days at sea,) "I haven't been able to forget.... Damme--I haven't done
well here--"
Bedient bent forward, perceiving that "here" meant his earthly life, as
well as Equatoria.
"I should have stayed over yonder and sat down as you did--before you
did. Here"--now the Captain meant Equatoria alone--"I have thought of
my stomach and my ease. My stomach has gone back on me--and there is no
ease. Over there, I might have--oh, I might have thought more--but I
didn't know enough, early enough. And you did--at seventeen, you did!
That's what made you. They're all mad up in The States, and they're
just little children down here.... I might have profited in India--"
That was a frequent saying of the Captain's about the States. Twice a
year at least, he was accustomed to make the voyage to New York.... The
truth was, the old man felt a yearning for something the years and
India had given Bedient. He felt much more than he said, and often
regarded the young man, as one rapt in meditation.... His interest in
Gobind and the Himalayas was insatiable; much more eagerly did he
listen regarding the Punjab than about the ports he had known so
well--and the changes that had passed under the eyes of the young man
in Manila and Japan.... When Bedient was relating certain events of
days and nights, that had become happy memories through the little
things of the soul, Captain Carreras would start to convey the
indefinite desires he felt; then suddenly, the deep intimacy of his
revelations would appear to his timid nature, and even in the mothering
dark, the panic would strike home--and he would swing off with pitiful
humor about goats or some other Island affair....
Bedient had an odd way of associating men whom he liked with mothers of
his own imagining. Happily discovering fine qualities in a man, he
would conjure up a mother to fit them.... Often, he saw the little
Englishwoman whose boy had taken early to the seas.... She was plump
and placid in her cap; inclined to think a great deal for herself, but
still she allowed herself to be kept in order mentally and spiritually
by her husband, whose orthodoxy was a whip. Perhaps she died thinking
her tremulous little departures were sure attractions of hell and
heresy. Bedient liked to think of her as vastly bigger than her mate,
bigger than she dreamed--but alone and afraid.
SEVENTH CHAPTER
_ANDANTE CON MOTO_--FIFTH
For the first time in his life, Bedient learned what America liked to
read.... All the finer expressions of the human mind and hand gave him
deep joy. His love and divination for the good and the true were the
same that characterized the rarest minds of our ancestors, who had
access only to a few noble books in their formative years. And
Bedient's was the expanded and fortified intelligence of one who has
grown up with the Bible.
Each ship brought the latest papers, periodicals and certain pickings
from the publishers' lists. India had not prepared Bedient for this.
With glad welcome he discovered David Cairns here and there among
short-story contributors, but the love of man and woman which the
stories in general exploited, struck him of Indian ideals as shifty and
pestilential. The woman of fiction was equipped with everything to make
her as common as man. She was glib, pert, mundane, her mind a
chatter-mill; a creature of fur, paint, hair, and absurdly young. The
clink of coins was her most favorable accompaniment; and her giving of
self was a sort of disrobing formality. The men who pursued her were
forward and solicitous. There was something of sacrilege about it all.
The minds and souls of real women--such were not matters for American
story; and yet the Americans wrote with dangerous facility. Bedient,
who worshipped the abstraction, Womanhood, felt his intelligence
seared, calcined.... Only here and there was a bit of real
literature--usually by a woman. The men seemed hung up to dry at
twenty-five. There was no manhood of mind.
Bedient's sense of loneliness became pervasive. Apparently he was
outside the range of consciousness--for better or worse--with the
country to which he had always hoped to give his best years. His ideals
of the literary art were founded upon large flexible lines of beauty
into which every dimension of life fell according to the reader's
vision. He felt himself alone; that he was out of alignment with this
young race from which he had sprung, to wander so far and so long.
And yet there was a Woman up there for him to know. This was imbedded
in his consciousness. Soon he should go to her.... He should find her.
And as the Hindu poets falteringly called upon the lotos and the
nectars; upon the brilliance of midday athwart the plain, and the glory
of moonlight upon mountain and glacier and the standing water of
foliaged pools; upon the seas at large, and the stars and the bees and
the gods--to express the triune loveliness of woman (which mere man may
only venture to appraise, not to know)--so should he, Bedient, envision
the reality when the winds of the world brought him home to her heart.
