promptly and easily--

without help of quenching their thirst in salt water--men go mad, in

open boats, at sea.

"But I believe the shock of loneliness at sunrise was even more

hideous. One is prepared for it, in a way; otherwise it would, I am

sure, be far more hideous. Santa confessed to me, on the second day,

that she had felt--and, she believed, could feel--nothing more

dreadful. As she put it, 'You see, my friend, when the sky lightens

at length, you have assurance of God, and that God is help.

Then, when He sends up no help, but a great staring sun to watch your

misery, hour by hour, God turns to devil and you only long for

night--when, at least, the dew falls.'

"Between sunset and sunrise, however, I was kept fairly busy.

For the _Eurotas_ had scarcely been twenty minutes under water, and

night had barely fallen, before the captain's boat ranged up to us.

She carried a lantern in her bows, and I had found one and was

lighting it after his example.

"'Names on board!' he demanded. We gave them through Grimalson, the

second mate, who was in charge. He said no more for about half a

minute, during which time no doubt he was running through the list in

his head. Then, 'That's all right,' he announced cheerily.

'You'll set watches, Mr. Grimalson, and keep her in easy hail.

The weather will certainly hold fine for a bit, and early to-morrow

I'll be alongside again with instructions. Plumb south our course

lies, for the present. I'll tell you why, later. You have a sail?"

"'Ay, sir,' answered Grimalson.

"'Right. But don't hoist it unless I signal. . . . Yes, yes, not a

draught at present. But if a breeze should get up, don't hoist sail

without instructions. We keep together--that's the main point.

Just pull along easy--I'll set the pace--and keep in my wake, course

due south. Those that aren't pulling will act wise to trust in God

and get some sleep. . . . Is that Doctor Foe there forra'd, with the

lantern?'

"'Ay, sir,' I answered up.

"'Then as soon as you've fixed it, sir, I'll ask you to jump aboard

and along with us for to-night. I've poor Jock Abercrombie here--

fetched him and Swainson out of No. 1 boat'--These were the two

injured men: Abercrombie, our Chief Engineer, by far the worst

burnt--'I doubt if he'll last till morning: but we've been friends

from boys, Jock and me, and if you can do aught, sir, to make his

passing easier--'

"I asked him to wait while I fetched my medicine-chest, and was

transhipped with it into the captain's boat. They had laid

Abercrombie in the stern-sheets, with the stoker Swainson beside him.

Abercrombie's plight was hopeless; flesh of chest and arms all

red-raw from the scorching, and the man palpably dying from shock.

"'I had him into my boat, sir,' Macnaughten explained gravely,

'because we'd shipped the ladies--all but Mrs. Farrell--in No. 1, and

I don't want 'em to be distressed more than necessary. . . . A man

can't think of everything all in five minutes, but I got him out of

it, soon as I could. There's no hope, think you?'

"'Between you and me, none,' said I, sinking my voice.

"'That's what I reckoned,' said the skipper, with just a nod of his

head. He had taken the tiller and sent all the crew, saving four men

rowing, forward whilst I examined the patients. 'Jock wouldn't be

one to let out a groan if he knew there were women by to be scared by

it. . . . Also, Doctor, if he's dying, I'd like to be handy by, if

you understand. I got him this berth. We were friends, always.'

"I found some cotton-wool and a tin of vaseline, and coated the poor

man's hurts as well as I could. Then, as he still groaned, though

more feebly, I got out my phial of morphia and a needle. As I held

the bottle against a sort of binnacle-light by which Macnaughten sat

steering, I caught his eyes staring down on me, quiet and solemn.

I tell you, that man was a man, Roddy.

"'Yes, I know, Doctor,' he said quietly. 'You're calculating how

much there is of it, and how you may have to use it before we're

through. . . . What about Swainson?'

"'He'll pull around,' said I. 'The vaseline will ease three-fourths

of his trouble within ten minutes.'

"'Keep your voice low,' said the skipper, 'as I'm keeping mine.'

He bent forward, pretending to consult the compass. 'I've sent all

these fellows forward, though they put her down by the head so that

it's like steering a monkey by the tail. . . . Now I reckon that

you'll be wishful to go back to-morrow, or as soon as may be, and

join your party. That's so?'

"'That's so,' said I, as I finished the injection and turned to deal

with the stoker.

