a kind of insane ritual, like a Parsee fire-worshipper making
obeisance before his god. He was rapt away to some plane of mystic
exaltation, to some hinterland of the soul that merged upon madness.
When at length the boat crunched upon the sandy shore he got up
unsteadily from the stern and pointed to the pharos that flamed in
the heavens.
"The fire upon the altar is lit," he addressed me, oracularly, while
the fanatic light of a devotee burned in his eyes. "Shall we ascend
and prepare the sacrifice?"
I leaned over the oars, panting from my exertions, indifferent to
his rhapsody.
"If you'll take my advice, you'll get back at once to your bungalow
and strip off that wet sleeping-suit," I bluntly counseled him, but
I might as well have argued with a man in a trance.
He leaped over the gunwale and strode up the beach. Again he struck
his priest-like attitude and invoked me to follow.
"The fire upon the altar waits," he repeated, solemnly. Suddenly he
broke into a shrill laugh and ran like a deer in the direction of the
forest that stretched up the slopes of the mountain.
The mate's face, thrust over the rail as I drew alongside the
schooner, plainly bespoke his utter bewilderment. He must have
thought me bereft of my senses to be paddling about at that hour of
the night. The tide had made, and the _Sylph_, righting her listed
masts, was standing clear of the shoal. The deck was astir, and when
the command was given to hoist the sails it was obeyed with an
uneasy alacrity. The men worked frantically in a bright, unnatural
day, for Lakalatcha was now continuously aflame and tossing up
red-hot rocks to the accompaniment of dull sounds of explosion.
My first glance about the deck had been one of relief to note that
Joyce and his wife were not there, although the commotion of getting
under sail must have awakened them. A breeze had sprung up which
would prove a fair wind as soon as the _Sylph_ stood clear of the
point. The mate gave a grunt of satisfaction when at length the
schooner began to dip her bow and lay over to the task. Leaving him
in charge, I started to go below, when suddenly Mrs. Joyce, fully
dressed, confronted me. She seemed to have materialized out of the
air like a ghost. Her hair glowed like burnished copper in the
unnatural illumination which bathed the deck, but her face was ashen,
and the challenge of her eyes made my heart stop short.
"You have been awake long?" I ventured to ask.
"Too long," she answered, significantly, with her face turned away,
looking down into the water. She had taken my arm and drawn me
toward the rail. Now I felt her fingers tighten convulsively. In the
droop of her head and the tense curve of her neck I sensed her mad
impulse which the dark water suggested.
"Mrs. Joyce!" I remonstrated, sharply.
She seemed to go limp all over at the words. I drew her along the
deck for a faltering step or two, while her eyes continued to brood
upon the water rushing past. Suddenly she spoke:
"What other way out is there?"
"Never that," I said, shortly. I urged her forward again. "Is your
husband asleep?"
"Thank God, yes!"
"Then you have been awake--"
"For over an hour," she confessed, and I detected the shudder that
went over her body.
"The man is mad--"
"But I am married to him." She stopped and caught at the rail like a
prisoner gripping at the bars that confine him. "I cannot--cannot
endure it! Where are you taking me? Where _can_ you take me? Don't
you see that there is no escape--from this?"
The _Sylph_ rose and sank to the first long roll of the open sea.
"When we reach Malduna--" I began, but the words were only torture.
"I cannot--cannot go on. Take me back!--to that island! Let me live
abandoned--or rather die--"
"Mrs. Joyce, I beg of you...."
The schooner rose and dipped again.
For what seemed an interminable time we paced the deck together
while Lakalatcha flamed farther and farther astern. Her words came
in fitful snatches as if spoken in a delirium, and at times she
would pause and grip the rail to stare back, wild-eyed, at the
receding island.
Suddenly she started, and in a sort of blinding, noon-day blaze I
saw her face blanch with horror. It was as if at that moment the
heavens had cracked asunder and the night had fallen away in chaos.
Turning, I saw the cone of the mountain lifting skyward in
fragments--and saw no more, for the blinding vision remained seared
upon the retina of my eyes.
Across the water, slower paced, came the dread concussion of sound.
"Good God! It's carried away the whole island!" I heard the mate's
voice bellowing above the cries of the men. The _Sylph_ scudded
before the approaching storm of fire redescending from the sky....
The first gray of the dawn disclosed Mrs. Joyce still standing by
the rail, her hand nestling within the arm of her husband,
indifferent to the heavy grayish dust that fell in benediction upon
her like a silent shower of snow.