* * * * *
There was much to do at the _hacienda_. The Captain was past riding a
great deal, and the large hill and river property--the coffee, cacao,
cotton, cane and tobacco industries profited much better with an
overseer. Still Bedient slowly realized that the hundreds of natives in
touch with Captain Carreras' plantations worked about as well for him
as they knew. Single-handed, Carreras had done great things, and was
loved as a good doctor is loved. In spite of his huge accumulation of
land, the Captain was the least greedy of men. He had been content to
improve slowly. His incalculable riches, as he had early confided to
Bedient, were in the river-beds. Only a few of these placer
possibilities were operated. There was a big leak in the washings.
Still, the natives were not greedy, either. They were home-keepers, and
had no way to dispose of bullion.
Carreras had managed all his affairs so as to keep the government on
his side, and his revenues were no little part of the support of the
Capitol. This was his largest outlay, but in return he was
protected.... Deep disorder brooded in the present political silence;
all recalcitrants were gathering under Celestino Rey--but this
situation was only beginning to be understood.
At certain times of year, Carreras had in his employ the heads of five
hundred families, and had shown himself unique in paying money for
labor. This was un-Spanish. It gave him the choice of the natives. He
represented therefore a stable and prosperous element of the
population. His revenues were becoming enormous. The Hollanders paid
him a fortune annually for raw chocolate. This, with tree-planting and
culture, would double, for the soil seemed to contain the miraculous
properties of _alkahest_. The point of all this is, that Captain
Carreras had come to be regarded as the right wing of the government.
He arranged all his dealings on a friendly rather than a business
basis; his good-will was his best protection.... Bedient had been in
Equatoria for several months when Jaffier sent for the Captain.
"I don't feel like it, but I'd better go," the old man said. "Something
amiss is in the air. Damme, I've got all delicate to the saddle since
you came, sir.... I used to think nothing of the ride down town--and
now it's a carriage.... Ah, well, you can try out a new symphony--and
tell me what it says when I get back."
As it turned out, Bedient did exactly this thing.... Time could not
efface the humor evoked by the sight or sound of the magnificent
orchestrelle. During one of the Captain's New York trips, he had heard
a famous orchestra. The effect upon him was of something superhuman.
The Captain went again--followed the musicians to Boston and
Philadelphia. The result was more or less the same. Soul flew in one
direction; mind in another; and, inert before the players--a little fat
man, perspiring, weeping, ecstatic. What came of it, he had told
Bedient in this way:
"The _Hatteras_ was to sail at night-fall, but on that morning I went
into a music-store, not knowing what I wanted exactly,--but a souvenir
of some kind, a book about orchestras. It appears, I told a man there
how I'd been philanderin' with the musicians; how I had caught them in
an off day at Springfield, Mass., and bought cornucopias of Pilsner
until they would have broken down and wept had they not been near their
instruments.... It was a big music-store, and he was a very good man.
He sold me the orchestrelle that morning. You think I had an electric
plant installed down here to light the house and drive my sugar-mill,
don't you? It wasn't that at all, but to run the big music-box yonder.
The man had smoothly attached a current, but he said I could just as
well pump it with my feet. Then he called in a church organist--to
drive the stops. Between them, they got me where I was all run down
from that orchestra crowd. They said a child could learn the stops....
You should have heard my friends on the _Hatteras_--when the
orchestrelle was put aboard that afternoon. They never forget that.
Then we had a triple ox-cart made down in Coral City, and four span
were goaded up the trail--and there she stands.
"Andrew, they finally left me alone with it and a couple of hundred
music-rolls.... It was hours after, that I came forth a sick man to
cable for power.... About those music-rolls--I had called for the best.
