1
BELLAIR had to wait less than two days in Savannah, for the _Jade_
had made a pretty passage. Impressions rushed home too swift for
his mind to follow, as he stepped aboard from the cotton dock; the
number of impressions, he did not know, until he began the inventory
in his cabin afterward. Last and first and most compelling, however,
was the spectacle of Stackhouse, that David Hume figure of a man,
reclining in his cane-chair of similar vast proportions just aft of the
main-shrouds. A momentous hammock of canes, that steamer-chair, with
gentle giving slopes for the calves and broad containers, polished with
wear and tightly woven like armour, for the arms; a sliding basket for
the head, suggestive of a guillotine’s grisly complement; the whole
adjusted to Stackhouse and no other.
Humid heat in the harbour, a day of soft low clouds. The man who pushed
Brooklyn from him, had discarded even more thoroughly the clothing of
temperate climes. The vivid black of his hairy chest was uncovered, and
there was a shining bar of the same, just above the selvage of white
sock. Bellair thought he must be hairy as a collie dog.... But mainly
that which weighted and creaked the chair seemed an enormous puddle of
faded silks.
The bulky brown head (which arose plumb as a wall from the back of the
neck) had slightly bowed as Bellair passed. There was something ox-like
in the placidity of the brown eyes, but that was only their first beam,
as it were. Much that was within and behind the eyes of Stackhouse,
Bellair thought of afterward. Through a deep, queer process, it came
to him that even the answer for his coming was in that indescribable
background; and restless, too, in the pervading brown, a movement of
sleek animals there. The Japanese woman had _skuffed_ forward with
drink for her lord.
Over all was the cloud of canvas and rigging, which Bellair had studied
from the land, and which had forced him to a fine respect for the
ruffian sailor-men who could move directly in such an arcanum, and
command its service. Bellair had not found such labour on shore, having
lost his respect for the many who did not learn even the commonest
work.... There was a deep-sea smell about her, a solution of tar and
dried fruit, paint and steaming coppers from the galley.
The very age of the _Jade_ was a charm to him. Only her spine and ribs
and plates were of steel--the rest a priceless woodwork that had come
into its real beauty under the endlessly wearing hands of man. There
seemed a grain and maturity to the inner parts, as if the strain and
roughing of the seas had brought out the real enduring heart of the
excellent fabric. The rose-wood side-board of his upper berth, for
instance, placed for the full light from the port to fall upon it,
was worth the price of the passage--sixteen inches wide, a full inch
and one-half thick, worn to a soft lustre as if the human hands had
hallowed it, and giving back to the touch the same answer from the
years that a vine brings to stone-work and the bouquet to wine.... The
_Jade_ had known good care and answered. Floors, even of the cabins,
were hollowed from much stoning; the hinges held and ferried their
burdens in silence, and the old locks moved with soft contented clicks,
the wards running in new oil.
A city man who had long dreamed of a country garden; or indeed, Bellair
was a city man who had long dreamed of a full-rigged ship to fulfil in
part the romance of his soul. The _Jade_ had a dear inner life for him,
satisfied him with her lines, her breathing, settling and repose. A
fine hunger began to animate the length and breadth of the man.
There was a half hour of straight, clear thinking, of the kind that
plumbs the outlook with the in, and mainly comes unawares. Bessie
Brealt, of course, appeared and passed, in all the hardness of her life
and the pity of it, but the days that had elapsed since the parting had
not changed his unique desire to help her; nor did he lie to himself
that he wanted her, too, as a man wants a woman. He loved her in a way,
against his will. Possibly the kiss had fixed that. In the solution of
the running thoughts, and without subtlety of mingling, was the face on
deck, the dark, extraordinary face of Stackhouse.
