NATURE INDULGES IN SATIRE
Though I am not giving authorship to this narrative with a view to its
general perusal, I am determined so to write it that if other eyes do
chance upon it they may read the true records of a man's emotions under
those circumstances.
I shall never be able to coax myself into any illusion of heroism in my
adventures and I shall set down my most abject terrors in equal and
impartial degree with the few occasions in which the instinct of
self-preservation enabled me to rise to the need and bluff
magnificently.
The case of the submarine commander of Nippon was different. He wished
to leave behind him such a message as an Emperor might read, and with
exalted devotion to his object, he left it. Still, had some miracle
brought his vessel to the surface before the end, who knows but that, in
the confessional of his own memory, he might have acknowledged a very
delirium of terror? Who knows but that between the period of one
unflinching paragraph and the capital of the next, there may have been
intervals of wallowing in the trough of physical despair?
At least with me there were many fears. The night went by a road of
nightmare and thirst which led to no haven of rest. I slept fitfully and
in terror, and awoke at its end to a feeling of exhaustion. For a while
I dreaded to rise and face the possibilities of a new day. It was only
the burning torture of thirst that finally outweighed panic and drove me
in search of water. I held timidly to the shore, distrusting the jungle
and dodging furtively from rock to rock, with straining eyes and ears.
Climbing among the ragged boulders which were strewn like fragments of
fallen masonry at the foot of the cliff, I shortly came upon a thread of
clear water, where I lay and slaked my thirst. After that came a renewed
freshness and a sudden return of vigor. I began also to feel a healthful
hunger, and when, in clambering to the top of a steep rock, I frightened
a shrieking gull from her nest, I fell avidly on the eggs she left
behind.
As the sun climbed, a tepid humidity freighted the air, but the
trade-wind, rising steadily and freshly, tempered it and stirred the
delicate fronds of palm and fern.
The cliff was honeycombed with small irregular caverns and rifts. Some
were mere grottoes, but others went back into somber recesses deeper
than I, with no means of lighting my steps, cared to explore. For my
dwelling place I selected one that broadened from a twisted and narrow
fissure to a crude chamber large enough for a wolf's den, or at need a
man's refuge. A fern-fringed brooklet trickled across the opening.
For my door yard I had a small plateau with a sheer wall of cliff at my
back and a steep drop at the front. One must climb to reach the place
which is an advantage where the tenant may desire to roll stones down
upon the heads of his visitors.
The _Wastrel_ must have gone to the bottom near by, for incoming tides
from time to time deposited on my shore strange and satirical scraps of
flotsam. The sardonic humor of the sea mocked me by delivering on my
beach a tattered fragment of old newspaper and an empty biscuit tin.
It was two days after my arrival that I discovered some bulky thing
lodged, as my raft had been, upon the near-by rocks. The two days had
told upon me. My pajamas were in ribbons; my canvas shoes torn, and my
flesh bruised. My feet, too, were cut and blistered and my hands raw. I
had already tired of talking aloud to myself and more and more often I
caught myself turning with a sudden start to peer apprehensively at the
fringe of the forest. To my growing morbidness it seemed that over the
beauty of the place hung an impalpable but certain curse. I waded out
eagerly to the fresh bit of salvage and found a seaman's chest with
quaintly knotted handles of tarred rope. It was of stout workmanship and
its heavy locks and hinges had endured without injury the buffeting of
the sea. The name of J. H. Lawrence still legible upon one end brought
back with startling vividness the memory of a man waiting with stoical
amusement the coming of death. Laboriously enough I dragged it in,
halting often to pant and wipe the sweat out of my eyes with my forearm.
The sun was sinking over the shoulder of the mountain when I at last
arrived, exhausted but still tugging at my prize, upon the plateau of my
cliff apartment. I lay a long while, my heart pounding with exertion,
before I was equal to the task of attacking its lock with a stone and my
sheath knife, and after that it was some moments before the lock yielded
and I raised the heavy lid. First there met my eyes a scattered
collection of souvenir postcards, much discolored and faded, but
sufficiently preserved to awaken a clamor of protest and longing. There
were tantalizing pictures of the Cafe de Paris and Trafalgar Square and
the _bund_ at Hong Kong.
Young Mr. Lawrence must have been a confirmed souvenir-buyer. I could
trace his odyssey by trivial things he had picked up here and there.
Two curved daggers with turquoise settings in the hilt had come from the
bazaars of Damascus or Jerusalem. A copper incense-burner with a package
of scented tapers had been brought from Tokio or Nagasaki. Equally
useless things filled package after package.
No mission chest piously outfitted at home ever carried to the remote
heathen a more useless assortment of unnecessaries than this one brought
to me. There was not a shirt, not an article of utility, only trinkets
as serviceable as doll-babies to a prizefighter. At last, however, I
came upon two packages carefully wrapped in sail-cloth. So painstaking
and secure had been their packing that when I took off the first
covering and the second, I found that the contents had suffered no
wetting.
The first bundle contained the violin which had incensed the captain and
several packages of extra strings. As I took it out, I seemed to hear
again its plaintive, wordless song and I laid it down reverently. It
seemed a part of the dead man's soul--something intimate and wonderful
which had outlasted his mortality.
In the second package was something wrapped in tissue paper and very
soft to the touch. I opened it and spread out on the sand a gorgeously
wrought Mandarin kimono. Its silk was of the heaviest and richest
quality and its design flamed with the unstinted opulence of Chinese
embroidery. On the flowing sleeves and bordered panels were storks of
blue and silver flying among poppy-like flowers of crimson purple. There
were also delicately worked streams and reeds and moons, all tangled up
with ranting dragons of gold, gazing fiercely out from eyes of inset
jade. Gold thread, silver thread, silk thread, cunningly combined to the
making of its dazzling pattern.