One does that blind, you know. But the best in music matters, it
appears, has nothing to do with retired sea-captains.... It's a pretty
piece of furniture. The orchestra had died out of me by the time we had
the electric-plant going.... I take it you have to be caught young to
deal with those stops.... You go after it, Andrew. It scares me and the
natives when it begins to pipe up. I had a time getting my household
back that first time. Maybe, I didn't touch the right button--or
I touched too many. You go after it, my boy--it's all
there--_appassionato--oboe--'consharto'--vox humana_ and the whole
system--"
... It is hard for one to realize how little music Bedient had heard in
his life. Just a few old songs--always unfinished--but they had haunted
the depths of him, and made him think powerfully. Certain strains had
loosed within him emotions, ancient as world-dawns to his present
understanding, but intimate as yesterday to something deeper than mind.
And so he came to ask; "Are not all the landmarks of evolution
identified with certain sounds or combinations of sounds? Is there not
an answering interpretation in the eternal scroll of man's soul, to all
that is true in music?"
Long ago, one night in Korea, he had been wakened by the yammering of a
tigress. His terror for a moment had been primal, literally a simian's
helpless quaking. Earlier still, he had heard a hoot-owl, and
encountered through it, his first realization of phantom horrors; he
knew then there _was_ an Unseen, and nether acoustics; here was a key
to ghostly doors. A mourning-dove had brought back in a swift passage
of consciousness the breast of some savage mother. Night-birds
everywhere meant to him restless mystery.... Is sound a key to
psychology? Is the history of our emotions, from monster to man,
sometime to be interpreted through music--as yet the infant among the
arts?
The answer had come--why the unfinished songs had the greater magic for
him. So diaphanous and ethereal is this marvellously expressive young
medium, music, that the composers could only pin a strain here and
there to concrete form--as a bit of lace from a lovely garment is
caught by a thorn. So they build around it--as flesh around spirit. But
it was the strain of pure spirit that sang in Bedient's mind--and knew
no set forms. So an artistic imagination can finish a song or a
picture, many times better than the original artist could with tones or
pigments. Too much finish binds the spirit, and checks the feeling of
those who follow to see or hear.
These, and many thoughts had come to him from the unpretentious things
of music.... _Ben Bolt_ brought back the memory of some prolonged and
desperate sorrow. The lineaments of the tragedy were effaced, but its
effect lived and preyed upon him under the stress of its own melody.
Once he had heard _Caller Herrin'_ grandly sung, and for the time, the
circuit was complete between the Andrew Bedient of Now, and another of
a bleak land and darker era. In this case the words brought him a
clearer picture--gaunt coasts and the thrilling humanity of common
fisher folk.... Many times a strain of angelic meaning and sweetness
was yoked to a silly effigy of words; but he rejoiced in opposite
examples, such as that little lullaby of Tennyson's, _Sweet and Low_,
which J. Barnby seemed to have exactly _tono_-graphed.... Once across
infantry campfires, _Juanita_ came, with a bleeding passion for
home--to him who had no home. There was a lyrical Ireland very dear to
him--songs and poems which wrung him as if he were an exile; Tom
Moore's _Sunflower Song_ incited at first a poignant anguish, as of a
sweetheart's dead face; and _Lead Kindly Light_ brought almost the
first glimmer of spiritual light across the desolate distances of the
world--like a tender smile from a greater being than man. And there
were baleful songs that ran red with blood, as the _Carmagnole_; and
roused past the sense of physical pain, like the _Marseillaise_. What
heroic sins have been committed in their spell! By no means was it all
uplift which the songs brought. There was one night when he heard
_Mandalay_ sung by some British seaman across the dark of a Japanese
harbor. They were going out, and he was coming into port....
These were his sole adventures in music, but they had bound his dreams
together. He had felt, _if the right person were near_, he could have
made music tell things, not to be uttered in mere words; and under the
magic of certain songs, that which was creative within him, even dim
and chaotic, stirred and warmed for utterance.... So fresh a surface
did Bedient bring to the Carreras music-room.
The time had come when his nature hungered for great music. The
orchestrelle added to the Island something he needed soulfully.