They were a full day at sea, before Bellair was called to sit down
before the great cane chair. There was a warm land wind; November
already forgotten. The _Jade_ had gathered up her skirts and was
swinging along with a low music of her own. Stackhouse waddled back to
his chair from the land-rail, a remarkable mass of crumpled silks, the
canes marked in the general effusion of dampness along his back and
legs, the silks caught up behind by a system of wrinkles and imprints,
and one hitched pantaloon revealing the familiar muff of fur above the
selvage of his fallen sock. Now Stackhouse was preparing to enter.
Bellair was caught in the tension. The process, while prodigious, was
not without its delicate parts. One hand was irrevocably occupied
with a long-stemmed China pipe, a warm creamy vase, already admired by
Bellair. Breath came in puffs and pantings of fragrant tobacco, but
there were gurglings and strange stoppages of air that complained from
deeper passages.
Creaking began at the corners; and a wallowing as if from the father of
all boars. Now the centre of the chair caught the strain in full and
whipped forth its remonstrance. One after another the legs gripped the
deck, each with a whimper of its own; and the air was filled with sharp
singing tension which infected the nerves of the watcher. Suddenly
the torso seemed to let go of itself; and from the canes of the huge
central hollow came a scream in unison. By miracle the whole found
itself once more and the breathing of Stackhouse subsided to a whine.
“We are entering the latitude of rum,” said he. “Whoever you are, young
man, drink the drink of nature, and you will brosper.”
The west was just a shore-line, the dusk rising like a tide. The hand
of the owner pressed the silks variously about his chest, and at last
located a loose match. Nerves were sparsely scattered in these thick,
heavy-fleshed fingers. He had to stop all talk and memory to direct his
feeling. The match at length emerged from his palm, and slithered over
the fine canes of the arm. It was damp. Stackhouse rubbed the sulphur
delicately in the hair at his temple and tried again. Fire leaped to
the tip, and poured out from the great hand which pressed it to the
pipe and mothered it from the wind. From the gurgling passages, smoke
now poured as the sweetness in Sampson’s riddle.
Rum had come. The Japanese woman served them. The youth of her face
chilled Bellair; the littleness of her, all the tints and delicacy of
a miniature in her whitened face. Bright-hued silk, a placid smile,
the _skuffing_ of her wooden sandals and the clock-work intricacy of
the coils of her black hair--these were but decorations of the tragedy
which came home to the American where he was still tender.... But why
should he burn tissue? She seemed happy. He knew that the Japanese
women require very little to make them happy; but that little was
denied this maiden. An hour a day to giggle with her girl-friends
behind a lattice, and she might have borne twenty-three hours of hell
with calmness and cheer, not counterfeit like this.
“You have no true drink of the soil in Ameriga,” said Stackhouse.
“You do not make beer nor wine, so you make no music. The only drink
and the only music that come from the States of Ameriga, are from the
nigger-folk who do not belong there. They make music and corn whiskey.
The rest is boison to the soul.”
The voice was rich and mellow. He must have known Teutonic beginnings,
or enough association for the mannerisms to get into his blood.
Stackhouse was not even without that softness of sentiment, though he
was tender only for men. Except for a spellable word here and there,
his accent was inimitable. He talked of little other than death, and
with indescribable care--as if he had been much with men of another
language or with men of slow understanding.... It may have been the
drink, or the sunset over distant land; the Spanish Main ahead, or
the dryness and pentness of the city-heart and its achievement of
long-dreamed desire in a snug, sweet ship under the easy strain of
sails with wind in them; in any event Bellair was drawn with exquisite
passion--drawn southward as the _Jade_ was drawn in the soft,
irresistible strength of nature.
He knew that this would pass, that he could not continue to sense this
_rapport_ with the sea-board, but he loved it now, breathed deep, and
saw Stackhouse as he was never to be seen again. There was enchantment
in the eyes of the great wanderer, and a certain culture of its kind in
its stories. Bellair listened and in the gleam of the broad, dark eyes,
there seemed a glimpse of burning ships, shadowy caravans on moonlit
sands and the flash of arms by night; low-lying lights of island ports,
formless rafts, spuming breakers, mourning derelicts--just glimpses,
but of all the gloom and garishness of the sea. He began a monologue
that night, and though it is not this story, it was not interrupted
except by meals and sleeping, for many days; and all the pauses in that
story were the dramatic pauses of death:
“... I have travelled more than most travellers and have seen more than
is good for one man. In New York I saw Brundage of Frisco, who asked
me if I remembered Perry. I said I remembered very well, for Perry
was a bartner of mine, before young Brundage came out to the Islands.