"'Well, I'd like to have you here aboard,' said the skipper.

'But so's best. We want some brains in No. 2 boat; and, between

ourselves, Grimalson hasn't the brains of a hare. He's a

second-cousin-twice-removed of one of our directors. He's no seaman

at all; and his navigation's all a pretence. . . . I suppose, now,

_you_ can't navigate?'

"'Good Lord, no, sir!' said I. 'I just understand the principles of

it--that's all.'

"'It's a damned sight more than Grimalson understands, I'll bet,'

responded Captain Macnaughten, studying the binnacle and speaking as

though we were discussing the weather and the crops. 'You may push

your finger into that man anywhere, he's that soft and boggy--no

better'n slush--_and_ pink. . . . Don't you despise a pink-coloured

man? Still, I want you to understand, Doctor, that he's the superior

officer on No. 2, for the time being.'

"'I understand,' said I, looking up from my business of unguenting

the stoker, who was not badly burnt.

"'But if Grimalson should turn rotten. . . . Well, now, I've had an

eye on you, sir, and I judge I can share off on you a bit of trouble

I wouldn't share off on most. . . . _You_ must know as well as I do

that the chance is pretty thin for us all, even if this weather

holds. I reckon there's no nearer land than Easter Island, four

hundred good miles norr'ard, and a beat in light winds. . . . I've

heard too much about long beats in open boats--heard enough to make

the flesh creep. Anyways, I'm responsible. I've turned it over in

my head: and I'm giving orders--you take me? We're not steering for

any land at all. We're steering the shortest way, due south--what

wind there is drawing behind us--on the chance to hit in with the way

of traffic--Sydney ships making round the Horn. . . . You'll not

argue that, I hope?" he demanded.

"'On the contrary, sir,' I agreed, 'I just know enough to be sure

that you are doing the wisest thing.'

"'Nobody but God can be sure,' said he, and sat musing. 'Well, I

take the responsibility God has seen fit to lay on me of a sudden.

You won't hear me speak of this again: but you're an educated man,

and you've nerve as well as brains--I marked ye by the head of the

ladder, when the first boat was getting out. I reckoned you for one

that doesn't speak out of his turn; and it came over me, just now,

that I'd like one such man, and him a gentleman, to bear in mind that

if I set my face pretty hard in the time that's ahead of us, it won't

mean that I ain't feeling things at the back of it.'

"'Thank you, Captain Macnaughten,' said I, pretty earnestly.

'The best I can answer is the simplest--that you're doing me much

honour.'

"'That's all right,' he said lightly: 'all right and understood.

One man often helps another in funny little ways in this funny old

world.' After a pause he went on yet more lightly and cheerfully,

'Well--and I've noticed you've a trick of beginning your sentences on

that word 'well': it's a habit of mine too, they tell me--as the

ladies say ashore, we're going to be worse before we are better, so

we'll call those fellows aft a bit and ease the steering. . . . Stay

a minute, though, before I call to them. . . . A clever man like you

ought to be able to pick up a bit of navigation in a few lessons.

While our boats keep together (as, please God, they will to the end)

it wouldn't be a bad notion if you dropped alongside just before

midday for a morning call, and I'll learn you how to handle a sextant

and prick down a reckoning. . . . It'll be sociable, too. . . . Yes,

I'll signal the time to you: but, to be ready for it, you might set

your watch by my chronometer here. . . . I wonder, now,' he inquired

oddly, 'if you've forgot to wind yours up to-night?'

"Well, Roddy, it's the truth that I had forgotten. I looked at him,

pretty foolish, and with that we both laughed--yes, there and then, a

sort of laugh, low and quiet, like well-water bubbling.

"'Now I'll tell _you_,' said the skipper, 'I caught myself winding up

mine the moment after the ship went down . . . that's funny, eh?

Five minutes to nine was the hour. . . . I'd hooked the old timepiece

out of my fob, and there I was, winding, for all the world as if

ashore and going to bed. . . . See here--three turns of the winch and

she's chock-a-block again, if you ever! . . . And, come to think, I

may as well correct _her_ by the chronometer, too.'

"So we solemnly set our watches together, there by the binnacle

light. A queer fancy took me that the act was a sort of ritual, not

devised by either of us--a setting and sealing of friendship. . . .

Ought a fellow, Roddy, shipwrecked in the South Pacific, to complain

while he has these three stand-by's--a woman to love, a man to

admire, and a man to hate?"

