Throughout the afternoon, with a triangular scraping iron, he assisted
Halvard in removing the whitened varnish from the yacht's mahogany.
They worked silently, with only the shrill note of the edges drawing
across the wood, while the westering sun plunged its diagonal rays far
into the transparent depths of the bay. The _Gar_ floated motionless
on water like a pale evening over purple and silver flowers threaded
by fish painted the vermilion and green of parrakeets. Inshore the
pallid cypresses seemed, as John Woolfolk watched them, to twist in
febrile pain. With the waning of day the land took on its air of
unhealthy mystery; the mingled, heavy scents floated out in a sickly
tide; the ruined façade glimmered in the half light.
Woolfolk's thoughts turned back to the woman living in the miasma of
perfume and secret fear. He heard again her wistful voice pronounce
the names of far places, of Tarragona and Seriphos, investing them
with the accent of an intense hopeless desire. He thought of the
inexplicable place of her birth and of the riven, unsubstantial figure
of the man with the blood pulsing into his ocherous face. Some old,
profound error or calamity had laid its blight upon him, he was
certain; but the most lamentable inheritance was not sufficient to
account for the acute apprehension in his daughter's tones. This was
different in kind from the spiritual collapse of the aging man. It was
actual, he realized that; proceeding--in part at least--from without.
He wondered, scraping with difficulty the under-turning of a cathead,
if whatever dark tide was centered above her would, perhaps, descend
through the oleander-scented night and stifle her in the stagnant
dwelling. He had a swift, vividly complete vision of the old man face
down upon the floor in a flickering, reddish light.
He smiled in self-contempt at this neurotic fancy; and, straightening
his cramped muscles, rolled a cigarette. It might be that the years he
had spent virtually alone on the silence of various waters had
affected his brain. Halvard's broad, concentrated countenance, the
steady, grave gaze and determined mouth, cleared Woolfolk's mind of
its phantoms. He moved to the cockpit and from there said:
"That will do for today."
Halvard followed, and commenced once more the familiar, ordered
preparations for supper. John Woolfolk, smoking while the sky turned
to malachite, became sharply aware of the unthinkable monotony of the
universal course, of the centuries wheeling in dull succession into
infinity. Life seemed to him no more varied than the wire drum in
which squirrels raced nowhere. His own lot, he told himself grimly,
was no worse than another. Existence was all of the same drab piece.
It had seemed gay enough when he was young, worked with gold and
crimson threads, and then----
His thoughts were broken by Halyard's appearance in the companionway,
and he descended to his solitary supper in the contracted, still
cabin.
Again on deck his sense of the monotony of life trebled. He had been
cruising now about the edges of continents for twelve years. For
twelve years he had taken no part in the existence of the cities he
had passed, as often as possible without stopping, and of the villages
gathered invitingly under their canopies of trees. He was--yes, he
must be--forty-six. Life was passing away; well, let it ...
worthless.
The growing radiance of the moon glimmered across the water and folded
the land in a gossamer veil. The same uneasiness, the inchoate desire
to go ashore that had seized upon him the night before, reasserted its
influence. The face of Millie Stope floated about him like a magical
gardenia in the night of the matted trees. He resisted the pressure
longer than before; but in the end he was seated in the tender,
pulling toward the beach.
He entered the orange grove and slowly approached the house beyond.
Millie Stope advanced with a quick welcome.
"I'm glad," she said simply. "Nicholas is back. The fish weighed--"
"I think I'd better not know," he interrupted. "I might be tempted to
mention it in the future, when it would take on the historic suspicion
of the fish story."
"But it was imposing," she protested. "Let's go to the sea; it's so
limitless in the moonlight."
He followed her over the path to where the remains of the wharf
projected into a sea as black, and as solid apparently, as ebony, and
across which the moon flung a narrow way like a chalk mark. Millie
Stope seated herself on the boarding and he found a place near by. She
leaned forward, with her arms propped up and her chin couched on her
palms. Her potency increased rather than diminished with association;
her skin had a rare texture; her movements, the turn of the wrists,
were distinguished. He wondered again at the strangeness of her
situation.
She looked about suddenly and surprised his palpable questioning.