He told me Perry was six weeks buried. That is the way now. When I
was young, my combanions did not die in beds. They were killed. Eight
months ago, I saw Emslie--waved at him going up the river to Shanghai.
He was outward bound, and came home to us in Adelaide in a sealed
box. Old Foster, who is richer than I, has married a little Marie in
Manila and may die when he pleases now. The South Seas still run in and
yonder among Island shores, but who buys wine for the Japanese girls in
Dunedin, since Norcross was conscripted for the service we all shall
know?...
“And thus you come to the _Jade_, and some time you will here them dell
of Stackhouse. Who knows but you may dell the story--of a familiar face
turned down like an oft-filled glass? And some one will say, ‘He has
not laughed these many years.’ They used to say in the _Smilax_ at Hong
Kong, when the harbour was raving and the seas were trying to climb
the mountain--they used to say that Stackhouse was laughing somewhere
off the China coasts. But there are only so many laughs in a man,
and they go out with the years. Most of those who said that thing of
Stackhouse--yes, most of them, are dead as glacial drift.”
Such was the quality of his perorations, hunched ox-like just aft of
the main-shrouds--the Japanese woman coming and going with the ship’s
bells, bringing drinks day and night.
“It seared my coppers--that drinking in the States of Ameriga. It will
not subdue,” said he. “One has a thirst for weeks after a few days of
drinking in Ameriga. For one must be bolite.”
He was never stimulated, seldom depressed, but saturated his great
frame twenty hours of the twenty-four, the Japanese woman seeming
to understand with few or no words the whims of taste of which he
was made. Just once in the small hours, Bellair heard her voice. The
cane-chair had not been empty long, and the silence of soft rain
was upon the deck. Bellair had opened a package of New York papers
purchased on the last day in Savannah.... It was just one scream, but
the scream of one not frightened by any human thing.... The roll of
papers dropped down behind the bunk. Anyway, Bellair could not have
read after that. Early in the morning after hours of torture of dreams,
he was awakened as usual by the sluicing of the monster. Two Lascars
who travelled with Stackhouse apparently for no other purpose, poured
pails of salt water upon him in the early hour when the decks were
washed; and often at midday as they neared the Line. It was given to
Bellair more than once, as the voyage lengthened, to witness this
hippodrome.
2
Her face was continually turned away. Bellair wondered as days passed
if he should ever see her face to face--the silent, far-looking young
woman with a nursing baby in her arms. On deck she stood at the rail,
eyes lost oversea. Her contemplation appeared to have nothing to do
with Europe or America, but set to the wind wherever it came from, as
the strong are always turned up-stream. Sometimes she wore a little
blue jacket, curiously reminding Bellair of school-days, and though she
was not far from that in years, she seemed to have passed far into the
world. The child cried rarely.
There was a composure about the mother, but he did not know if it were
stolidity or poise. Certainly she had known poverty, but health was
in her skin, and there was something in that white profile, that the
sun had touched with olive rather than tan, that stopped his look.
The perfection of it dismayed Bellair. He loved beauty, but did not
trust it, did not trust himself with it. The presence of a beautiful
face stimulated him as no wine could do, but it also started him to
idealising that which belonged to it, and this process had heretofore
brought disappointment. Bellair did not want this touch of magnetism
now. Beauty was plentiful. He had seen the profiles of Italian girls in
New York, that the Greeks would have worshipped, and which the early
worship of the Greeks was doubtless responsible for--beauty with little
beside but giggle and sham. He disliked the thing in a man’s breast
that answers so instantly to the line and colour of a woman’s face;
objected to it primarily, because it was one of the first and most
obvious tricks of nature for the replenishment of species in man and
below. Bellair fancied to answer the captivation, if any at all, of a
deeper wonder in woman than the contour of her countenance.