"The engineer died just before dawn. Indeed, the day broke of a

sudden as I finished straightening his body and wrapping it for

burial; and I looked up in the new light, and around me, to take in

that second gush of loneliness of which I told you. . . . It was

appalling. It swept in on me from the whole enormous circumference

of empty waters, and I fairly cowered from it over the corpse I had

been tending.

"I never had that sensation again, or in anything like that degree,

during the whole voyage; and I shall presently tell you why. But it

was Macnaughten who taught me my first deliverance. . . . I knelt

there, huddled, not daring to turn my face up for a second look and

expose my cowardice. I seemed to be drowning in the deep of deeps,

and fragments of the first chapter of Genesis swirled past me like

straws--_And the earth was without form and void. . . . And the

Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God saw the

light, that it was good_--but here it was, and it was not good.

_And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters_--

but there was no firmament. _And God divided the waters . . . and

the gathering together of the waters called he Seas: and God saw that

it was good_--oh, my God! _And God said, Let the waters under the

heaven be gathered together unto one place, and let dry land appear:

and it was so_--But it wasn't!

"Captain Macnaughten's voice spoke through this misery of mine quite

matter-of-factly and simply, dispersing it like so much morning mist.

"'Signal the other boats to pull close,' he commanded. 'Someone tell

me where the Bible and Prayer-Book were stowed. I saw them handed

down, with my own eyes.' Then to me: 'These things--packed as we

are . . . the sooner over, the better, and the less they'll prey on

anyone's mind.' He looked down. 'Jock would have liked it so, I

reckon.'

"The other two boats were called close. The summons was explained,

and the burial service decently read. 'It don't seem altogether a

lively beginning,' said he to me at the close--and the water was

scarce dry on his cheek that had run down suddenly as he read out

_I heard a voice from heaven, saying_--'But,' he added, 'it'll sober

'em down to what they'll have to face. . . . And now we'll sober 'em

up with some cheerfuller business no less practical.'

"The boats having gathered close for this ceremony, he commanded them

to stay so while the crews cooked breakfast. 'I saw the coffee

handed down into No. 1,' he announced. 'Fetch it out, you! . . .

And, after breakfast, I'll overhaul all three boats and see that each

has her share fairly apportioned.'

"I tell you, Roddy, that this Macnaughten, who aboard the _Eurotas_

had been an ordinary skipper conning his ship, and nowise hearty or

communicative, of a sudden proved himself as great as any man I've

read of in history. . . . You may smile if you will. But here was a

man abandoned by Heaven in the waste of the South Pacific, with all

his prospects blasted and all the hopes built on the _Eurotas_ line

(in which, I learned, he had piled his money); with a wife at home,

moreover, and a daughter. Yet for the seven days we kept company he

stood up to duty, fathered us all, never showed sick or sorry.

He had a fairish baritone voice, and it was he that started us

singing to fill up the endless time. How does it go?--"

Thus sang they in an English boat,

A holy and a cheerful note--

God! I can hear his voice now, trolling _Nancy Lee_ back across the

waters, defying them, until the night quenched it.

"Through these seven days, regularly and towards noon, he signalled

and I went aboard No. 3 for a lesson in navigation. It was the third

day that, returning, I found Grimalson didn't stomach these visits.

Grimalson was a mean man, and incompetent; the sort that knows he's

not trusted, knows there's good reason for it, and resents it all the

time. I thought him just a sulky brute, and noted that on some

excuse or other it was always inconvenient to be close up with No. 3

boat as it drew towards midday and my time (as he put it, growling)

for 'taking the Old Man's temperature.' He was misguided enough, on

the fourth day, to let off a part of this rather feeble joke upon the

captain himself, and found his bearings pretty smartly. He had so

managed things that at ten minutes to noon it became pretty clear I

must miss my appointment. All three boats carried sail now: the

weather being perfect, with a nor'-westerly breeze, light but steady:

and the three were running before it pretty well abreast like three

tiny butterflies on the waste of water--for I should tell you that

all three were twenty-four footers, built to one whale-boat model on

the same moulds, and carried small Bermuda, or leg-of-mutton sails,

cut to one pattern--when Grimalson took it into his head that our

down-haul should be tautened in, cursed the man who was doing his

best to execute a silly order, ran forward, and so messed matters

that the sail had to be three-parts lowered and re-set. It was quite

deliberately done, as even a landsman could see; and it lost us a

couple of hundred yards off the captain's boat, sailing to starboard

of us.