The island of Muloa remains to-day a charred cinder lapped about by
the blue Pacific. At times gulls circle over its blackened and
desolate surface devoid of every vestige of life. From the squat,
truncated mass of Lakalatcha, shorn of half its lordly height, a
feeble wisp of smoke still issues to the breeze, as if Vulcan, tired
of his forge, had banked its fire before abandoning it.
THE ARGOSIES
BY ALEXANDER HULL
From _Scribner's Magazine_
There may have been some benevolent force watching over Harber. In
any case, that would be a comforting belief. Certainly Harber
himself so believed, and I know he had no trouble at all convincing
his wife. Yes, the Harbers believed.
But credulity, you may say, was ever the surest part in love's young
golden dream: and you, perhaps, not having your eyes befuddled with
the rose-fog of romance, will see too clearly to believe. What can I
adduce for your conviction? The facts only. After all, that is the
single strength of my position.
There was, of course, the strange forehanded, subtle planning of the
other girl, of Janet Spencer. Why did she do it? Was it that,
feeling her chances in Tawnleytown so few, counting the soil there
so barren, driven by an ambition beyond the imagination of staid,
stodgy, normal Tawnleytown girls, she felt she must create
opportunities where none were? She was very lovely, Harber tells me,
in a fiery rose-red of the fairy-tale way; though even without
beauty it needn't have been hard for her. Young blood is prone
enough to adventure; the merest spark will set it akindle. I should
like to have known that girl. She must have been very clever. Because,
of course, she couldn't have foreseen, even by the surest instinct,
the coincidence that brought Harber and Barton together. Yes, there
is a coincidence in it. It's precisely upon that, you see, that
Harber hangs his belief.
I wonder, too, how many of those argosies she sent out seeking the
golden fleece returned to her? It's a fine point for speculation. If
one only knew.... ah, but it's pitiful how much one doesn't, and
can't, know in this hard and complex world! Or was it merely that
she tired of them and wanted to be rid of them? Or again, do I wrong
her there, and were there no more than the two of them, and did she
simply suffer a solitary revulsion of feeling, as Harber did? But no,
I'm sure I'm right in supposing Barton and Harber to have been but
two ventures out of many, two arrows out of a full quiver shot in
the dark at the bull's-eye of fortune. And, by heaven, it was
splendid shooting ... even if none of the other arrows scored!
Harber tells me he was ripe for the thing without any encouragement
to speak of. Tawnleytown was dull plodding for hot youth. Half
hidden in the green of fir and oak and maple, slumberous with
midsummer heat, it lay when he left it. Thickly powdered with the
fine white dust of its own unpaven streets, dust that sent the
inhabitants chronically sneezing and weeping and red-eyed about town,
or sent them north to the lakes for exemption, dust that hung
impalpably suspended in the still air and turned the sunsets to
things of glorious rose and red and gold though there wasn't a single
cloud or streamer in the sky to catch the light, dust that lay upon
lawns and walks and houses in deep gray accumulation ... precisely
as if these were objects put away and never used and not disturbed
until they were white with the inevitable powdery accretion that
accompanies disuse. Indeed, he felt that way about Tawnleytown, as
if it were a closed room of the world, a room of long ago, unused now,
unimportant, forgotten.
So unquestionably he was ready enough to go. He had all the fine and
far-flung dreams of surging youth. He peopled the world with his
fancies, built castles on every high hill. He felt the urge of
ambition fiercely stirring within him, latent power pulsing through
him. What would you? Wasn't he young and in love?
For there had been, you must know, a good deal between them. What
does one do in these deadly dull little towns for amusement, when
one is young and fain and restless? Harber tells me they walked the
streets and shaded lanes in the dim green coolness of evening,
lounged in the orchard hammock, drifted down the little river, past
still pools, reed-bordered, under vaulting sycamores, over hurrying
reaches fretted with pebbles, forgot everything except one another
and their fancies and made, as youth must, love. That was the
programme complete, except for the talk, the fascinating,
never-ending talk. Volumes on volumes of it--whole libraries of it.
So, under her veiled fostering, the feeling that he must leave
Tawnleytown kept growing upon Harber until one evening it
crystallized in decision.
