VANDERDECKEN
Candon with his bundle under his arm walked from the stage where
George had landed him to the ferry wharf. He did not intend staying at
Tiburon, he wanted to lose himself, put himself beyond possible reach
of Hank and George. He was waiting for the San Francisco ferry.
He felt uplifted, light-headed, full and satisfied with the knowledge
that George Du Cane and the others would be reading his letter by now.
He had revenged himself on himself, on society, and on his companions.
Right from his first joining in with Hank and George, under everything
had lain the fact that he was an outlaw, coupled with the fact that he
had joined the _Wear Jack_ through subterfuge. His confession at San
Nicolas had seemingly cleared the slate, yet the fact remained; you
cannot confess a fact away. He had been forgiven by Hank and Bud, and
Tommie had declared her opinion that he would be all right with the
Almighty when he’d prayed himself out of the hole he was in by hard
work and the restoration of the jewels. Just so. Yet the fact remained
that he had run crooked.
It had been like a grit in the eye. Sometimes he did not feel it, other
times he did, but it had been there all the time.
It was his sense of inferiority always fretting his pride, his pride
always fretful that had, perhaps, brought about the end of everything.
A lesser man or a greater man might have defended himself, explained or
tried to explain.
He took his place in the ferry boat, crammed with the usual crowd. At
it drew off from the wharf, he saw the _Heart of Ireland_ as she lay
at anchor. There was a figure on deck, it was Jake, the others were
evidently down below. What were they saying, what were they doing? He
watched the old schooner as she dimmed away into the distance across
the breezy water, then he turned and looked at San Francisco standing
before him in a blaze of light, the Palace Hotel, the hills veined
with streets, the docks and shipping, all so vast, so indifferent,
brilliant, self-possessed and cruel.
Nature in her worst moods has made nothing more daunting than a city.
Candon had never felt this as he felt it now. The _Wear Jack_ had been
a home and he and his companions almost a family. In all the city he
had not a friend. That is the worst of a sailor’s life; unless he rises
to the command of a ship and keeps it, the end of each voyage often
means a break-up and separation from the men he sails with and the
best friends part never to meet again. The sailor has no time ashore to
make friends and the friends he makes at sea he loses.
Candon landed at the wharf and made for Essex Street where he had put
up before. No. 12 was the house, an humble enough place, but clean and
respectable, kept by a widow whose husband had been captain of one of
the Oakland ferry boats.
He obtained a room, left his bundle and started out making up town.
He had no object in view. In the old days he would most likely have
drifted into a tavern, met companions and maybe friends under the
freemasonry of drink; but those days are done with. Drink he could have
got, poison, swallowed in a corner at five or ten times the price of
the old stuff, but, though several touts spoke to him, recognising a
man from the sea, he turned them down. Passing from street to street
without caring where he went, the fact of his own isolation was borne
in on him by every sight and sound. All these people had businesses,
friends, acquaintances. He had none. If he were to drop dead not a soul
would care.
He found himself amongst the sharp-faced hustling crowd of Market
Street and drifted with it, scarcely seeing it, looking in at shop
windows but scarcely noticing the goods. He was not walking alone now;
the wraiths of Hank and George and Tommie were with him, walking on
either side of him, and now in some extraordinary way his anger and
enmity against them, against himself and against circumstances had
faded. It was as though they were dead.
The loneliness of the great city, the very atmosphere of it had seized
upon him, cut him off from those past few brilliant weeks of adventure
and stress. He could no longer feel as he felt then. He tried,
remembering how they had pre-judged him, to work up his feelings of
only a few hours ago, but the old anger would not come. He had left
it behind him on the _Heart of Ireland_ or, maybe, on the ferry boat.
Anger would not come, because the way was barred by a new-found sense
of reason that kept saying to him, “Well, suppose they did? Look at the
facts—they made a mistake—you were furious because you were innocent,
but were you made of glass so that they could see your innocence? Not
you; why you were Vanderdecken. You had already done a shady trick by
getting on board the _Wear Jack_ under that contract; you were no white
lamb. Facts were against you and you were too proud to explain—that’s
the truth—and you had a grudge against everything. Well there it is and
no more to be said.”