"Things were scarcely right with us before Macnaughten had brought

his boat about close to wind and came ranging alongside. He had his

watch in his hand.

"'Mr. Grimalson,' he demanded, 'why were you fooling with that sail,

just now?'

"'She wasn't setting proper,' explained Grimalson; 'and I told Jarvis

to take a swig on the downhaul. He got messed up in the slack

somehow, and--'

"'Before you go any further,'--the captain cut him short--' I may

just tell you that your sail was setting perfectly, and that I saw

the whole business through my glass. . . . Hasn't Doctor Foe told you

that I require him, while this weather holds, to be on board this

boat regularly at ten minutes to noon, to take observations?'

"'Observations?' grumbled the second mate. 'I thought observations

to be a seaman's job. I reckoned that what doctors and suchlike took

was temperatures, and five minutes up or down wouldn't put anyone

out.'

"'I'm sorry,' answered Macnaughten, very quiet, after a moment's

thought,--'I am very sorry to tell you before your crew and

passengers what, with a ship under me, I should have called you aft

and below to hear in private. But if you ever use that tone with me

again, Mr. Grimalson, I shall take _your_ temperature with my

revolver. And if you dare to disobey my smallest order, as you

deliberately did just now, I shall transfer you to this boat and clap

you in irons. For it seems to me I have to explain to you what the

others,--crew and passengers alike--know by the light of common

sense: that until God's mercy delivers us my least word is the Ten

Commandments rolled into one, we being where a hand's turn is either

a hair's-breadth or broad as the Pacific. . . . Now cast off, and set

your behaviour by No. 1 boat, where Mr. Ingpen has come up to wind

and is waiting for us. . . . A cable's length on the port, and level

with us--that's the order, and you'll watch it until I give the next.

You have lost us twenty minutes. Happen _that_ might turn out the

hair's breadth I was speaking of--the difference between life and

death--and the whole Pacific ain't wider.'

"We were down in latitudes where the current sets southeasterly, and

this was helping us all the time. But on the sixth and seventh days,

although the wind held fair and light and steady, a considerable

swell had been following us, warning of trouble somewhere to

northward; and on the eighth night it overtook us.

"It was--not to speak irreverently--in itself ten times more trouble

than ten thousand Grimalsons could have raised; a tearing gale of

wind which, all of a sudden, converted the oily summits of the swell

into bursting white waves. I don't suppose the height from trough to

summit actually increased as it did to view, but in twenty minutes,

and with night shutting down the lid on us, each successive wave

astern seemed to grow taller by feet. The rain appeared to have no

effect in flattening their caps, though it came down with a weight

that knocked half the breath out of our bodies, and with a roar above

which it was hard to hear an order shouted. We could spy the other

boats' lanterns but at long intervals, partly because of this

down-pouring curtain and partly, I suppose, because when we topped up

over a crest they would nine times out of ten be hidden in a trough,

dipping or rising.

"We carried, by Captain Macnaughten's orders, a hurricane lamp on our

fore-stay. Someone had lit a second amidships, where we huddled in

oilskins and under tarpaulins like a congregation of eels. . . .

Jarvis, our best seaman, had the tiller. He sat, all hunched,

crouching forward over a third small lamp--the binnacle lamp with

which our boat, like the others, was providentially fitted.

The rain, however, beat on its glass in such sheets that he could not

possibly have read the compass card floating by the wick. Nor--I am

sure--was he trying to read it. He just sat and steered by the feel

of the seas as they lurched ahead and sank abaft. The lamplight

glowed up on his cheek-bones, but was lost under the pent of his

sou'wester, which had a sort of crease or channel in its fore-flap,

that shed down the rain in a flood. Though we lay, we passengers, on

the bottom boards we could see nothing of his face, so far forward he

bent.

"Then Grimalson lost his head. He was seated at Jarvis's shoulder in

the stern-sheets, with a hefty seaman (Prout by name) on his other

hand tending the sheet--the both of 'em starboard of Jarvis. Of a

sudden he started up, reached forward, snatched the midships light,

and held it aloft against the wall of a tremendous sea arching

astern. At sight of it the fool lost all his remaining nerve, and

yelled to the two seamen forward to lash a couple of oars to the

painter and cast overboard. 'If we ran another hundred yards, we

were lost: there was no hope but to fetch around head-to-sea and ride

to it.'