Experimenting with the rolls, the stops and the power, he found there
was nothing he could not do in time. Music answered--trombone,
clarionet, horn, bassoon, hautboy, flute, 'cello answered. Volume and
tempo were mere lever matters. On the rolls themselves were
suggestions. Reaching this point, his exaltation knew no bounds. He
looked upon the great array of rolls--symphonies, sonatas, concertos,
fantasies, rhapsodies, overtures, prayers, requiems, meditations,
minuets--and something of that rising power of gratitude overcame him,
as only once before in his life--when he had realized that the Bible
was all _words_, and they were for him. From the first studious
marvellings, Bedient's mind lifted to adoring gratefulness in which he
could have kissed the hands of the toilers who had made this instrument
answer their dreams. Then, he fell deeply into misgiving. It seemed
almost a sacrilege for him to take music so cheaply; that he had not
earned such joy. But he could praise them in his heart, and he did with
every sound.
The orchestrelle unfolded to a spirit like this. Doubtless his early
renderings of random choice were weird, but more and more as he went
on, the great living things righted themselves in his consciousness,
for he had ear and soul and love for them. Some great fissure in his
nature had long needed thus to be filled. He sent for books about the
great composers; descriptions of the classics; how the themes were
developed through different instruments. Then he wanted the history of
all music; and for weeks his receptivity never faltered. No neophyte
ever brought a purer devotion to the masters. His first loves--the
_Andante in F_, the three movements of the _Kreutzer Sonata_, a prayer
from _Otello_, the _Twelfth_ _Rhapsody,_ the _Swan Song_ and the
_Evening Star_, and finally _Isolde's Triumph over Death_--these were
ascendings, indeed--to the point of wings.
The stops so formidable at first became as stars in the dark.... Little
loves, little fears and sins and hopes were all he had known before;
and now he entered into the torrential temperaments of the
masters--magnificent and terrifying souls who dared to sin against God,
or die defying man; whose passions stormed the world; whose dirges were
wrung from heaven. Why, these men levelled emperors and aspired to
angels, violated themselves, went mad with music, played with hell's
own dissonances, and dared to transcribe their baptisms, illuminations,
temptations, Gethsemanes, even their revilings and stigmata.
The dirges lifted him to immensity from which the abysses of the world
spread themselves below. Two marches of Chopin, and the death-march of
Siegfried, the haunting suggestion of a soul's preparation for
departure in Schubert's _Unfinished_; the _Death of Aase_, the
_Pilgrim's Chorus_, one of Mozart's requiems, and that Napoleonic
_funèbre_ from the _Eroica_--these, with others, grouped themselves
into an unearthly archipelago--towering cliffs of glorious gloom, white
birds silently sweeping the gray solitudes above the breakers....
It was during the four days while Captain Carreras remained in Coral
City with Jaffier, that Bedient entered into the mysterious enchantment
of the _Andante_ movement of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony. He had played
it all, forgetting almost to breathe, and then returned to the second
movement which opens with the 'celli:
[Illustration: Musical notation]
Again and again it unfolded for him, but not its full message. There
was a meaning in it _for him_! He heard it in the night; three voices
in it--a man, a woman and a soul.... The lustrous third Presence was an
angel--there for the sake of the woman. She was in the depths, but
great enough to summon the angel to her tragedy. The man's figure was
obscure, disintegrate.... Bedient realized in part at least that this
was destined to prove his greatest musical experience....
Captain Carreras found much to do in the city, but he did not tell
Bedient that the real reason for his remaining four days was that he
couldn't sooner summon courage for the long ride home. He spoke but
little regarding the reasons Jaffier had called him.
"He's afraid of Celestino Rey, and likely has good reason," said the
Captain wearily. "The old pirate is half-dead below the knees, but his
ugly ambition still burns bright. He thinks he ought to be drawing all
the Island tributes, instead of the government. Jaffier expects
assassination. On this point, it would be well to watch for the death
of Rey. These two old hell-weathered Spaniards are worth watching--each
tossing spies over the other's fences, and openly conducting affairs
with melting courtesy toward each other--but I don't seem to have much
appetite for the game. There was a time when I would have stopped work
and helped Jaffier whip this fellow. But I hardly think he'll take our
harvests and the river-beds just yet--"
They talked late. The Captain alternated from his bed to a chair,
seemed unwilling for Bedient to leave and unable to sleep or find ease
anywhere. He was over-tired, he explained, and hearing about Bedient's
experience with the _Andante con moto_, insisted upon it being played
that night....
