RUM
He had done big things, had Captain Sagesse, since the day thirty
years and more ago when, deserting from a French ship, he had taken
up his abode at St. Pierre. Beginning at the very bottom, he had
worked his way up to comparative affluence, and whilst plying Gaspard
with questions he interpolated fragments of his own history. Captain
Sagesse was the only subject of very deep interest to Captain Sagesse;
had he been going to his own execution he would have cast fragments
of his history to the crowd, he was a walking autobiography, and he
had been closed for three weeks, inasmuch as the crew consisting
entirely of blacks, he had no one to open himself to. He told of how
he worked the vessel entirely with blacks, Barbadians, and when he had
exhausted his slight interest in Gaspard and his history he returned
to himself, talking as though Gaspard were an old friend just stepped
aboard, the freemasonry of the south and a common birthplace giving
him the familiarity of long acquaintanceship. There was scarcely a
disreputable transaction in which a ship’s keel could find a place but
it seemed that Captain Sagesse and his barque, the _Belle Arlésienne_,
had been in it—gun running in the Spanish-American war, smuggling,
and worse. He owned the vessel, he owned property in Martinique and
very questionable property in St. Pierre; and inspired now by rum and
what seemed at first blush a charming and natural naïveté, he told
about himself and his doings, his possessions and aspirations with
characteristic force and freedom.
Gaspard, at first half drowsy with weariness, listened like a person in
a dream to the chatter of the other, then, the rum beginning to take
effect upon him, he found himself laughing at things which might have
made him frown if listened to in strict sobriety. He was sinner enough,
but in his small way in life he had dealt straightly with his fellows,
he had, at all events, no feeling for a scoundrel, and Captain Sagesse
was scoundrel enough, heaven knows, to judge by his conversation. He
had got the better of governments, men, and women; he gave neither
names nor dates nor places, talking in his loose way with nothing
more definite than, “It was an islet, it might have been fifty miles
south or fifty miles north of Rum Cay—but that doesn’t matter,” or
“Honorine, that might have been her name, but it wasn’t, anyhow, I’ll
tell you the trick she served Pierre Sagesse, and then I’ll tell you
the trick he served her.”
All at once the brain of Gaspard, drowsed by the events of the day,
cleared, perception became acute, sensation beatified, two glasses of
strong rum and the Martinique _bout_ which the Captain had given him,
had opened for him the door of the Brandy Paradise; the deck-house of
_La Belle Arlésienne_ seemed palatial, Sagesse the greatest of men and
he, Gaspard Cadillac, the equal of Sagesse.
He held out his glass for more rum.
“And mark you,” said Sagesse as he poured it out, “I got my hold on her
in that way, because, _mordieu_, I remembered those two words she said
that night to the mate of the _Bayonnaise_. They thought I was drunk,
but I have never been drunk in my life, and I never forget.”
“Nor I,” said Gaspard, “never been drunk and never forget.” The
recollection of Anisette and Yves came up in his mind, and he thumped
the table with his fist. “I have served my man out. No, I never forget.
Now you listen—” But Sagesse was off on another tack, money business
this time, and Gaspard rocking unsteadily in his seat with his eyes
injected, the cigar in the corner of his mouth, and his fists clenched
on the table before him, sat hearing nothing, glorified in the hideous
upset of alcohol, filled with the splendour of his own importance, and
tormented on his throne by something, he knew not what, but which took
the form of Yves.
It was the woman of Marseilles still working like a demon at his heart
and brought into full life by the drink. The feeling that another man
had done him out. That another man had been preferred to him. That
another man was a better animal, even though that man was dead. Alcohol
told him that he was glorious, supreme, a man amongst men. Anisette
like a pale, sneering ghost said “Pshaw. Where is Yves. _You_, you are
nothing to a woman.”
“And it was worth seven thousand dollars American gold coin,” Sagesse
was saying in the course of his yarn, when Gaspard, whipping the belt
and pouch from his waist, brought them down on the table with a bang,
so that the gold coins rolled out.
“Look at that,” cried Gaspard. “What you say? Wasn’t that worth the
thrust of a knife?” The coins danced before him as he sat rocking in
his seat, an abstemious man as a rule, the weariness and the strong old
rum had done their work.