He went into a picture house and sat for ten minutes and came out again
and had some food.
It was evening now and the lamps were springing alight. He wandered
down towards the docks, Hank, Bud and Tommie still clinging to him, and
Reason, refreshed with a porter-house steak, clearing her throat to
say something. Then in Tallis Street where the crimps abide, she said
it.
“Swab!” Then she began to rub it in. “You wrote that letter. Every line
you wrote, down there in the foc’sle of the _Heart_, was pure joy. You
said to yourself, ‘When they read this they will suffer.’ That’s what
you said and what you felt. You didn’t write to explain, you wrote to
hit.”
That was the truth.
They were the best people he had ever met and he had wounded them all
he could. Done all he could to make them feel mean and small.
If they had not been the best people, the letter would have had no
effect; if he had not loved them, the odious pleasure of writing it
would not have been there. If he had not loved them, he would not have
struck them, struck them with the feverish anger of the child that
breaks and destroys the thing it cares for.
He walked on, making towards the water side, reviewing himself and his
futilities.
Impulse and a volcanic nature had been his ruin right along from the
first—and pride. And the devil of it was his impulse had always been—or
nearly always—towards the good. Why, look away back to the time when he
commanded a ship and had been fired for a volcanic letter to the owners
for supplying his crew with “grub that a dog wouldn’t eat.” And he had
chucked a good chance to go and fight in a war that had nothing to do
with him, just because the Lusitania had been torpedoed. Look at the
McGinnis business. Look at everything.
A man rarely sees himself in the glass of mind. When he does the image
is rarely quite true. Candon saw a reflection uglier than the reality.
At all events it was a good thing that he saw it. Then he went home and
tried to sleep and could not.
* * * * *
At ten o’clock next morning, he found himself in Pacific Avenue, asking
his way. At five minutes past ten, he was coming up the steps of a
residence with Purbeckian marble pillars to the door-way.
He rang and Farintosh opened. Farintosh did not know if Mr. du Cane
were in; he would see. He returned in a minute and ushered Candon into
a library where Bud, in his shirt sleeves, was re-arranging some books.
Bud had a pipe in his mouth.
Farintosh shut the door and the two men were left alone.
“Sit down,” said Bud. There was no warmth in his tone. He seemed a
different man from the Bud of the _Wear Jack_, older, more serious. Old
Harley du Cane with his rose in his coat and his air of a _flaneur_,
could sometimes crystallize into awful and icy seriousness, the man
of pleasure suddenly becoming the man of affairs, cold, logical with
something of the touch of the judge.
“I’ve come to say I haven’t treated you people well,” said Candon.
“I’ll never see you again, so I wanted just to say that. I couldn’t
sit down under it any longer. Couldn’t sleep to-night without saying
what I wanted to say. I shouldn’t have given up that letter.”
“You shouldn’t,” said Bud. He was standing with his back to the
fireplace now, with his pipe in his mouth. “I’m not wanting to rub it
in, but you’ve crumpled Tommie up. Steady on, and let me talk. I’m the
man you ought to have a grouch against, for when the _Wear Jack_ went
off, I was the first to say you’d taken your hook. I had to kick Hank
to make him believe. Hank’s a good sort, much better than me, much
better than you, much better than any of us. He believed in you, so did
Tommie. Well, now, see here, B. C., I’m not going to apologise to you
for being mistaken and for writing you down worse than you were, for
the facts were all dead against you, and it was no pleasure to me to
think you’d hooked it. It cut me bad. Let’s forget it and come to the
point. I guess the Almighty sent you here to-night for me to deal with
and I’m going to deal with you straight. One moment.”
He left the room, and Candon heard him calling for Farintosh and giving
some directions, then he returned, took his place on the hearth rug and
went on.
“Yes, I guess he did. What are your plans?”
“Foc’sle.”
“Yes, the foc’sle of some wind-jammer, fine time and fine prospects.
