PREMONITIONS BECOME REALITIES
At last, running back to the start, we tracked him down and with his
discovery came disappointment. I had realized that she had been dressing
a mere lay-figure in garments of idealized manhood and endowing an
unknown with a panoply of the chivalric to which he could probably lay
no rightful claim. Still it was disconcerting to realize that he had, in
the flesh, contributed absolutely nothing to the picture. She had simply
devised from the whole cloth of imagination a collaborative sum of
Galahad the Pure and Richard the Lion-Hearted. She had seen him only
once in later years--from the sidelines of a Yale-Harvard football game.
He was playing with the crimson and she was at the impressionable age.
There was the whole and meager foundation for his apotheosis. She did
not state the year, but she gave the score, and by that I identified the
occasion.
"I devoutly pray," I confided to young Mansfield, "that she never meets
him. She has fed herself on dreams. I hope she doesn't wake up."
Mansfield promptly took up the unknown hero's defense. He invariably
held a brief for the idealist.
"Why do you assume that he's a bounder?" he demanded almost resentfully.
"He may be all she thinks."
"I don't assume anything," I retorted, "but I happened to play on that
team myself and I am compelled to admit, though with chagrin, that we
had among us no knights from Arthur's Round Table. Warriors of ferocity
we had; young gentlemen who played the game to the lasting glory of John
Harvard; but this letter-perfect type of chivalry, valor and gentleness
well, I'm afraid he failed to make the team."
You remember the story of Bruce and the spider? In his ermine,
surrounded by his stalwart barons, Robert would probably have learned no
lesson from the weaving of filmy webs. Alone and in peril, it taught him
how to conquer. To us, alone and in peril, this diary assumed an epochal
importance entirely out of kelter with its face value.
Of course, there were many topics which we might have discussed to
divert our minds from morbidly watching the cloud of impending mutiny
spread and grow inky. But the cloud was present and human, and the diary
was present and human, and we were present and human. Whether or not we
were creatures of atrophied brains and distorted vision is an academic
question. The fact remains. For us there was genuine relief in turning
from the miasma of brooding doom which overhung the _Wastrel_ to the
spiced fragrance of this self-revealed personality. It was a clean
breeze into our asphyxiation. It was a momentary excursion out of a
noisome dungeon into an old-fashioned garden, where roses nod and
illusions bloom.
One steaming night when darkness had stopped our reading, the two of us
were lying flat on our backs--and silent--in the enveloping shadows of
the forward deck near the capstan. A group of men who were off watch had
gathered near us, seeking the gratefulness of the uninterrupted breeze.
With no suspicion of our proximity, they fell into a low-pitched but
violent conference.
Hoak held the floor as spokesman, and his deep whispering voice was raw
with bitterness.
"We hain't no bloomin' galley-slyves," he growled. "Blyme me, I say,
let's make a hend o' the 'ole bloody mess once and for hall."
"How?" came the natural question from one of the more conservative.
"'Ow?" retorted the ringleader, "W'at's the odds 'ow? Any way will do.
Rush the cabin. There's a stand of rifles at the for'ard bulkhead. Kill
hoff the bloody lot of hofficers. Navigate the bloomin' ole 'ooker back
ourselves and report whatever damn thing we like."
"How about these passengers? They'd snitch," suggested the same
questioner.
"Aw no," sarcastically assured Hoak, "they won't snitch. They won't 'ave
no more charnce to snitch than Coulter 'isself--damn 'im."
For a moment I felt a steaming throb in my throat. Then came a new
sensation, something like relief that at last the clear outline was
looming through the fog of maddening uncertainty. It did not seem to
matter so much what the certainty was, so long as it brought an end to
the suspense. There was some discussion in hushed voices. Caution had
its advocates who opposed so desperate a course.
"Think it hover till to-morrow," said Hoak at last. "But hif you don't
stand by me Hi'm going to cut loose a boat and tyke to the water. To
'ell with the _Wastrel_ an' her rotter of a captain."
There was a sudden hush followed by a sort of low chorused groan. Around
the superstructure of the forward cabin appeared Captain Coulter, his
first officer and the chief engineer. For an instant they stood
silently, flashing electric torches into the terrified faces of the
conspirators who, like schoolboys caught denouncing their teacher,
shuffled their feet and remained speechless.
Hoak, alone, took a step forward. His face was working spasmodically in
the bull's-eye glare which exaggerated the high lights on his snarling
teeth and the black shadows of his scowl. He wavered for an instant
between his personal dread of Coulter, and the knowledge that, with so
much already known, caution was futile. While he hesitated the other men
tacitly grouped themselves together at his back and stood sullenly eying
the officers. Coulter and his two subordinates slipped their hands into
their pockets. It was a tense moment and a noiseless one. When the
captain broke silence his voice was cool, almost casual.