He was aware that many a woman has a beautiful profile, whose direct
look is a disturbing reconsideration. This kept his eyes down, when she
was opposite in the dining cabin. We are strangely trained at table;
at no time so merciful. The human dining countenance must be lovely,
indeed, not to break the laws of beauty. Only outright lovers dare, and
they are bewildered by each other, and see not. So he did not know the
colour of her eyes.
She nursed her baby often on deck, sitting bare-headed in the wind and
sun, sometimes singing to it. The singing was all her own; Bellair
wished she wouldn’t. Her melodies were foreign, and sometimes it
seemed to him as if they were just a touch off the key. Her low
dissonances, he described vaguely as Russian, but retained the
suspicion that she was tonally imperfect of hearing.
The singing and the picture of her was just as far as possible from
Bessie Brealt, but she made Bellair think. In all likelihood this was
the general objection. His eyes smarted in the dusks, as he thought of
the other singer (as solitary in New York as this woman here), who was
determined not to be afraid of the cars or the bears or the wolves.
Every day Bessie’s first words returned to him:
“A little Rhine wine--it’s very good here.”
And always the devastation of that sentence was great. It was a
street-woman’s inside familiarity, _Brandt’s_ being one of her
rounds; as she might speak of the beer at _Holbeck’s_ or the chops at
_Sharpe’s_. Yet Bessie was not greedy, and had no taste for wine. It
was the glibness, the town mannerism, and the low, easy level which
her acceptance of the common saying revealed; the life which she was
willing to make her own, at least exteriorly. But after all, in the
better moments, it seemed very silly to deny a great soul to the girl
who could sing as Bessie sang. Some day she would feel her soul....
The preacher, third passenger on board the _Jade_, reported that the
Faraway woman was returning to her home in New Zealand. Fleury didn’t
know if her baby was boy or girl, but judged that it was very healthy,
since it cried so little.
Fleury wasn’t promising to Bellair’s eyes. First of all it was
the cloth; and then during the first three weeks at sea, Bellair
spent innumerable hours in the periphery of the great cane-chair.
He did not resist his prejudice. “A missionary going out with the
usual effrontery,” he decided. The preacher’s face appeared placid
and boyish.... Fleury, however, continued to observe cheerful
good-mornings, to praise the fine weather, and to offer opportunities
for better acquaintance--all without being obtrusive in the least.
Hayti and Santo Domingo--names once remote and romantic to the city
man’s mind--were now vanished shores, and as yet the voyage was but
well begun.... The three passengers were served together in the cabin,
except in cases when the Stackhouse narrative happened to be running
particularly well. Bellair would then be called to dine with the owner.
Captain McArliss would appear at this mess and disappear--the courses
being brought to him one after another in a certain rapid form. The
Captain seemed so conscious, that Bellair never quite dared to observe
what happened to the food, but he was certain that McArliss did not
bolt. His suspicion was that he tasted or sipped as the case might be,
merely spoiling the offering. He was gone before Stackhouse was really
started.
It was less what the giant ate, than the excessive formality and
importance of his table sessions that prevailed upon the American.
Dinner was the chief doing of the day. Bellair had never complained,
even in thought, of the food served to him in the usual mess, but with
Stackhouse everything was extra fine from the Chinese standpoint--all
delicacies and turns of the art, all choice cuttings and garnishments,
a most careful consideration of wines--so that from the first audible
delectation of the contents of the silver tureen, to the choice of a
cigar (invariably after a few deep inhalations from a cigarette “made
in Acca by the brisoners”), there was formality and deep responsibility
upon the ship; and a freedom afterward through the galleys that was
pleasant to regard.
“There are many things in Belgium,” said the master. “There are wines
and gookeries there; also in Poland there are gooks. In England there
are gooks, but not in Ameriga--only think-they-are-gooks. However,
there are gooks in China. I have one, as you shall see.”