Some celestial dignitary had once ordered its embroidering and, perhaps,
had ridden upon his palanquin garbed in its splendor with the pride of a
peacock in his narrow, slanting eyes. It seemed to me, kneeling there in
my torn pajamas, my knees and elbows bruised, my stomach rebelling
against rank food, that I could see the whole picture of which this
garment had once been a brilliant detail. There were shouting coolies
running ahead with huge bamboo staves to clear the way. The grandee's
chair, crusted with carving, was borne along in state. I could picture
paper lanterns swinging from slender poles and plum blossoms awave and
smell the heavy reek of burning incense, and at the thought of all this
arrogant luxury I suffered as though I were struggling through a
nightmare. The young derelict of the _Wastrel_ had, in all likelihood,
bargained for it and haggled over its cost in an Oriental shop. He had
finally bought it for a gift to a wife or sweetheart, and even with
capable bargaining it must have been a purchase beyond his means. Now
in futile magnificence it lay outspread before me who was sea-wrecked
and fighting hunger. In the same package, however, I found my first
useful articles: a small block of those miniature matches that one may
buy in the Chinatown sections of San Francisco or New York, which burn
with an odious reek of sulphur. It was doubtless because they partook of
the quality of a curiosity that he had preserved them.
There was also one of those slung-shots such as may be bought along
water fronts where seamen foregather: a small leather sack, loaded with
shot and suspended from a wrist-strap.
At the extreme bottom of the package, carefully preserved between two
sheets of thick cardboard, lay a page torn from a newspaper. It was on
that heavy, glossed paper which some journals use for their pictorial
sections and was covered with miscellaneous illustrations.
I was on the point of throwing the thing away, when some impulse led me
to turn it over. What I saw altered and remoulded all my life from that
moment forward.
A curtain of dusk was beginning to fall upon the hinterland at the edge
of the forest. The fringe of cane and palm was filling up with shadow
and the peak of the volcano was brooding against a sky of burnished
copper.
When I turned the sheet it was as though I had come face to face with an
actual personality where a moment ago there had been nothing animate.
Of course it was only because the art of photographer and engraver had
ably abetted each other, but the portrait which worthily filled the
seven columns of glazed paper was a marvel of lifelike presentment--and
of indescribable loveliness.
There are authenticated cases, in plenty, of men who have loved a face
seen only in a picture. The Mona Lisa of da Vinci has laid over many
beholders the hypnotic spell of the long-dead woman immortalized upon
its canvas. Pygmalion loved his Galatea. I fancy that, if the truth were
told, I loved in that first flash of view the lady who smiled out at me
from the lifelessness of ink and paper. The margins of the sheet had
been so close trimmed at the top that no date or caption remained, but
beneath, the scissors had left two words: "Miss Frances--" and with
these two words I must content myself.
But for the picture itself.
I have already confessed my passionate reverence for beauty. Here before
me was beauty of the purest type I have ever been privileged to see. It
was not the brush magic of a gifted painter who has caught from a lovely
model the charm of line and color and canonized them with idealization.
It lacked all the fire with which the palette might have kindled it. It
recorded nothing more than the lens had seen, yet its flawlessness
required no aid of art and asked no odds of color.
Her clear, young eyes smiled out at me with a miracle of graciousness.
Her perfectly curving lips were graver, and if possible sweeter than her
eyes. Her chin and throat were exquisitely modeled. Her hair was
abundantly massed and heavy. I could guess from the photographic tones
that its coils and escaping tendrils of curl, varied in shifting lights
between the red warmth of gold and the amber of clear honey.
But what most made this a remarkable photograph was its living quality.
So vital was the effect as one looked, that it seemed a palpitant
personality of breath and soul. The lips might be trembling on the verge
of speech and in the quiet smile hovered a delightful hint of whimsical
humor. The whole bearing was queenly with that gracious pride which we
characterize as royal when we speak of royalty as something inherently
noble. For the accolade of a smile from those lips, in the flesh, a man
might undertake all manner of folly. The young woman was in evening
dress and at her throat hung a rope of pearls.
Suddenly a transport of rage and a bitterness of contrast possessed me.
My hair was matted, my arms and hands raw and blackened with blood and
grime. I was the picture of abandoned misery. The satirical gods now set
Tantalus-wise before my eyes a picture of beauty and ease and
shelter--a pretty woman in the charming fripperies of evening dress.
But while I scowled, her eyes smiled back into my own, challenging in me
the vagabond spirit of the whimsical, until I too smiled.
I bowed to the picture.
"You are quite right," I said aloud. "Since it is impossible to alter
the situation, the only sane course is to recognize its humor. While we
are together here, I shall regard you as a living person. It shall be
our effort to turn this poor jest on the high gods who are its authors."
It almost seemed to me that the lips parted and the eyes danced
approvingly.
"Frances," I added, "I may call you Frances, may I not, in view of the
informality of our circumstances?--you are gorgeous. It was good of you
to come to keep me company. I needed you."
The air held a twilight stillness upon which my words fell clamorously.
I realized that I had not before spoken aloud for more than a day. Into
the ensuing silence came a new and alarming sound. It was half human and
incoherent, like a number of voices at a distance. I felt my muscles
grow rigid and choked off a half-animal growl that rose involuntarily in
my throat. Instinctively I was whipping the revolver from its holster
and slipping forward, crouched in the protection of a rock, my eyes
turned toward the jungle. Vaguely lurking in the gathering fog of
shadow, where the palms began, were some eight or ten figures. It was
impossible in the waning light to make out what sort of creatures they
were, but they moved with a soft prowling tread that was disquieting.
After a little while they melted out of sight, but until past midnight I
sat my eyes alertly fixed on the tangled dark, while the low-hung stars
paraded across the sky.