It was on a Sunday. They had taken a lunch and climbed Bald Knob, a
thousand feet above the town, late in the afternoon. The dying sun
and the trees had given them a splendid symphony in black and gold,
and had silenced them for a little. They sat looking down over the
valley in which the well-known landmarks slowly grew dark and
indistinguishable and dim lights blossomed one after another. The
sound of church bells rose faintly through the still air. The pale
last light faded in the sky.
Harber and Janet sat in the long grass, their hearts stirring with
the same urgent, inarticulate thoughts, their hands clasped together.
"Let's wait for Eighty-seven," she said.
Harber pressed her hand for reply.
In the mind of each of them Eighty-seven was the symbol of release
from Tawnleytown, of freedom, of romance.
Presently a shifting light appeared in the east, a faint rumble
became perceptible and increased. The swaying shaft of light
intensified and a moment later the long-drawn poignancy of a
chime-whistle blowing for the river-road crossing, exquisitely
softened by distance, echoingly penetrated the still valley.
A streak of thunderous light swam into view and passed them,
plunging into a gap in the west. The fire-box in the locomotive
opened and flung a flood of light upon a swirling cloud of smoke. A
sharp turn in the track, a weak blast of the whistle at the
bridge-head, and the "Limited," disdaining contemptible Tawnleytown,
had swept out of sight--into the world--at a mile to the minute.
"If I were on it," said Harber slowly.
Janet caught her breath sharply. "You're a man!" she said fiercely.
"You could be--so easily!"
Harber was startled for a moment. Her kindling of his flame of
adventure had been very subtle until now. Perhaps she hadn't been
sure before to-day of her standing. But this afternoon, upon the
still isolation of Bald Knob, there had been many kisses exchanged,
and brave vows of undying love. And no doubt she felt certain of him
now.
With Harber, however, the pathway had seemed leading otherwhere. He
wasn't the sort of youth to kiss and ride away. And, discounting
their adventurous talk, he had tacitly supposed that his course the
last few weeks spelled the confinement of the four walls of a
Tawnleytown cottage, the fetters of an early marriage. He had been
fighting his mounting fever for the great world, and thinking, as
the train sped by, that after all "home was best." It would be. It
must be. So, if his fine dreams were the price he must pay for Janet,
still he would pay them! And he was startled by her tone.
Her slim fingers tightened upon his.
"Why do you stay?" she cried passionately. "Why don't you go?"
"There's you," he began.
"Yes!" she exclaimed. "Oh, I'm selfish, maybe! I don't know! But
it's as much for me as for you that I say it!"
Her words poured out tumultuously.
"Where are all our wonderful dreams--if you stay here? Gone
aglimmering! Gone! I can't see them all go--I can't! Can you?"
Was he to have, then, both Janet and his dreams? His heart quickened.
He leaned impulsively toward her.
She pushed his face away with her free hand.
"No--no! Wait till I'm through! We've always known we weren't like
other Tawnleytown folk, haven't we, dear? We've always said that we
wanted more out of life than they--that we wouldn't be content with
half a loaf--that we wanted the bravest adventures, the yellowest
gold, the finest emotions, the greater power! And if now ...
"See those fights down there--so few--and so faint. We can't live
our lives there. Seventy-five dollars a month in the bank for
you--and dull, deadly monotony for both of us--no dreams--no
adventures--nothing big and fine! We can't be content with that! Why
don't you go, John?
"Don't mind me--don't let me keep you--for as soon as you've won,
you can come back to me--and then--we'll see the world together!"
"Janet--Janet!" said Harber, with pounding heart. "How do you
know--that I'll win?"
"Ah," she said strangely, "I know! You can't fail--_I won't let you
fail_"!
Harber caught her suddenly in his arms and kissed her as if it were
to be his last token of her.
"I'm going then!" he whispered. "I'm going!"
"When?"
"There's no time to be lost!" he said, thinking fast. "If I had
known that you were willing, that you would wait--if ... Janet, I'm
going to-morrow!"
Her arms tightened about him convulsively. "Promise me--promise me!"
she demanded tensely, "that you'll never, never forget me--that
you'll come back to me!"
Harber laughed in her face. "Janet," he said solemnly, "I'll never
forget you. I'll come back to you. I'll come back--'though 'twere
ten thousand mile!'"
And they walked home slowly, wrapt once more in their fascinating
talk, fanning the flames of one another's desires, painting for
their future the rich landscapes of paradise. Youth! Brave, hot youth!
The next day Harber contemptuously threw over his job in the bank
and fared forth into the wide world that was calling.