"Mr. Kirkenhead," he ordered the chief engineer, "take this man Hoak to
the stokehold, and keep him there until we reach port. Give him double
shift and if he makes a false move--kill him."
The giant made a passionate start forward, and found himself looking
down the barrel of Coulter's magazine pistol. From the glint of the
raised weapon he bounced backward against the rail, where he leaned
incoherently snarling like a cornered dog.
"Hi didn't sign as no blymed stoker," he growled at last. "Hi won't
go----"
"The stokehold or hell, it's up to you." Coulter's reply came in an
absolute monotony of voice strangely at variance with the passionate
stress of their labored breathing. Back of the tableau gleamed the
phosphorescence of the placid sea. "There's thirty seconds to decide.
Mr. Kirkenhead, look at your watch."
For a seeming eternity there was waiting and bated breath. We could hear
the muffled throb of the engines, and the churning of the screws.
Then Kirkenhead announced, "Twenty seconds, sir."
A moment more and Hoak turned, dropping his head in utter dejection and
shambled aft toward the engine-room companionway.
"Mr. Heffernan," came the captain's staccato orders, "instruct the
ship's carpenter to scuttle all the boats, except the port and starboard
ones on the bridge. If we are to have any little disagreements on board
we will settle them among ourselves. No one will leave in my boats
except by my orders. And"--he wheeled on the men--"whenever you vermin
feel inclined for trouble--start it."
So that incident passed and went to swell the cumulative poison of
festering hatred. We knew that the eruption had merely been delayed;
that it must inevitably come and that now its coming would be soon.
Between forward and aft war had been declared. Later that same evening I
made bold to remonstrate with Captain Coulter as to the order
concerning the boats. The conversation took place on the bridge--and it
was brief.
"Mr. Mansfield and myself," I said, "are passengers who have paid full
fares and we are entitled to full rights. We demand protection. This
hulk is rotten and unseaworthy. When you scuttle her boats you are
throwing the parachute out of a leaky balloon."
Coulter looked me over for a moment and replied with absolute composure.
"Mr. Deprayne, rights are good things--when you can enforce them.
Consulates and courts of admiralty are a long way off. The intervening
water is quite deep. If you don't like the _Wastrel_, leave it. I'm
sorry I can't spare you a boat to leave in."
Mansfield and myself went that night in the miserable cabin which we
shared oppressed with the conviction that the breaking point was at
hand. Mansfield had suddenly sloughed off his boyishness and become
unexpectedly self-contained, giving the impression of capability. The
prospect of action had changed him. Once more he began to quote his
ghastly verses, but now without shuddering, almost cheerfully.
"''Twas a cutlass swipe or an ounce of lead,
Or a yawning hole in a battered head--
And the scuppers glut with a rotting red.'"
Then he remembered that sometimes men survive strange adventures, and he
wrote a letter to the girl in Sussex which he asked me to deliver in the
event that I, and not he, should prove such a survivor. I fastened it
with a pin into the pocket of my pajama jacket. For hours after we had
turned into our berths each of us knew that the other was not sleeping.
We heard the crazy droning of the sick engine; the wash of the quiet
water; the straining of the timbers.
We had not, on turning in, followed our usual custom of blowing out the
vile-smelling oil lamp which gave our stateroom its only illumination.
Neither of us had spoken of it, but we left the light burning probably
in tacit presentiment that this was to be a night of some portentous
development, and one not to be spent in darkness. Mansfield pretended to
sleep in the upper berth, but after vainly courting dreams for an hour,
I slipped out of mine and crept to the fresher air of the deck.
When I returned to the cabin, still obsessed with restless wakefulness,
I found the diary, and throwing myself into my bunk, spent still another
hour in its perusal. I had long ago laid by my early scruples and now I
found in its pages a quality strangely soothing.
Singularly enough, in all our fragmentary reading between these limp
covers, we had never pursued any consecutive course and though certain
passages had been re-read until I fancy both of us could have quoted
them from memory, there still remained others upon which we had not
touched. For me in my present condition of jumping nerves they offered
fields of quieting exploration. Now, for a time, I skipped about,
reading here and there passages in no way connected. There was a highly
humorous description of a certain Frenchman who had insistently shadowed
the course of the girl's travels about the Continent, inflicting on her
an homage which it seemed to me must have been more offensive than
actual rudeness. She did not give his name, but her description of his
appearance and eccentricities was so droll and keenly appreciative that
even my strained lips curled into a grin of enjoyment in the perusal. He
had a coronet to bestow and she likened his attitude and bearing to that
of a crested cock robin. "To-night," she wrote, "_monsieur le comte_
proposed for my hand--to Mother. I was in the next room and heard it. To
hear one's self proposed to by proxy is quite the most amusing thing
that can happen. When he asks me I shall inform him that I've already
given my heart to another man--a man who hasn't asked me and may never
ask me. Yes, he will, too. He _must_. It is in my horoscope. 'The
Heavens rolled between us at the end, we shall but vow the faster for
the stars.' This little Frenchman needs an heiress and it might as well
be me--but it won't be."