Something like this at each mighty dining--and the promise had to do
with the next course which Stackhouse invariably knew and served as
a surprise for his guest, for he ordered his dinner with his coffee
and fish in the morning. Bellair had often seen the Chinese emerge
from the galley, as they came up from the dining saloon, little sparse
patches of hair here and there on his fat face like willow clumps
on the shore, these untouched by the razor, though his forehead was
perfectly shaven to the queue circlet. This was Gookery John taking his
breath after the moil and heat of the day.
Stackhouse would declare that he dined just once a day, meaning this
exactly. He breakfasted on a plate of fried fish with many pourings of
mellow, golden and august German coffee, eating the hot fishes in his
hands like crackers--a very warm and shiny hand when it was done--crisp
brown fishes stripped somehow in his beard, the bones tossed overside.
He liked full day with this meal. The plates were brought hot and
covered to the great cane chair, until he called for them to cease. For
his supper he desired outer darkness (English ale and apples, black
bread from Rome that comes sewn in painted canvas like hams for the
shipping, butter from Belgium packed with the care of costly cheeses,
of which he was connoisseur; sauces of India, a cold chicken, perhaps,
or terrapin, and an hour or two of nuts). The Japanese woman appeared
at none of these services.
It was the dinners, however, which bewildered Bellair most. He had
not the heart utterly to condemn them, since the _Jade_ and the noble
sea-air, sometimes winy and sometimes of sterile purity, kept him in
that fine state of appreciation, which if he had ever known as a boy
was utterly forgotten. He had initiation in curries and roasts, piquant
relishes of seed and fish and flower, chowders, broiled fish and
baked--until he felt the seas and continents serving their best, and
learned about each in the characteristic telling of the man who lived
for them. For instance when chicken was brought:
“These are the birds for the Chinese to play with--yes, you would
think me joking? It is not so. The little chicken-birds are kept for
pets. They are not frightened to death. You do not know, berhaps,
that fear and anger boisons the little birds? They are kept happy and
killed quick--before they know. Many mornings they are fed from the
hand and played with, until they love John of the gookeries--and one
morning--so, like that--heads off--and no boison from the fear of death
in our flavours. Many things you do not know--yes?”
“Yes,” Bellair said.
Stackhouse loved his little facts like these, all matters of
preparation of fish and flesh and fowl; the intricate processes of
fattening, curing, softening, corking and all the science of the
stores.... “There was a certain goose which I found in Hakodate--not
from the Japanese, but from a Chino there----”.... “And once upon a
time in Mindanao, they baked a fish for me with heated stones in the
ground. Wrapped in leaves, it was, and covered first in clay. You
should see the scales and skin come off with the clay--and the inner
barts a little ball, when it was finished. And the dining of that
evening. Ah, the sharb eyes of the little nigger girls--you would
believe?”.... Such were the stories in the long feeding--but the
stories on deck were the stories of the death of men.
In the usual mess the chat was perfunctory on Bellair’s part, since
he granted that the preacher and the Faraway woman (he called her
so in his thoughts from her distant-searching on deck) were so well
adjusted to each other. He granted this, and much beside concerning
the two, from pure fancy. Never once had they disregarded him, or
engaged in conversation that would leave him dangling, though many
times his own thoughts were apart. The _Jade_ had been three weeks out
of Savannah, in the southern Caribbean, a superb mid-afternoon, when
Bellair, turning at the rail, found Fleury at his side. He had just
been wondering if he had better go below and read awhile by the open
port, or start the monologue of Stackhouse for the rest of the day. The
latter was enjoyable enough, but Bellair disliked to drink anything so
early.... “One must be bolite.”
It happened right for the first conversation with Fleury. He had never
known a preacher whose talk touched the core of things. Preachers
had always shown a softness of training on the actualities, and
left Bellair sceptical of the rest. A minister had once told him:
“What force for good we get to be in mid-life, is in spite of our
ecclesiastical training, not because of it.” Bellair had often thought
of that.
