THE MAN'S MAN
Unflecked blue sky above, with a blazing white sun in it. A mighty
mountain peak, with bald summit, seamed sides mantled with greenery,
and round its waist, where it sat in the water, a narrow band of
gleaming white sand and tufted cocoa-palms, like an Island woman's
girdle. A smooth, dark, ruffled mirror of lagoon; and farther out,
with gaps here and there, a barrier reef on which the hungry sea chafed
and roared in ceaseless thunder. Two white men and a menacing crowd of
brown ones.
"Ready?" asked the elder of the two men.
He was tall and thin, white-haired and grey-bearded, and his eyes shone
like stars. His face was bronzed with much sun. There was a glow in
it which did not come from the sun, a mighty determination which did
not come from mere strength of will, a sweet white soul-fire which had
made him a power throughout the islands of the Southern Seas.
"I am ready," said the younger man.
His face was brown also, but not bronzed. There was a lighter patch of
tightened skin above each cheek-bone. His jaw was set so grimly that
it looked aggressive. His lips were tightly closed. His eyes were
unnaturally wide at the moment. He looked slightly raised--fey, in
fact, as a man looks when he and death meet face to face in a narrow
way.
In front, the crowd of Islanders stood waiting for them at an angle of
rock where the white beach curved round into the land. They carried
clubs and spears, and swung them restlessly. Behind, on the smooth
reflexive swell of the lagoon, a white boat, just pushed off from the
shore, rode like a seabird with wings outstretched for swoop or flight.
Farther out a waiting schooner, whose white sails shivered softly to a
head breeze.
"Remember, my son," said the elder man quietly, "one sign of flinching
and it is finished. Now let us go." He bared his white head and said
softly, "In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Spirit,"
and went up towards the dark men like the courteous Christian gentleman
he was. The younger man did the same.
[Illustration: One sign of flinching and it is finished.]
The natives drew back round the rock; the white men followed. The men
in the boat watched intently, and then listened and gazed at the angle
of the rock. Their orders were to wait.
The two men passed out of sight, the elder, quiet and calm, as if going
for a stroll in his mission garden, the younger, strung to martyr
pitch, ready to endure to the utmost. The islanders retreated foot by
foot; the white men followed steadily. Then, suddenly, clubs whirled
and spears bristled, and the brown men turned and rolled on the white
like a flood, and parted them.
The elder man stood and eyed them steadfastly. He had been through it
many times before. Death and he had been old friends and
fellow-travellers for many a year, and the passing of The Gate was to
him but the entrance to a larger life. He spoke to them in words he
thought they might understand. For a moment the two men were like two
white rocks in a foaming mountain stream. Brown arms, clubs, spears
whirled about them. Not one man in ten thousand could have stood it
unmoved.
The white-haired man was such a one. He stood. The younger man's face
broke; the strings had been drawn too tight. He cast one swift glance
round.
In an instant the silvery crown beside him ran blood, and disappeared.
With bent head inside his folded arms the younger man dashed at the
throng, and sent the brown men spinning, as he had sent men of a
brawnier breed spinning on the football field at home. He burst
through them in spite of blows and cuts. He was close up to the wild
eddy under which his old friend lay when a well-flung club caught him
deftly in the neck and brought him down in a heap. The brown men
danced madly, and let their shouts go up. They took the younger man by
the heels, and dragged him to where the body of the elder lay, and
flung him down on top of it. Then the sailors from the boat burst on
them with a yell, and sent them scattering.
It was days before he recovered consciousness, weeks before he could
lie in a chair on the verandah of the distant mission-house--weak from
loss of blood, weaker still in other ways.
They tended him lovingly. There were gracious women there who
ministered to him like angels. To them he was hero, saint, martyr but
once removed. To himself----!
He was almost too weak to think about it yet. He was hacked to pieces,
and bruised to pulp. When he tried to move, it seemed to him that not
one sound inch of flesh was left him. When he tried to think, all the
little blood that was left in him rushed up into his head and set it
humming and buzzing, and dyed his face crimson under the partly
bleached tan.