"You are puzzled," she pronounced. "Perhaps you are setting me in the
middle of romance. Please don't! Nothing you might guess----" She
broke off abruptly, returned to her former pose. "And yet," she added
presently, "I have a perverse desire to talk about myself. It's
perverse because, although you are a little curious, you have no real
interest in what I might say. There is something about you like--yes,
like the cast-iron dog that used to stand in our lawn. It rusted away,
cold to the last and indifferent, although I talked to it by the hour.
But I did get a little comfort from its stolid painted eye. Perhaps
you'd act in the same way.
"And then," she went on when Woolfolk had somberly failed to comment,
"you are going away, you will forget, it can't possibly matter. I must
talk, now that I have urged myself this far. After all, you needn't
have come back. But where shall I begin? You should know something of
the very first. That happened in Virginia.... My father didn't go to
war," she said, sudden and clear. She turned her face toward him, and
he saw that it had lost its flower-like quality; it looked as if it
had been carved in stone.
"He lived in a small, intensely loyal town," she continued; "and when
Virginia seceded it burned with a single high flame of sacrifice. My
father had been always a diffident man; he collected mezzotints and
avoided people. So, when the enlistment began, he shrank away from the
crowds and hot speeches, and the men went off without him. He lived in
complete retirement then, with his prints, in a town of women. It
wasn't impossible at first; he discussed the situation with the few
old tradesmen that remained, and exchanged bows with the wives and
daughters of his friends. But when the dead commenced to be brought in
from the front it got worse. Belle Semple--he had always thought her
unusually nice and pretty--mocked at him on the street. Then one
morning he found an apron tied to the knob of the front door.
"After that he went out only at night. His servants had deserted him,
and he lived by himself in a biggish, solemn house. Sometimes the news
of losses and deaths would be shouted through his windows; once stones
were thrown in, but mostly he was let alone. It must have been
frightful in his empty rooms when the South went from bad to worse."
She paused, and John Woolfolk could see, even in the obscurity, the
slow shudder that passed over her.
"When the war was over and what men were left returned--one with hands
gone at the wrists, another without legs in a shabby wheelchair--the
life of the town started once more, but my father was for ever outside
of it. Little subscriptions for burials were made up, small schemes
for getting the necessities, but he was never asked. Men spoke to him
again, even some of the women. That was all.
"I think it was then that a curious, perpetual dread fastened on his
mind--a fear of the wind in the night, of breaking twigs or sudden
voices. He ordered things to be left on the steps, and he would peer
out from under the blind to make sure that the walk was empty before
he opened the door.
"You must realize," she said in a sharper voice, "that my father was
not a pure coward at first. He was an extremely sensitive man who
hated the rude stir of living and who simply asked to be left
undisturbed with his portfolios. But life's not like that. The war
hunted him out and ruined him; it destroyed his being, just as it
destroyed the fortunes of others.
"Then he began to think--it was absolute fancy--that there was a
conspiracy in the town to kill him. He sent some of his things away,
got together what money he had, and one night left his home secretly
on foot. He tramped south for weeks, living for a while in small place
after place, until he reached Georgia, and then a town about fifty
miles from here----"
She broke off, sitting rigidly erect, looking out over the level black
sea with its shifting, chalky line of light, and a long silence
followed. The antiphonal crying of the owls sounded over the bubbling
swamp, the mephitic perfume hung like a vapor on the shore. John
Woolfolk shifted his position.
"My mother told me this," his companion said suddenly. "Father
repeated it over and over through the nights after they were married.
He slept only in snatches, and would wake with a gasp and his heart
almost bursting. I know almost nothing about her, except that she had
a brave heart--or she would have gone mad. She was English and had
been a governess. They met in the little hotel where they were
married. Then father bought this place, and they came here to live."
Woolfolk had a vision of the tenuous figure of Lichfield Stope; he was
surprised that such acute agony had left the slightest trace of
humanity; yet the other, after forty years of torment, still survived
to shudder at a chance footfall, the advent of a casual and harmless
stranger.
This, then, was by implication the history of the woman at his side;
it disposed of the mystery that had veiled her situation here. It was
surprisingly clear, even to the subtle influence that, inherited from
her father, had set the shadow of his own obsession upon her voice and
eyes. Yet, in the moment that she had been made explicable, he
recalled the conviction that the knowledge of an actual menace lurked
in her mind; he had seen it in the tension of her body, in the anxiety
of fleet backward glances.