* * * * *
Well, he went south, then east, then west, and west, and farther west.
So far that presently, after three years, he found himself not west
at all, but east--far east. There were between him and Janet Spencer
now thousands on thousands of miles of vast heaving seas, and
snow-capped mountain ranges, and limitless grassy plains.
Three years of drifting! You'd say, perhaps, knowing the frailty of
vows, that the connection might have been lost. But it hadn't.
Harber was but twenty-three. Faithfulness, too, comes easier then
than later in life, when one has seen more of the world, when the
fine patina of illusion has worn off. Besides, there was, I'm sure,
a touch of genius about that girl, so that one wouldn't forget her
easily, certainly not in three years. And then, you know, Harber had
had her letters. Not many of them. Perhaps a dozen to the year.
Pitifully few, but they were filled with a wonderful fascination
against which the realities of his wandering life had been powerless
to contend. Like a slender cable they bound him--they held him!
Well, he was in Sydney now, standing on the water-front, beneath a
bright-blue Australian sky, watching the crinkling water in the
Circular Quay as it lifted and fell mightily but easily, and seeing
the black ships ... ah, the ships! Those masterful, much more than
human, entities that slipped about the great world nosing out, up
dark-green tropical rivers in black, fir-bound fjords, through the
white ice-flows of the Arctics, all its romance, all its gold! Three
years hadn't dulled the keen edge of his appetite for all that;
rather had whetted it.
Nevertheless, as he stood there, he was thinking to himself that
he must have done with wandering; the old saw that a rolling
stone gathered no moss was cropping up sharply, warningly, in
his mind. He had in the three years, however--and this is rather
remarkable--accumulated about three thousand dollars. Three thousand
dollars! Why, in this quarter of the world, three thousand dollars
should be like three thousand of the scriptural mustard-seed--they
should grow a veritable forest!
What was puzzling him, however, was where to plant the seed. He was
to meet here a man who had a plan for planting in the islands. There
were wild rumours afloat of the fortunes that could be made in
rubber and vanilla out in the Papuan "Back Beyond." Harber was only
half inclined to believe them, perhaps; but half persuaded is well
along the way.
He heard his name called, and, turning, he saw a man coming toward
him with the rolling gait of the seaman. As he came closer, Harber
observed the tawny beard, the sea-blue eyes surrounded by the fine
wrinkles of humour, the neat black clothing, the polished boots, and,
above all, the gold earrings that marked the man in his mind as
Farringdon, the sea-captain who had been anxious to meet him.
Harber answered the captain's gleam of teeth with one of his own,
and they turned their backs upon the water and went to Harber's room,
where they could have their fill of talk undisturbed. Harber says
they talked all that afternoon and evening, and well into the next
morning, enthusiastically finding one another the veritable salt of
the earth, honourable, level-headed, congenial, temperamentally
fitted for exactly what they had in mind--partnership.
"How much can you put in?" asked Harber finally.
"Five hundred pounds," said the captain.
"I can match you," said Harber.
"Man, but that's fine!" cried the captain. "I've been looking for
you--you, you know--_just you_--for the last two years! And when
Pierson told me about you ... why, it's luck, I say!"
It was luck for Harber, too. Farringdon, you see, knew precisely
where he wanted to go, and he had his schooner, and he knew that
part of the world, as we say, like a man knows his own buttons.
Harber, then, was to manage the plantation; they were going to set
out rubber, both Para and native, and try hemp and maybe coffee
while they waited for the Haevia and the Ficus to yield. And
Farringdon was ready to put the earnings from his schooner against
Harber's wage as manager. The arrangement, you see, was ideal.
Skip seven years with me, please. Consider the plantation affair
launched, carried, and consummated. Farringdon and Harber have sold
the rubber-trees as they neared bearing, and have sold them well.
They're out of that now. In all likelihood, Harber thinks,
permanently. For that seven years has seen other projects blossom.
Harber, says Farringdon, has "the golden touch." There has been
trading in the islands, and a short and fortunate little campaign on
the stock-market through Sydney brokers, and there has been, more
profitable than anything else, the salvaging of the Brent Interisland
Company's steamer _Pailula_ by Farringdon's schooner, in which
Harber had purchased a half-interest; so the partners are, on the
whole, rather well fixed. Harber might be rated at, perhaps, some
forty thousand pounds, not counting his interest in the schooner.