"--Which, after some seven or eight sickening minutes, we did.

He was master, and Jarvis put down the helm and obeyed. Twice we

were heaved, tilted and slid sideways down, like folks perched on the

window-sills of a falling house. Then she came fair about and rode

to it, every crest flinging more or less of spray over us, hour after

hour. . . .

"But I must tell you one thing. From time to time we were roused up

in the darkness, to bale. Our work performed, we three passengers--

Santa and Farrell and I--would creep under the tarpauling anew, out

of the drumming rain, and coil there to sleep. . . . Ay, and once in

the pitch blackness under, she, mistaking, reached two arms around my

neck and with a long sigh, dead-beat, sank asleep. That was all.

. . . Farrell lay as he had tumbled, like a log across my ankles.

. . . I held her, crooked by my elbow against my side, her head

drowsed on my shoulder, her body pulsing against mine. I am telling

you all, and I tell you that I did not dare to kiss her. Lying

awake, with Farrell across my feet, I held her to me, feeling her

breathe.

"At hint of dawn Jarvis, who had been watching the seas the night

through, barked us out of cover. The rain had ceased, the gale had

swept southward as fast as it had come. The sea heaved almost as

steeply as ever, but the toppling waves no longer flung any spray

over us, or any to mention."

"Day broke, and the after-swell still tumbled us heavily: but nowhere

within the great ring of horizon did it heave one of the other boats

into sight. The sea smoothed itself down with a quite wonderful

rapidity, and still its great surface was a blank."

"I cannot somehow believe that so able a handler of his boat as I

knew Captain Macnaughten to be allowed himself to be swamped in that

gale. His orders had been to carry on and only heave-to upon signal.

Jarvis--who (as I have said) could sail our boat running by the feel

of her, maintained that we had never been in the worst of danger,

that the skipper could sail a boat for ten to his own one, that he

had just held on, in his straight way, upon the orders he had given,

and left us at the back of the horizon while we fenced seas under

Grimalson's orders.

"Since nothing apparently has been heard since of those other boats,

I shall go on hoping that Jarvis was wrong, and that Captain

Macnaughten's boat and Mr. Ingpen's, in one way or another, met with

a short sharp end in that gale.

"But if they did last it out and over the horizon to drag it out and

die and never be reported to Lloyd's, then I, who know the sort of

things they must have suffered, assure you, who have read them

accurately reported in books, that whenever or wherever Captain James

Macnaughten perished, the Recording Angel has him entered up for a

seaman and a gentleman."

NIGHT THE SEVENTEENTH.

NO. 2 BOAT.

(Foe's Narrative Continued.)

"One must use ugly words for ugly things.

"Grimalson, staring--as we all stared--over the blank sea, vomited

the natural man within him in some fourteen or fifteen words for

which he was never forgiven by any of us.

"'Gone, by Gosh! And that bloody old fool was teaching _me_ to

handle a boat!'

"All heard it. Not a soul spoke. I glanced at Jarvis in time to

catch the twitch of his mouth--one of those twitches I used to study

in angry dogs, and snapshot and measure: but he continued to gaze

across the waters. After half a minute or so he glanced at me,

looked seaward again, and observed quietly, 'It don't seem probable

they would run mast-down in the time. And yet I don't know: 'twas

blowing powerful fresh just after midnight. Hull-down, a boat might

easily be; and supposing sail lowered, what's a boat's mast better to

pick up than a needle in a bottle o' hay?--let be they might be

dismasted. There was weather enough. And No. 1 carried a bamboo--

which is never to be trusted, if you ask _me_.'

"'Who the devil's asking you?' demanded Grimalson.

"'Nobody, sir,' the seaman answered, respectfully, but without

turning his head. 'Words spoken in a l'il boat like this be for

anybody's hearin'; and anybody's heard or no, accordin' as they

choose.'

"'Well then,' Grimalson retorted, 'I happen to be boss here aboard,

and I don't choose. So drop you that, prompt, and start baling her.'

"'One moment, Mr. Grimalson--' I began. But he took me up quicker

than he had taken Jarvis.