Well, I’ve made different plans for you, made them long ago, dropped
them when that beastly business happened, but I’ve picked them up
again, right now.”
“I reckon a dive into the harbour would be the best plan for me,” said
Candon. He was seated with his arms folded, wilted, miserable. He was
thinking of Tommie and what Bud had said about her.
“It would,” said Bud, “if you are an ass and don’t fall in with what I
want to do.”
“Yes?”
“You’ve got to take my money, work and pay me back—fruit farm or ranch.
Quit the sea, the sea’s no use to you, B. C., and I tell you that
straight.”
“It’s good of you,” said the other shaking his head. “It’s darn good
of you, Bud du Cane—you said that before. It’s not my pride. I reckon
I’ve no pride left, but where’s the good? I guess I’m too far gone for
any man to help me. I’ve lost clutch of myself in the last two days. I
tell you it’s as if I’d been boiled and my back-bone taken out of me.
I’m changed, that’s a fact. All my life I’ve never lost confidence in
myself till now. You remember how I took the _Wear Jack_ out of harbour
that night? I could no more do that now than I could fly—I’ve lost
confidence in myself.
“And maybe a good thing, too,” said George.
“I don’t know,” said Candon, “maybe it’s good or bad, but there’s the
fact. A while ago I was a man who could lead things, now I feel all I
want is to take orders.”
“Good,” said George, “and now you’re talking like a man. What do you
think a man is, anyway? Why, till he learns to take orders, he hasn’t
got the makings of a man in him. And now I’m going to give you your
orders, B. C. You’ve got to make a home for a girl that cares for you.
She’s got money enough of her own, but you can’t take a woman’s money,
but you can take mine as a loan, and if you don’t make good, why you
aren’t the man I think you are.”
“Cares for me?” said Candon, as though he were a bit deaf and not sure
that he had caught the other’s words.
“Yes, unless I have no sense or judgment left. But she’ll tell you
herself in a minute. I’ve sent for her.”
He left the room.
Candon got up and walked to and fro for a long time, his hands behind
his back. Then he lifted up his chin and gazed before him with those
clear eyes trained to look over vast distances.
The manhood had come back to him with the call to a greater adventure
than any he had ever undertaken.
He heard an automobile drawing up in the street—voices. Then the door
opened and Tommie stood before him. It closed, leaving them alone.
* * * * *
That is the story of Vanderdecken as told to me by Hank Fisher. The
story of a man of temperament saved from himself by a woman. I met
George du Cane at Pasadena a little while ago and he corroborated
the tale giving me a few extra details left out by Hank. George said
Tyrebuck collected his insurance all right on the _Wear Jack_, also
that McGinnis and his crowd managed to escape from the Mexicans, and,
making down the coast, were rescued by a tanker which had put into
Santa Clara Bay owing to a defect in her machinery. They returned to
San Francisco, but made no trouble, or only with Mrs. McGinnis, who
had sold the _Heart of Ireland_ and invested the money in a laundry,
thinking McGinnis dead.
Hank married his girl quite recently and Candon and Tommie are happy,
but the thing uppermost in George’s mind in connection with this
business was the treasure.
He took an old press cutting from his pocket book and showed it to
me. It gave news of a boatful of dead Chinamen found and sunk by the
British cruiser _Hesperia_ down by the Galapagos Islands.
“They’d have sunk it maybe with a shell,” said George; “it would have
given them fine target practice for one of their small guns and they’d
never have overhauled it for jewelry.
“It’s a hundred to one it was the boat of the _Wear Jack_. The _Wear
Jack’s_ whaler had no name on it, and it’s just the position they’d
have been in by drifting. You see the Kiro Shiwo would have brought
them down past the line and then they’d have met Humboldt’s current;
that would have pushed them back, and there they’d have been drifting
and messing about when the _Hesperia_ came along. Anyhow,” finished
George, “whatever’s become of those jewels, they’ve never been seen
since, and it’s my opinion, they’ll never be seen again.”
THE END.