"It's very soothing," Carreras said, when Andrew returned to the upper
apartment. "I think I can sleep now. Off to bed with you, lad."
So lightly did Bedient sleep, however,--for the music haunted his
brain,--that he was aroused by the bare feet of a servant in the
hall-way, before the latter touched his door to call him. Captain
Carreras had asked for him. The glow of dawn was in the old man's
quarters, and he smiled in a queer, complacent way from his bed, as if
a long-looked-for solution to some grave problem had come in the night,
and he wanted his friend to guess. A hand lifted from the coverlet, and
Bedient's sped to it; yet he saw that something more was wanted. The
Captain's shoulder nudged a little, and the smile had become wistful.
He did not fail to understand the need, but other realizations were
pressing into his brain. So the Captain nudged his shoulder again
bashfully. Bedient bent and took him in his arms.
It was death. Bedient had known it from the first instant of entering,
but he was not prepared. He could not speak--only look into the tender,
glowing smile. Captain Carreras finally turned his eyes into the
morning:
"You know it was very foolish of me--very--to think I could make you
happy, Andrew, with all these riches," he said at last, not thickly,
but very low, as if he had saved strength for what he wished to say....
"You were a long time coming, but I knew you would come--knew it would
be just like this--in your arms. Queer, isn't it? And all the waiting
years, I kept piling up lands and money, saying: 'This shall be his
when he comes.'... It was a little hard at first to know you didn't
care--you couldn't care--that one, and ten, were all the same to you.
And last night, I saw it all again. Had I brought you word that
Celestino Rey had the government and that confiscation of these lands
were inevitable, you would never have compared it in importance with
finding that part of the symphony. It's all right. I wouldn't have it
changed...."
Andrew listened with bowed head, patting the Captain's shoulder gently,
as he sustained.
"But I have given you more than money, boy. And this you know--as a
man, who knew money better, could never understand. I have given you an
old man's love for a son--but more than that, too,--something of the
old man's love for the mother of his son.... I thought only women had
the delicacy and fineness--you have shown me, sir.... It is all done,
and you have made me very glad for these years--since the great wind
failed to get us--"
Then he mingled silences with sentences that finally became
aimless--seas, ships, cooks, and the boy who had nipped him from the
post he meant to hold--and a final genial blending of goats and
symphonies, on the borders of the Crossing. Then he nestled, and
Bedient felt the hand he had taken, try to sense his own through the
gathering cold.... It was very easy and beautiful--and so brief that
Bedient's arm was not even tired.
An hour afterward, Falk came in for orders--and withdrew.
Bedient had merely nodded to him from the depths of contemplation....
At last, he heard the weeping of the house-servants. And there was one
low wailing tone that startled him with the memory of the Sikh woman
who had wept for old Gobind.
EIGHTH CHAPTER
THE MAN FROM _THE PLEIAD_
Bedient drew from Falk a few days afterward that the Captain had
planned almost exactly as it happened. Since the beginnings of unrest
in Equatoria, he had transferred his banking to New York; so that in
the event of defeat in war, only the lands and _hacienda_ would revert,
upon the fall of the present government. Falk could not remember (and
his services dated back fifteen years, at which time he left Surrey
with the Captain) when the master did not speak of Bedient's coming.
"But for your letters, sir, Leadley and I would have come to think of
you as--as just one of the master's ways, Mister Andrew."
Falk was a middle-aged serving-class Englishman, highly trained and
without humor. Leadley, the cook, and a power in his department, dated
also from Surrey, which was his county. These men had learned to handle
the natives to a degree, and the entire responsibility of the
establishment had fallen upon them during the absences of the Captain.
As chief of house-servants and as cook, these two at their best were
faultless, but the life was very easy, and they were given altogether
too many hands to help. Moreover, Falk and Leadley belonged to that
queer human type which proceeds to burn itself out with alcohol if left
alone. The latter years of such servants become a steady battle to keep
sober enough for service. Each man naturally believed himself an
admirable drinker.