"'Dear me, now!' he snarled in a foolish sarcastic way. 'And who may

this be that I have the honour of addressing?--Captain Macnaughten's

ghost? or his next-of-kin, belike? Or may be his deputy

understudy?--with your _One moment, please_? . . . You sit down on

that thwart there, and don't you dare open your face again until I

give you leave. . . . That was the old fool's way with _me_--hey?

And now you recognise it.'

"'I do,' said I, pulling out my revolver. 'You may quit fumbling in

your pocket, for it's wringing wet and these cartridges are dry, as I

have assured myself. . . . _You_ sit down on _that_ thwart, and don't

you dare open your face until I give you leave to get up and wash it.

That's _your_ trick of speech, and maybe you recognise it."

"As I covered him, Jarvis touched my elbow. 'I beg your pardon, sir,

but you're a gentleman and a passenger, and Mr. Grimalson's our

senior officer, when all's said, _and_ in command. . . . I'm not

talkin' about the rights of it nor the wrongs of it,' Jarvis went on,

as I still held the revolver levelled:' but 'tis flat mutiny you're

committing; and me and my mates'll have to range up on the side of

order. Whereby you'll be no match for us. . . . Oh, sir,' he

pleaded, 'let up with quarrelling, and let's all die decent, if we

must, when the time comes--and with a lady in the boat!'

"'Thank you, Jarvis,' said I; and lowering my revolver drew out the

cartridges pretty deliberately. 'I beg your pardon, Mr. Grimalson.

I shall not, on any provocation, interfere with you again. But

before you start baling the boat, I'll ask you to note that the third

water-breaker is stove, and it was the only full one. Saltish this

water may be, but nine-tenths of it is honest rain from heaven.'

"'My God, sir, and it's truth!' verified one of the seamen who had

scrambled forward. The full breaker had jerked loose from its

lashings and lay awash under the bowman's thwart: worse--it had

loosed the other two, and these, floating light, had washed away

overboard and gone out of ken.

"Grimalson stood up, slightly dazed. In the rock of the boat he

seemed to be shifting his weight deliberately from foot to foot.

"'Why didn't one of you report?' he shouted, in a fury at which I

smiled; it being so senseless and at the same time so cunning, as a

ruse to let him arise with dignity from the thwart. 'Why didn't

somebody report?' he repeated in an absurd official manner, quite as

though he had been a station-master interrogating a group of porters

on the whereabouts of a missing parcel.

"'Well, sir,' I answered as politely as possible; 'it was I that

first found the casks were loose, and by the accident that the rim of

the full one struck me pretty sharply, in the night, between the

shoulder-blades. I got it trigged up, as you see, before it ran

amuck to do further damage. In securing it I found that it had lost

its bung and was almost empty: but that hardly seemed worth

mentioning, with such a flood of rainwater washing around. There was

nothing to be done at the moment; the breaker in a way was refilling

itself, as soon as I had it jammed, by the water washing over it;

and, after a bit, judging it full or nearly full, I ripped off a

corner of my oily and made a sort of bung, as you see."

"All this had, in fact, cost me some labour, and I related it, no

doubt, a bit too complacently. Worse, I rounded it up by saying,

'The captain, sir, was more anxious about the water than anything, as

he told me yesterday.'

"At this his temper boiled over--yet not (as I could see) until he

had flung a glance at Jarvis and the crew, to make sure they were

submissive still to the old habit of discipline. 'Macnaughten was

always full of wisdom,' he sneered; '--so full that he's dead of it!

. . . And so you didn't think it worth mentioning?'

"Do you know, Roddy, I didn't think the fool worth any further

attention. . . . One can't really hate two men at one time . . . at

any rate, _I_ can't. It's too fatiguing. There sat Farrell, three

feet away, looking dazed, as he'd looked ever since the _Eurotas_

went under. As for this Grimalson, I didn't reckon him worth powder

and shot. I knew that he would bluster before the men, to save his

face, and then climb down. To secure the water on board was such an

obvious measure that, bluster as he might, he couldn't miss coming to

it finally. . . . I heard Jarvis explaining that an empty pork-tub,

with a tarpauling inside of it, would hold quite a deal of the

rainwater washing above the bottom-boards. I took no more trouble

than to turn my back on Grimalson, who was arguing that all this

water was mucking the dry provisions.