Yet, he had given much secret thought to religious things, not counting
himself a specialist, however, seldom opening the subject. Certainly
at Lot & Company’s, no one had marked this proclivity. He had the idea
that a man must come up through men, and through the real problems of
men, if he would become a moving force for good in the world; that no
training apart among texts and tracts and tenets would get him power.
Very clearly he saw that a man must go apart to fix his ideals, but
that he should seek his wilderness after learning the world, not after
prolonged second-hand contacts with books.
“The big job ahead is for some one who can show the human family that
it’s all of a piece, and that we’re all out after the same thing,” he
remarked.
“A Unifier,” Fleury suggested.
“Yes. Just so long as we have to hate one cult or sect, because we love
another, we’re lost to the whole beauty of the scheme----”
“I quite agree with you,” said the preacher.
“What is your church?” Bellair asked.
“Well, the fact is, I haven’t one,” Fleury said with a smile.
“Convictions somewhat similar to that which you have expressed have
twice cost me my church. As the church puts it, I am a failure and not
to be trusted with regular work----”
“You are going out in the mission-service?”
Bellair was now ashamed, because he had held the other a bit cheaply.
The boyish face looked suddenly different to him, as Fleury said:
“No--that is, I have ceased to expound theology. I have come out to
make the thought and the act one.”
Bellair was taking on a new conception. His question was a trifle
automatic:
“Did you talk out in meeting?”
“Yes. There were a thousand years in the congregation. You know what I
mean--only a few of our generation in method of mind.”
“A sort of Seventeenth century average?” Bellair suggested.
“Don’t misunderstand me. I was wrong, too,” Fleury declared. “Wrong,
in the young man’s way of thinking himself right. You know we’re just
as baneful when we are getting into a new world of thought as when we
are not yet out of the old. It’s only after we have settled down and
got accustomed to the place, that we’re reasonable. A man should be big
enough to talk to all men, and appear everlastingly true to the least
and the greatest. Truth is big enough for that. I had only a different
trail from theirs, and wanted them all to come to mine, forgetting that
the trails are only far apart at the bottom of the mountain--that they
all converge at the top----”
“You had to be honest with yourself,” Bellair said thoughtfully.
“That’s just what I thought, but maybe there was a lie in that,” Fleury
answered. “It’s not so easy to be honest with one’s self and keep on
using words for a living. The best way is to act----”
“You’ve said something, Mr. Fleury.”
And in his new respect for the other, Bellair wanted to make his view
clearer. “It’s the old soil and seed story again,” he said. “It isn’t
enough to get truth down to superb simplicity. The minds of men must
be open beside. My objection to the Church is that it has separated
religion from work and the week-day--tried to balance one day of
sanctimoniousness against six days of mammon--taught men that heaven
is to be reached in a high spiritual effusion because One has died for
us. The fact is we’ve got to help ourselves to heaven.... Excuse me for
being so communicative,” he added, “but what you said about putting
down talk and taking up action interested me at once. I’ve a suspicion
you won’t be long in finding something to do----”
“I’m hoping just that.”
Fleury smiled at him. The face was large and mild, not a fighter’s
face nor a coward’s either.... The young woman appeared with the child.
She seemed to hold it to the sun, and she walked with the beauty of a
woman bringing a pitcher to the fountain. Bellair realised the heat of
the day. Her face had an intense clearness, but was partly turned away.
There was a delicacy about it that he had not known before. He recalled
that she had just bowed to them.... They were passing an island
shore--a line of sun-dazzle that stung the eyes, empty green hills and
a fierce white sky. Bellair thought of the woman and the island as one
... he, the third, coming home, mooring his boat, hastening up the
trail at evening.... Her frail back, bending a little to the right,
made him think of a dancer he had once seen. He saw the child’s bare
limbs in the sun.... His steps were quickened up that Island trail
again.... The _Jade_ seemed fainting in the cushions of hot wind. Just
then a voice said:
“She’s quite the most remarkable woman. She isn’t a talker.”