His mind was still in a state of confusion; his thoughts were almost as
broken as his body. He remembered facing the bristling brown men. He
could see their shaggy heads and twisted faces, their white teeth,
their gleaming eyes, and the whirl of their brandished weapons. After
that all was blurred, and broke off into sudden darkness. He had a dim
remembrance of intense strain and a sudden snap. He groped for the
ends of the broken threads, but they were hidden in the outer void. He
was still very weak.
He accepted gratefully all that was done for him, but for the most part
lay in silence. His sufferings were great, but no word of complaint
ever passed his lips. If he had permitted himself any such, it would
have been that he still lived when his leader died. To all he was a
monument of patient resignation.
So great was his depression, and so slow his recovery, that it was
decided at last to send him home, as the only hope of full
recuperation. He acquiesced, as he had done in everything they
suggested, but in this matter with evident reluctance. He thought it
unlikely he would ever return. His heart had been in the work, but he
had been tried and found wanting. The work, he said to himself, was
for abler and more faithful hands.
So the mission schooner carried him to the nearest port of call, and in
due course he was lying in a deck chair carefully swathed in plaids,
and the great steamer bore him swiftly homewards.
The story of the martyrdom and of his heroic defence of his old friend:
how they two had gone up alone to the peaceful assault of an island of
the night; how he had fought for his leader till he could fight no
longer, and had fallen at last wounded to death across his dead
body,--it had all preceded him. The very sailors were proud to have
him on board. The officers made much of him in an undemonstrative way.
The ladies fluttered round his chair like humming-birds, and loaded him
with attentions.
And he suffered it all in silence. He was still very weak. How could
he turn his sick soul inside out to these strangers, and what good to
do so?
He had not yet decided what course to take when he got home. He had
thought and thought, till he was sick of thinking, sick of himself,
sick of life. Ah! why had he not died with the brave old man out there
on the shore of the creek behind the rocks? Why had his nerve given
way at that supreme moment? Why had this bitter cross been laid upon
him? Far better to have died--far easier, at all events. But easier
and better run opposite ways as a rule, and have little in common.
Should he confess the whole matter, and retire from the field and find
some other way of life? Truly he felt no call to any other work. This
had been the one desire of his life; he had grown from youth to manhood
in the hope of it. He believed he could still be of service when once
he got over the effects of his present fall. Should he not rather bury
the dead past, with God as only mourner, and start afresh?--to fail
once more when the strain came again, he said to himself with exceeding
bitterness. He grieved over his lapse as another might grieve over a
deliberate crime. But he postponed any final decision as to the future
till he should feel stronger in mind and body.
There was a noted writer on board, a realist of realists. He sought
impressions at first hand. He cultivated the sick man's acquaintance,
greatly to his discomfort.
"Mr. Blair," he said, sitting down by his side one day, "I would very
much like to know just how you felt, and what you thought of, when you
were fighting those brown devils. Won't you tell me?"
And the sick man roused himself for a moment, and looked at him with
that in his eye which the other comprehended not, and said slowly, "I
felt like the devil and I thought of the devil," and not another word
would he say. And the writer pondered much on the saying, but never
got to the bottom of it or knew how true it was.
His people met him at the landing-place, the reverend father and the
white-haired mother, proud to be known even as the foster-parents of
such a son, grateful for one more sight of him in the flesh. How could
he break their hearts by telling them what a broken reed their trusted
one had proved? They rejoiced over him greatly, and said to one
another that as his strength came back the cloud that lay on his
spirits would be lifted. Their gentle encomiums stung him like darts.
But, by degrees, broken body and broken spirit were healed. Slowly and
thoughtfully he made up his mind that the past should be past. He
would go out again. He would take his stand in the forefront of the
battle in the hope of an honourable death--for he held his life forfeit
to the past.