Sagesse stopped short in his story, stared at the belt and the gold and
then at the man before him. Sagesse, though he chattered of his own
doings, never by any chance gave a man a handle to use against him;
his tales were as vague, all save the villainy of them, as clouds; his
one weakness was talking and he knew it and guarded against it, the
villainies he boasted of were all apocryphal; based they were on black
deeds, just as clouds are based on mountains, the scoundrel in him had
to boast, but to bring Sagesse to book on one of his stories would be
like attempting to bring a bird to earth by grasping at its shadow on
the ground.
Men had tried to blackmail this _raconteur_ on the strength of his
statements; to bring the vulture to earth by catching at his shadow,
only to find themselves in the vulture’s clutch, blackmailed themselves
most cruelly. And he never let go as long as his clutch held, and there
was a feather on the victim. But though he chattered fables, he knew
when to be silent in face of facts. He was silent now. He laughed but
said nothing for a moment, whilst Gaspard gathering the coins together
in a heap, reiterated his question.
“What you say—isn’t that worth the thrust of a knife?—given in fair
fight, mind you, man to man, and the better man wins.” Sagesse held out
his hand, took a coin, examined it and handed it back.
“_Bon Dieu_, yes. So you killed him—but where did he get these things
from, they are not coins of to-day. Had he, then, been robbing a
museum?”
Gaspard nodded with drunken gravity.
“That’s it, you’ve hit it, he robbed someone of them and wouldn’t
share, it was over there on the island.”
“Aha,” said Sagesse. “So you killed him on the island, _vé_, but you
are a man after my own heart, the island—and the name of your man you
said was—”
“Yves.”
Gaspard exhausted, falling into the third stage of intoxication, was
leaning now over the table, his eyelids drooping, the cigar end, no
longer alight, held loosely in his nerveless fingers.
“Yves—and what rating was he?”
“Stoker.”
“So—but he had another name, he was not only called Yves?”
“What you say?” asked Gaspard, rousing slightly.
Sagesse repeated his question, but the man at the table did not seem
to comprehend, then, stricken with sleep he sank completely forward,
his head resting right cheek down on the table, his right hand on
the pouch containing the money. Sagesse looked at him for a moment
contemplatively, then he went to the door and cried, “Jules.” A
shuffling sound came along the deck, and a big negro, bare-footed and
bare-breasted, with his wool all tied up in little knots, made his
appearance at the door.
Sagesse pointed to the man at the table, and Jules with a broad grin
but without a word, entered and took the dreamer by the shoulders,
Sagesse took him by the feet, and between them they carried him to the
starboard dog hole, which did duty for a mate’s cabin when a mate was
on board. Here they put him in the bunk, Sagesse placed the belt and
pouch of money in the bunk beside him, then they closed the door on him
and left him to his slumbers.
When Sagesse found himself alone, he took a chart from a locker, spread
it on the table and pored over it.
Gaspard had told him that he had only been drifting since morning. If
this were so, if the man were not lying, and if, indeed, he had left
an island that morning, then the only island he possibly could have
left was here marked on the chart, a tiny island reef beset to North,
South, and East; eighty miles or so southeast of Turks Island.
Sagesse knew the Caribbean Sea and the Atlantic that includes the
Bahamas as well, almost, as he knew the heart of the lower order of
mankind. He knew from his own knowledge, and leaving the chart aside,
that there was only one islet about here from which a boat could drift
or be rowed in the course of a day to the point where he had picked
up his new acquaintance. He knew the island by sight, too, the clump
of seven palm trees, the white sandy beach, and the murderous reefs.
He had seen it through the glass several times, in past years. He had
counted the palms, seven of them. He never forgot anything; that was
partly why from a foremast hand in the French mercantile marine, he had
risen to wealth and eminence of a sort. He fetched a pen and inkhorn
from the locker, and made just over the islet the form of a tiny cross,
then he put the chart, pen and ink back in their places and came on
deck.
The moon had risen, still a crescent but strong enough to flood the
sea with light. Jules had relieved the man at the wheel, and stood a
dusky ghost before the yellow binnacle light, the wind still held and
had even strengthened a little, and in the silence of the night the
click of the rudder chain, the wash of the water at the bow, and the
occasional groan of hemp-rope and block could be heard.
The barquentine seemed talking to herself in an undertone. Old
and weary of the sea, dressed in canvas, patched and stained and
ill-fitting, barnacled and streaming southern weeds from her copper,
she went her way across the moonlit water, steering now, to make the
passage between Haiti and Porto Rico; a hag of the ocean groping her
way from port to port, now on honest business, now on contraband, from
Yucatan to Port of Spain.