"'They're pretty well mucked already, sir, by the looks of 'em,'

answered Jarvis: 'all but the canned meats, and few enough they are.

Five cans, as I counted the last stowage.'

"'Oh, very well, then,' came the order which I had known to be

inevitable. 'Run a tarpauling inside of that cask--and bale, you,

Prout and Martinez!'

"And so, behind my back and almost as I shrugged my shoulders--so,

within twenty minutes of the sunrise that told us we were eight human

beings isolated from all help but that which we could afford to one

another--in a casual, unpremeditated stroke the curse fell on us.

"The seaman Martinez, kneeling in water, was asking, rather

helplessly, for someone to pass him a baler or invent one--our

regulation dipper having gone overboard in the gale. It was a silly,

useless question: but Grimalson, already rattled, swung round upon a

man he knew to be weak. 'Damn me!' cried he in a gust of rage, 'if I

can't teach it to doctors, I'll teach _seamen_ who gives orders

here!' and snatching out a marling-spike from a sheath in his belt,

hurled it full at the seaman's head.

"The act was brutal enough in itself; for the iron, though a light

one, was full heavy enough, flung with that force, to lay a man out.

It did worse: for Martinez, instead of ducking his head, made a

spring to his feet, putting out his hands much as if fielding a

cricket-ball. The marling-spike, miss-aimed, struck the thwart in

front of him, turned point up with the ricochet, and plunged into his

thigh. As I splashed forward to his help, blood came creeping,

staining the water around my ankles. The steel point had pierced

slantwise through his femoral artery.

"Well, I was quick: and Santa was quick, too--tearing in strips the

damp pillow-case on which her head rested of nights when it wasn't

resting against Farrell's shoulder. (But not _this_ night, I thought

as I worked--not this blessed night just passed!) With the

pillow-case and the very spike that had done the mischief I made a

good firm tourniquet and saved Martinez's life for the time.

"But he had lost a lot of blood. All the drinking water awash in the

boat was foul with it, and this bloodied flood was running, as the

boat rocked, in and out among our small bags of pork and ship-bread.

My job ended, I looked aft. Farrell was leaning over the gunwale in

uncontrollable nausea. The face of Prout at the tiller, was dogged

but inexpressive. Grimalson stood like a man dazed.

"'Will he live?' he asked, his eyes meeting mine. 'Of course I never

intended--'

"'It wasn't a very pretty thing to do, was it?' I answered quietly.

"'Well, this settles it,' said he, staring down at the water.

'We must clean out this filthy mess and overhaul the stores.'

"'And _then_?' I asked.

"'Oh, it'll rain,' said he, affecting confidence. 'It rained for a

hundred last night, didn't it? We've run south of the dry latitudes

and soon we'll be getting more rain than we've any use for.

There's the small keg of rum, too. . . . Great thing as we're

situated,' the fool continued, 'is to keep everyone in heart.

And anyway I don't stomach water with blood in it--specially Dago

blood. . . . Jarvis and Webster, fall to baling: and you, Prout, hand

us over the tiller and dig out something for breakfast.'

"I had found a plug of tobacco in my pocket and seated myself to

slice it: and as I cut it upon my palm, my eyes fell on Farrell's

yet-heaving shoulders. . . . Of a sudden then it came upon me that,

even with the luck we'd carried, men can't go through seven days and

eight nights in an open boat and emerge quite sane. Macnaughten had

put up a gallant, a magnificent pretence. 'The Old Man's Penny

Readings,' as Grimalson had dubbed those evenings when the boats had

closed up and the crews sang Moody and Sankey or _My Mary_--'The Old

Man's Penny Readings, or Pea-nuts on the Pacific'--had been just as

grandly simple as anything in the Gospel. No: that's wrong--they had

come straight out of the Gospel, a last chapter of it the skipper had

found floating and recovered, and would carry up, a proud passport to

his God.

"But Macnaughten was gone, and with him the whole lovely illusion.

He had kept us in a nursery, separated from hell by a half-inch

plank; and here we were all beasts, consigned to ravening and to die

of unsatisfied bestial wants--yes, and commanded by a monkey-man who

chattered of keeping everyone in heart! _He!_"

"So there it was. I told you, Roddy, that it all happened like a

nightmare--or, if you prefer it, a composite photograph--of any dozen

stories you can recall. Here are the facts; and I will try to give

them succinctly, as in a police-report.