Decision brings a certain peace of mind. He was happier than he had
been since he leaped out of the white boat on to the shore of the Dark
Island that morning--so long ago that it seemed to belong to a previous
life.
The old people said God-speed to his decision. They had possessed him
once again after giving him up for good. It was more than they had
ever hoped for. They were thankful.
All interested in mission work hailed his decision with enthusiasm. He
was common property and too big to be monopolised by any one sect.
They had not been able to make one quarter as much of him as they had
wished. He had quietly declined to be feted and lionised. They
considered he carried his modesty to too great an extreme. They would
have made capital out of him and kindled fresh enthusiasms for the
cause by the sight and sound of him. It was with the greatest
difficulty that he avoided it all, using the plea of ill-health till
his bodily appearance would no longer countenance it.
Once his decision was made known, however, they decided to drag him out
of his retirement, and by dint of persistent importunity prevailed on
him at last to appear at a public meeting. He consented with
reluctance, and only because it was represented to him as a matter of
duty.
As the time drew near he began to fear that he was in for more than he
had expected. But he had given his word, and he would not draw back.
There were clever men at the head of the movement. Thousands of
interested men and women were hungering for a sight of the
almost-martyr. They had seen his portrait in the illustrated
papers--how joyously the old mother had responded to the many requests
for it!--but they wanted to see him with their eyes and hear him with
their ears, and the younger folk were to remember all their lives that
they had done so. And so, without going into details with him, the
leaders of the various societies quietly arranged matters on a generous
scale. There were men of imagination among them too, and they prepared
a dramatic touch for the meeting which they calculated would make it go
with a swing. It went beyond their expectations.
When the young missionary stepped on to the platform he stopped short,
and for a moment looked almost as fey as he had done when he leaped out
of the white boat that morning on the beach of Dark Island. But there
must be no drawing back. He had flinched once--never again!
The chairman of the meeting was a philanthropic Cabinet Minister. As
he welcomed the hero of the hour the great audience rose and waved and
shouted.
The young man clasped the chairman's welcoming hand as though he were a
drowning man, and that hand the one only hope of safety. Then he sank
into the chair provided for him, and dropped his face into his hand.
All this was torture to him. Why could they not have let him go out
quietly to his work, to his death? No bristling mob of savages that
ever could confront him was half so appalling to him as that great
well-dressed crowd of enthusiastic men and women and children, gathered
to do him honour. Honour! And he before God a dishonoured man--a man
who had failed when the pinch came. He groaned in his heart, and
wished that he had not come.
But the chairman was speaking, speaking of him, and what he had
done--what he was supposed to have done--in warm, appreciative words
and flowing periods, and the audience was as still as a flower-garden
on a summer afternoon. In the young man's soul there was a great
stillness also, a stillness equal almost to that which had fallen on
him when he came out of the shadows and lay in the verandah of the
mission house.
His eyes wandered unseeingly over those solid banks of faces, all
turned on him in eulogy of what he had not done. Those thousands of
eyes seemed to pierce his soul.
One face caught his attention and held it, the face of a girl sitting
in the third row from the front. Even in his agony he recognised it,
as how could he help when it had been so constantly with him in his
thoughts. The smooth white brow, like a little slab of polished ivory;
the level brows; the large dark eyes looking up at him with something
akin to reverence--the beautiful eyes with lustrous points in them; the
sweet oval of the lower part of the face; the firm little chin and
slightly parted lips, emphasising the old inquiring look which he knew
so well: it was a face any man might remember with gratitude for the
mere sight of it. It was the face he had at once longed for the sight
of and feared to meet, since ever the thought of coming home had been
suggested to him. And now here it was, more beautiful than even his
dreams of it--inquiring, hopeful, trustful. And he must satisfy the
inquiry--and dash the hope, and shatter the trust for ever. Oh, it was
hard! It was grievously hard! His life laid down then and there would
have been a small price to pay for the confirmation of her belief in
him. And he must destroy it and still live on!
But what was this? The chairman had turned to him in his speech, the
flower-garden in front had suddenly become a fluttering snowbank.