He had forgotten Fleury.
“Where is she going?”
“Auckland. She came from there.”
“Queer, she would go home this way----”
“Her whole fortune is in her arms,” Fleury whispered.
The ship’s bell struck twice; the cane-chair creaked; they turned by
habit to note the appearance of the Japanese woman with drink. She did
not fail. Stackhouse came to with a prolonged snore, a sound unlike a
pair of pit-terriers at work.
“A considerable brute,” muttered the preacher.
“He has been much of a man in his way,” said Bellair.
“He talks much--that is weakness.”
Their eyes met. Bellair began to understand how deeply the other’s
experience had bitten him.
“He’s afraid of death,” Fleury added.
“I wonder,” Bellair mused. “He talks always of death. He’s been in at
the deaths of many men. He’ll die hard himself--if he doesn’t tame
down.”
Fleury added: “When a man is so much an animal, all his consciousness
is in that. They see death as the end--that’s why they are afraid----”
“I wonder if he is a coward?” Bellair questioned.
“The stuff animals are made of cannot last,” the preacher concluded.
Bellair pondered as he sat with Stackhouse that night. Brandy was the
choice of the evening. The Japanese woman brought it from the deeps of
the hold, where it had come in stone from Bruges. Bellair joined him a
second and a third time for the instant stinging zest of the fire....
Fleury and the woman had long stood together aft by the clicking log.
The moon came late and bulbous. Stackhouse talked of his fortune, and
the chaos in many island affairs his death would cause.... Once he had
loved a chap named Belding, and would have left him great riches, but
Belding was dead....
3
They had crossed the Line. The night was windless hot--almost
suffocating below. Bellair gave it up, a little after midnight, and
went on deck, moving forward out of the smell of paint, for the heat
had bubbled the lead on the cabin planking. A few first magnitude stars
glinted in the fumy sky. The anchor chains and the big hook itself made
a radiator not to be endured--better the smell of paint than that.
Captain McArliss moved past with a cigar and suggested jerkily that a
hammock was swung aft by the binnacle. Bellair thanked him and went
there, but did not lie down. Close to the rail he could smell the deep
and it refreshed him. Left alone in this hard-won ease, his thoughts
turned back to New York.
... It was like a ghost at the companionway--a faint grey luminosity.
She came toward him without a sound, the child in her arms. Something
of the strangeness prevented him speaking until she was near, and then
he spoke softly in fear lest she be frightened:
“It is I, Bellair----”
If she were startled, she did not let him know. He offered the
deckchair he had occupied, or the hammock, as she chose.
“I would not have disturbed you,” she said.
“I think it is cooler close to the rail,” he suggested. “The little one
is very brave. Is he awake?”
“Yes----”
“I don’t know why I said ‘he,’--the fact is, I didn’t know,” he laughed.
“You were right,” she answered, sitting down. “He seems to have so much
to study and contemplate. It passes the time for him, and then he is
very well and he likes the sea.”
“He has been to sea before?”
“Yes, we came up from Auckland on a steamer when he was _ver-ee_
little, but he liked it, and did so well. It was harder for him in New
York, although he didn’t complain----”
Bellair laughed.
“Now that I have taken your seat--won’t you get another?” she asked.
“Or the hammock?”
“If you don’t mind I should be very glad to get another chair----”
Bellair found himself hurrying to the waist, for there was always a
lesser seat by the great cane throne.... He could not see her face in
that utter night, but sometimes when he had forgotten for a moment,
there seemed the faintest grey haze about her face and shoulders, but
never when he looked sharply; and the curve of her back as her body
fitted to the child in her lap, hushed him queerly within, so that he
listened to his own commonplace words, as one would hear the remarks of
another.
“Do you suppose he would come to me?” the man asked.
“I think he would be very glad,” she said.
Bellair took no risk, but placed his hand softly between the little
ones. Something went out of him, leaving nothing but a queer, joyous
vibration that held life together, with ample to spare to laugh with.