The latter, he told himself, might be merely a symptom of mental
sickness, a condition natural to the influences under which she had
been formed. He tested and rejected that possibility--there could be
no doubt of her absolute sanity. It was patent in a hundred details of
her carriage, in her mentality as it had been revealed in her
restrained, balanced narrative.
There was, too, the element of her mother to be considered. Millie
Stope had known very little about her, principally the self-evident
fact of the latter's "brave heart." It would have needed that to
remain steadfast through the racking recitals of the long, waking
darks; to accompany to this desolate and lonely refuge the man who had
had an apron tied to his doorknob. In the degree that the daughter had
been a prey to the man's fear she would have benefited from the
stiffer qualities of the English governess. Life once more assumed its
enigmatic mask.
His companion said:
"All that--and I haven't said a word about myself, the real end of my
soliloquy. I'm permanently discouraged; I have qualms about boring
you. No, I shall never find another listener as satisfactory as the
iron dog."
A light glimmered far at sea. "I sit here a great deal," she informed
him, "and watch the ships, a thumbprint of blue smoke at day and a
spark at night, going up and down their water roads. You are
enviable--getting up your anchor, sailing where you like, safe and
free." Her voice took on a passionate intensity that surprised him; it
was sick with weariness and longing, with sudden revolt from the
pervasive apprehension.
"Safe and free," he repeated thinly, as if satirizing the condition
implied by those commonplace, assuaging words. He had, in his flight
from society, sought simply peace. John Woolfolk now questioned all
his implied success. He had found the elemental hush of the sea, the
iron aloofness of rocky and uninhabited coasts, but he had never been
able to still the dull rebellion within, the legacy of the past. A
feeling of complete failure settled over him. His safety and freedom
amounted to this--that life had broken him and cast him aside.
A long, hollow wail rose from the land, and Millie Stope moved
sharply.
"There's Nicholas," she exclaimed, "blowing on the conch! They don't
know where I am; I'd better go in."
A small, evident panic took possession of her; the shiver in her voice
swelled.
"No, don't come," she added. "I'll be quicker without you." She made
her way over the wharf to the shore, but there paused, "I suppose
you'll be going soon?"
"Tomorrow probably," he answered.
On the ketch Halvard had gone below for the night. The yacht swayed
slightly to an unseen swell; the riding light moved backward and
forward, its ray flickering over the glassy water. John Woolfolk
brought his bedding from the cabin and, disposing it on deck, lay with
his wakeful dark face set against the far, multitudinous worlds.
V
In the morning Halvard proposed a repainting of the engine.
"The Florida air," he said, "eats metal overnight." And the ketch
remained anchored.
Later in the day Woolfolk sounded the water casks cradled in the
cockpit, and, when they answered hollow, directed his man with regard
to their refilling. They drained a cask. Halvard put it on the tender
and pulled in to the beach. There he shouldered the empty container
and disappeared among the trees.
Woolfolk was forward, preparing a chain hawser for coral anchorages,
when he saw Halvard tramping shortly back over the sand. He entered
the tender and, with a vicious shove, rowed with a powerful,
vindictive sweep toward the ketch. The cask evidently had been left
behind. He made the tender fast and swung aboard with his notable
agility.
"There's a damn idiot in that house," he declared, in a surprising
departure from his customary detached manner.
"Explain yourself," Woolfolk demanded shortly.
"But I'm going back after him," the sailor stubbornly proceeded. "I'll
turn any knife out of his hand." It was evident that he was laboring
under an intense growing excitement and anger.
"The only idiot's not on land," Woolfolk told him. "Where's the water
cask you took ashore?"
"Broken."
"How?"
"I'll tell you fast enough. There was nobody about when I went up to
the house, although there was a chair rocking on the porch as if a
person had just left. I knocked at the door; it was open, and I was
certain that I heard someone inside, but nobody answered. Then after a
bit I went around back. The kitchen was open, too, and no one in
sight. I saw the water cistern and thought I'd fill up, when you could
say something afterward. I did, and was rolling the cask about the
house when this--loggerhead came out of the bushes. He wanted to know
what I was getting away with, and I explained, but it didn't suit him.
He said I might be telling facts and again I mightn't. I saw there was
no use talking, and started rolling the cask again; but he put his
foot on it, and I pushed one way and he the other----"
"And between you, you stove in the cask," Woolfolk interrupted.