This was the first intimation that the unknown author of these pages was
possessed of wealth as well as beauty. In a vague way I found myself
regretting the discovery, although I could not say why. Through these
pages breathed the distinction of a piquant and subtly charming
personality--the fact that she had fortune as well, could add nothing.
But as I read the paragraphs devoted to her odyssey across the continent
and around the borders of the Mediterranean, shadowed always by this
persistent suitor with his picayune title, it struck me that her
itinerary and the order of her going tallied with my own wanderings. Yet
that might have no significance, since the routes of European touring
are distressingly devoid of variation.
The finger of destiny had seemed to concern itself in the fashion in
which I had always just missed the lady of Naples, Monte Carlo and Cairo
by a margin of seconds and of untoward circumstance. If my Fate were
playing with me in this manner it appeared consistent with its policy of
tantalizing evasiveness that she and the writer might be the same. When
I had given up the pursuit and come away to this remote quarter of the
globe it might still be decreed that I should not escape her influence.
Having skipped about for a time in such haphazard fashion, the idea
seized me of going back to the beginning and reading from the
commencement down to the present.
In the first pages of course I encountered a certain immature crudity of
composition and yet, in spite of these things, there was much here of
the charming fascination of childhood and the beginnings of character.
If the later sections were as fragrant as flowers, the earlier passages
were like the annals of rosebuds and blossoms. I believe I have already
mentioned that in her childhood she had been something of a tomboy. Her
interests had seemed to include many things which might quite naturally
have belonged to the enthusiasms of her brothers. Also one read between
the lines that her charming sense of humor and self-containment had
developed upon overcome tendencies toward passionate temper. A certain
passage had to do with her experience at a girls' boarding-school when
she was probably not more than ten or eleven. One of the teachers--an
unimpeachable lady of great learning and little human perception, it
would seem--had aroused her intense disfavor. There were various
references to this feud and also, even so early, to the mysterious
person vaguely alluded to as He. The principal of the school harbored a
bull terrier of rather uncertain temper. This brute, save for total
fealty to his mistress and to the writer of the diary, seemed to hold in
his nature only distrust for humanity, and among those specially singled
out for his antipathy was the aforementioned teacher.
One day the writer and the dog had met the preceptress on the avenue.
The girl had set down with great glee, the terror with which her enemy
had appealed to her for protection against the onslaughts of the dreaded
Cerberus.
"I told her that I would hold him," naively related the entry, in a
sprawling, childish hand, "and I did hold him until she was _almost_ at
the gate--but when I let him go I gave him a little sound advice and he
took it."
There followed a vivid description, done into mirth-provoking humor, of
the somewhat strenuous events of the next twenty or thirty seconds. A
section of black alpaca skirt remained with the dog as a memento.
"Of course," commented the writer, "I couldn't laugh freely until I got
back to the house, but I am laughing now. She looked so absurd! As I
came in I saw Him ride by on horseback. I'm afraid he wouldn't approve."
The description of that teacher had reminded me strongly of my good Aunt
Sarah. The explanation that the dog had been the child's friend merely
because she had refused to be afraid, was so convincingly put that I
found myself in guilty accord with her point of view. In a dozen ways,
despite this single instance, she showed that her pity and tenderness
were very genuine and sensitive, and easily reached by any true appeal.
This going back to the beginning enabled me to meet, on the occasion of
his first appearance, the man who had exercised such a strong influence
upon her subsequent life. In this I was pleased, for it showed that
however imaginary may have been his aura of ideality, none the less it
had basis in something more substantial than a glimpse of a football
game. There was, too, an element touching and almost pathetic in this
earliest self-confessed love. He was when she first saw him, eighteen or
nineteen, and she half as old. This disparity in age had put a chasm
between them which it did not occur to her that the years would bridge.
He was just at that self-sufficient age, when he regarded himself as
very much a man and short-skirted, pigtailed females as very far beneath
his mature devotion. Yet, in his patronizing way, he had been decently
kind and had jeopardized his standing as a man-of-the-world by
impersonal courtesies to a little girl. His influence had accordingly
grown strong and permanent, though he had not known of its existence.
She had enviously watched him with girls a few years her senior and had
admired his frank, sportsmanlike attitude and freedom from callow
freshness--and his courage. She said quite frankly in the diary that she
did not suppose he had remembered her at all.
And so, as I lay sleepless and oppressed by presentiment of disaster, I
read from childhood to young womanhood her chronicle of ideals until,
under the soothing of the document, I at last fell into a doze.