"Mr. Blair does not happen to belong to that particular section of the
Church to which I belong, and which, as the State Church of the realm,
retains, and rightly retains, within its own hands the appointment of
its own high officers. There are some of us who, as we grow older, and
perhaps wiser, regret more and more that any differences should remain
among the followers of Christ. We would fain see them done away with.
We would cast down all fences and walls of partition, and meet our
Christian brothers and sisters on an absolute equality, on the common
platform of love and service to the one Master.
"This meeting to-night, of many sects with one common object, is one
step in the right direction--a great step. And here is another. The
necessity for a supreme hand and head in the guidance of the mission
enterprises of the Outer Islands is apparent to all. For such a
position we require a man of tried courage and endurance, a man who can
look death in the face without flinching, a man who holds his own life
of small account, and who is ready at any moment to lay it down in the
service of the cause he loves. Of such stuff martyrs are made. That
the man who has given us such signal proofs of his fidelity and courage
should be chosen for so onerous and so honourable a post is a matter of
great satisfaction to us all. Mr. Blair, as all the world knows, has
proved his fitness in a time of grievous danger and perplexity.--a time
which I do not hesitate to say would have tried the nerve of any man to
breaking-point, under a strain which might have broken any ordinary
man, and small blame to him. But here"--and he laid his hand upon
young Blair's shoulder--"we have the one man who did not break down,
and it is this man whom we would rejoice to recognise as the first
bishop of the Outer Islands. I am authorised to request Mr. Blair's
acceptance of this arduous and honourable post, without reference to
any question of form or creed. And that request is made, not in the
name or on behalf of my own Church only, but in the names and on behalf
of all the Churches represented by the missions to the Outer Islands.
It is a common point of union. Mr. Blair's acceptance of the post
will, perhaps, be one step towards that greater union of the Churches
to which we look hopefully forward, and I earnestly hope that he will
see fit to accept this joint and unanimous request of the Churches."
And he sat down with glowing face amidst thunders of applause.
And Kenneth Blair? Oh! why could they not have left him to work out
his redemption in quietness and silence? Now it was not possible.
Those thousands of eyes burnt into his soul. The words he had listened
to pierced him like two-edged swords. Silence was no longer possible.
To accept all this, as if it were his rightful due, was to hang a
millstone round his neck which would drag him down to perdition.
When the tumult died at last into silence, the young man got up and
stood and gripped the railing of the platform.
His face was white and set. "A man of indomitable will," they said.
His eyes burnt with a gloomy fire. "He has seen strange and terrible
things," they said.
He swayed slightly once or twice before he found his voice. "He has
been very near to death," they said.
And then he began to speak, quietly, as one who might need all his
strength before he was done; but there was a timbre in it, born of
outdoor speaking, which carried to the remotest corner, and a thrill in
it which found its way to every heart. And, of all that great
assembly, the only face he saw with any distinctness was the face of
the girl in the third row, with its calm brow and its lustrous
up-glance. He spoke to it. He watched it. If he could convince that
one face of all that was in him, he felt that it would be well with him.
In his emotion he overlooked all formalities. He found his voice at
last, and said, "My friends, the words I have just been listening to
have been to me as sword-thrusts through the heart."
The silence was intense. Every ear and every eye was upon him. He saw
only the calm, sweet face of the girl in the third row.
"I have a very terrible confession to make to you. Had I known what
was intended this evening I should not have been here, but no slightest
word of it reached me. My sole desire has been to get back to my work
out yonder, and to lay down my life in it. I have been told that I am
a man of courage and endurance ... of tried nerve ... of unflinching
fidelity. There was a time when I too believed this of myself." He
spoke very slowly and with a solemn impressiveness which those who
heard it never forgot to the last day of their lives. "But between
that and this there is a deep gulf ... and at the bottom of that gulf
lies the dead body of my dear friend and chief. His death lies at my
door."