One of Janet Spencer's argosies, then, its cargo laden, is ready to
set sail for the hills of home. In short, Harber is now in one of
the island ports of call, waiting for the steamer from Fiji. In six
weeks he will be in Tawnleytown if all goes well.
It isn't, and yet it is, the same Harber. He's thirty now, lean and
bronzed and very fit. He can turn a hundred tricks now where then he
could turn one. The tropics have agreed with him. There seems to
have been some subtle affinity between them, and he almost wishes
that he weren't leaving them. He certainly wouldn't be, if it were
not for Janet.
Yes, that slender thread has held him. Through ten years it has kept
him faithful. He has eyed askance, ignored, even rebuffed, women.
The letters, that still come, have turned the trick, perhaps, or
some clinging to a faith that is inherent in him. Or sheer obstinacy?
Forgive the cynicism. A little of each, no doubt. And then he hadn't
often seen the right sort of women. I say that deliberately, because:
The night before the steamer was due there was a ball--yes, poor
island exiles, they called it that!--and Harber, one of some thirty
"Europeans" there, went to it, and on the very eve of safety ...
The glare and the oily smell of the lanterns, the odour of jasmine,
frangipanni, vanilla, and human beings sickeningly mingled in the
heat, the jangling, out-of-tune music, the wearisome island gossip
and chatter, drove him at length out into the night, down a
black-shadowed pathway to the sea. The beach lay before him presently,
gleaming like silver in the soft blue radiance of the jewelled night.
As he stood there, lost in far memories, the mellow, lemon-coloured
lights from the commissioner's residence shone beautifully from the
fronded palms and the faint wave of the waltzes of yesteryear became
poignant and lovely, and the light trade-wind, clean here from the
reek of lamps and clothing and human beings, vaguely tanged with the
sea, blew upon him with a light, insistent pressure. Half dreaming,
he heard the sharp sputter of a launch--bearing belated comers to
the ball, no doubt--but he paid no attention to it. He may have been
on the beach an hour before he turned to ascend to the town.
And just at the top of the slope he came upon a girl.
She hadn't perceived him, and she stood there, slim and graceful,
the moonlight bright upon her rapt face, with her arms outstretched
and her head flung back, in an attitude of utter abandonment. Harber
felt his heart stir swiftly. He knew what she was feeling, as she
looked out over the shimmering half-moon of harbour, across the
moaning white feather of reef, out to the illimitable sea, and drank
in the essence of the beauty of the night. Just so, at first, had it
clutched him with the pain of ecstasy, and he had never forgotten it.
There would be no voicing that feeling; it must ever remain
inarticulate. Nor was the girl trying to voice it. Her exquisite
pantomime alone spelled her delight in it and her surrender to it.
He saw at a glance that he didn't know her. She was "new" to the
islands. Her clothes were evidence enough for that. There was a
certain verve to them that spoke of a more sophisticated land. She
might have been twenty-five though she seemed younger. She was in
filmy white from slipper to throat, and over her slender shoulders
there drifted a gossamer banner of scarf, fluttering in the soft
trade-wind. Harber was very close to see this, and still she hadn't
observed him.
"Don't let me startle you, please!" he said, as he stepped from the
shadow of the trumpet-flower bush that had hitherto concealed him.
Her arms came down slowly, her chin lowered; her pose, if you will,
melted away. Her voice when she spoke was low and round and thrilled,
and it sent an answering thrill through Harber.
"I'm mad!" she said. "Moon-mad--or tropic-mad. I didn't hear you. I
was worshipping the night!"
"As I have been," said Harber, feeling a sudden pagan kinship with
her mood.
She smiled, and her smile seemed the most precious thing in the world.
"You, too? But it isn't new to you ... and when the newness is gone
every one--here at least--seems dead to it!"
"Sometimes I think it's always new," replied Harber. "And yet I've
had years of it ... but how did you know?"
"You're Mr. Harber, aren't you?"
"Yes. But---"
"Only that I knew you were here, having heard of you from the
Tretheways, and I'd accounted for every one else. I couldn't stay
inside because it seemed to me that it was wicked when I had come so
far for just this, to be inside stuffily dancing. One can dance all
the rest of one's life in Michigan, you know! So----"
"It's the better place to be--out here," said Harber abruptly.
"Need we go in?"
"I don't know," she said doubtfully. "Maybe you can tell me. You see,
I've promised some dances. What's the usage here? Dare I run away
from them?"