"That's it," Poul Halvard answered concisely. "Then I got mad, and
offered to beat in his face, but he had a knife. I could have broken
it out of his grip--I've done it before in a place or two--but I
thought I'd better come aboard and report before anything general
began."
John Woolfolk was momentarily at a loss to establish the identity of
Halvard's assailant.
He soon realized, however, that it must be Nicholas, whom he had never
seen, and who had blown such an imperative summons on the conch the
night before. Halvard's temper was communicated to him; he moved
abruptly to where the tender was fastened.
"Put me ashore," he directed. He would make it clear that his man was
not to be interrupted in the execution of his orders, and that his
property could not be arbitrarily destroyed.
When the tender ran upon the beach and had been secured, Halvard
started to follow him, but Woolfolk waved him back. There was a stir
on the portico as he approached, the flitting of an unsubstantial
form; but, hastening, John Woolfolk arrested Lichfield Stope in the
doorway.
"Morning," he nodded abruptly. "I came to speak to you about a water
cask of mine."
The other swayed like a thin, grey column of smoke.
"Ah, yes," he pronounced with difficulty. "Water cask----"
"It was broken here a little while back."
At the suggestion of violence such a pitiable panic fell upon the
older man that Woolfolk halted. Lichfield Stope raised his hands as if
to ward off the mere impact of the words themselves; his face was
stained with the thin red tide of congestion.
"You have a man named Nicholas," Woolfolk proceeded. "I should like to
see him."
The other made a gesture as tremulous and indeterminate as his speech
and appeared to dissolve into the hall. John Woolfolk stood for a
moment undecided and then moved about the house toward the kitchen.
There, he thought, he might obtain an explanation of the breaking of
the cask. A man was walking about within and came to the door as
Woolfolk approached.
The latter told himself that he had never seen a blanker countenance.
In profile it showed a narrow brow, a huge, drooping nose, a pinched
mouth and insignificant chin. From the front the face of the man in
the doorway held the round, unscored cheeks of a fat and sleepy boy.
The eyes were mere long glimmers of vision in thick folds of flesh;
the mouth, upturned at the corners, lent a fixed, mechanical smile to
the whole. It was a countenance on which the passage of time and
thoughts had left no mark; its stolidity had been moved by no feeling.
His body was heavy and sagging. It possessed, Woolfolk recognized, a
considerable unwieldy strength, and was completely covered by a
variously spotted and streaked apron.
"Are you Nicholas?" John Woolfolk demanded.
The other nodded.
"Then, I take it, you are the man who broke my water cask."
"It was full of our water," Nicholas replied in a thick voice.
"That," said Woolfolk, "I am not going to argue with you. I came
ashore to instruct you to let my man and my property alone."
"Then leave our water be."
John Woolfolk's temper, the instinctive arrogance of men living apart
from the necessary submissions of communal life, in positions--however
small--of supreme command, flared through his body.
"I told you," he repeated shortly, "that I would not discuss the
question of the water. I have no intention of justifying myself to
you. Remember--your hands off."
The other said surprisingly: "Don't get me started!" A spasm of
emotion made a faint, passing shade on his sodden countenance; his
voice held almost a note of appeal.
"Whether you 'start' or not is without the slightest significance,"
Woolfolk coldly responded.
"Mind," the man went on, "I spoke first."
A steady twitching commenced in a muscle at the flange of his nose.
Woolfolk was aware of an increasing tension in the other, that gained
a peculiar oppressiveness from the lack of any corresponding outward
expression. His heavy, blunt hand fumbled under the maculate apron;
his chest heaved with a sudden, tempestuous breathing. "Don't start
me," he repeated in a voice so blurred that the words were hardly
recognizable. He swallowed convulsively, his emotion mounting to an
inchoate passion, when suddenly a change was evident. He made a short,
violent effort to regain his self-control, his gaze fastened on a
point behind Woolfolk.
The latter turned and saw Millie Stope approaching, her countenance
haggard with fear. "What has happened?" she cried breathlessly while
yet a little distance away. "Tell me at once----"
"Nothing," Woolfolk promptly replied, appalled by the agony in her
voice. "Nicholas and I had a small misunderstanding. A triviality," he
added, thinking of the other's hand groping beneath the apron.