An almost imperceptible movement ran through the audience, as though a
cold breath shook it with a simultaneous chill. The face of the girl
in the third row remained steadfastly calm. If anything, it seemed to
glow with a deeper intensity of hopeful inquiry. "Say what you will, I
believe in you!" it said.
"The whole truth of what happened on that dreadful day has never been
told. I will confess that I had dared to hope that it might never need
to be told--that it might lie between myself and God--that I might be
permitted by Him to work out my redemption on the field of my failure,
chastened, and perhaps strengthened, by what has passed. For, at a
vital moment, when the flinching of an eyelid meant disaster, I ...
flinched.
"This is what happened. As we went up towards the savages that day, my
dear old friend asked me if I was ready. I was ready. I said so. He
said, 'Remember, one sign of flinching and it is finished,' and we went
up and round the corner. We were going, as I believed, to certain
death, and I was ready--at least, and truly, I believed so. When the
savages rushed in upon us, the horror of it broke upon me like a
deluge. I glanced round to see if there was no possible way of escape
for us. But there was no way. My dear old chief's head was crimson
already with blood, and he went down among them. I burst through--and
I know no more. They tell me my body was found on top of his. It may
be so. How it got there I do not know. What I do know is--that at
that supreme moment, when I believed myself to be strong, I found
myself weak. When I believed myself ready for a martyr's death, I
tried to escape by shameful flight. I was weighed and found wanting,
and the remembrance of it has seared my heart like molten iron, night
and day, since ever I came to myself. Whether we should have won
through if I had remained firm, God only knows. But--I flinched and
fled. It seems to me now that I would sooner die a hundred such deaths
as I fled from then than stand here before you all and confess my
default. I can accept no honours. Honours!" with a despairing lift
and fall of the hand. "I can accept no position based on so terrible a
misconception. All I ask, and I ask it with the deepest humility, is
that I may be allowed to go out there again. My life is forfeit to the
past. It shall be spent--if it be God's will, it shall be laid down
joyfully--in the service to which I believe He called me, and from
which I do not believe He has expelled me."
[Illustration: "My life is forfeit to the past."]
He sat down and covered his face with his hands. There was a momentary
silence. The chairman did not quite know what to do. The face of the
girl in the third row was ablaze with emotion; the dark eyes were
swimming. She glanced restlessly about to see what was going to
happen; she looked like springing up herself with flaming words. But
another did it. A tall, white-haired man, with a flowing white beard
and a face like brown leather, stood up on the platform, and said, in a
voice that went straight to all their hearts--
"My friends, we have all heard. Some of us understand, because we have
passed through that same dark valley as our young friend. Dare I, in
all humility, remind you that a Greater than any shrank from the
supreme moment, and prayed, with agonies no man may conceive of, that
His bitter cup might pass from Him? I tell you, gentlemen," he cried,
in a voice that rang like a trumpet, "that in doing what he has done
here this evening our friend has proved himself a man among men. He
has said that a hundred savage deaths appear to him less terrible than
the confession he has just made. And it is a true saying. Ask your
own hearts. I could prove to you that no man can answer absolutely for
himself at such a moment; but I will not even argue the point. Our
friend has been through the fire. He has been through God's mill. He
has been hammered on God's anvil. I tell you that he is true metal.
He has proved it here and now. I hold it an honour to grasp his hand
and bid him God-speed."
He stretched a sinewy, leather-brown hand to Blair, and the young man
gripped it with a new light in his face, and the two stood facing one
another.
Still holding the young man's hand, the old one turned to the front
again.
"If you agree with me that this is the man we want for the work out
there, rise in your seats."
His voice had rung like a bugle-call through the outer darknesses of
the earth; his name stood but little lower than God's to tens of
thousands who dwelt there, and was held in reverence wherever the
English language was spoken. That great audience rose to his call as
if a mine had exploded beneath it. His eyes shone with the light the
black men knew and loved.
"Let us pray," he said; and the young man fell to his knees beside his
chair and dropped his head into his hands again.