The larger part of his identity seemed to be infused with the night,
however. On one side of his hand, there was a warm, light seizure,
rendering powerless his own little finger, and on the other side, his
thumb was taken. He lifted his hand a little and the captor’s came with
it--no waste of energy whatsoever, but with easy confidence of having
enough and to spare. The man couldn’t breathe without laughing, but he
was very quiet about it as the moment demanded, and his delight was
nowise to be measured in recent history.
He was bending forward close to the woman’s breast. Suddenly he
remembered her--as if finding himself in a sanctuary.... The great
pictures of the world had this _motif_, but the Third of the trinity
was always invisible. Yet he had entered in this darkness, come right
into the fragrance and the love-magnetism of it ... held there in two
ineffable pressures.
His low laughter ceased. He was full of wonder now, but could not stay.
Out of the bewilderment of emotions he had the one sense--that he was
not the third to this mystery--that the third must be invisible, as in
the great _madonnas_ of paint. He betrayed the tiny grips with a twist,
caught the child in his two hands and lifted him from the mother,
sitting back in his own chair.... But the fragrance lingered about him
and that wonderful homing vibration. He knew something of the nature of
it now. It was peace.
4
The little blue jacket had come forth again as they ran down into the
cold.... There was wild weather around the Horn, and Stackhouse was a
sick monster from confinement. Bellair, who could drink a little for
company through the glorious nights on deck, bolted from the cabin
performance, and Captain McArliss was called to listen, and fell, as
Stackhouse knew he would, for he had said to Bellair during one of
their last talks:
“Lest there appear among men a perfect sailor, they handicapped my
McArliss--packed his inner barts in unslaked lime. Never will you see
a thirst fought as he fights it. First he will drink with me, and
you will hear him laugh; then he will drink alone, and there will be
silence until he begins to scream. Already his eyes are tortured and
his lips white. Bresently he will come and sit with me----”
Bellair hated this; in fact the big master had begun to wear deeply. “I
should think you would want to keep him on his feet--for the passage
around the Horn.”
“My McArliss is always a sailor,” said Stackhouse, rocking his head.
Bellair could credit that. McArliss interested him--an abrupt, nervous
man, who covered the eager warmth of his friendliness in frosted
mannerisms and sentences clipped at each end. He was afraid of himself
except in his work, afraid of his opinions, though a great reader of
the queer out of the way good things. Bellair found Woolman’s Life in
his little library, with narratives of the ocean, tales of Blackbirders
and famous Indiamen, Lytton’s “Strange Story” and “Zanoni,” also
Hartmann’s “Magic, Black and White.” The latter he read, and found it
not at all what he expected, but a book that would go with him as far
as he cared at any angle, and then lose him. He was quite astonished.
It was a long book, too--the kind you vow you will begin again, from
time to time through the last half. He wanted to talk to McArliss about
it, but the Captain was embarrassed.
“Crazy, eh?” he would say with a queer, dry laugh.
“I’ve stopped saying that about a book--because I don’t get it all,”
Bellair remarked. “This man is right as far as I can go with him.”
“You give him the benefit--eh? That’s pretty good.”
“And you like it?”
“Ha--it passes the time. Good God--we have to pass the time!”
He spoke jerkily, always in this fashion, and the days brought no ease
to the tension. McArliss patted his pockets, swore hastily over little
things, looked snappily here and there. Bellair would have guessed,
without the word from Stackhouse. The Captain was fighting hard. There
seemed nothing to be done; the man had grown a spiked hedge around an
innocent shyness; all that was real about him he kept shamefacedly to
himself. Still Bellair believed more and more in his fine quality.
McArliss made a picture for him of one who has come up through steam
and returned to canvas bringing a finer appreciation to the beauty and
possibilities of natural seamanship; as a man returns to the land,
after many wearing years of city life, with a different and deeper
instinct of the nature of the soil.
“She’s a slashing sailer,” he would say critically, as he crowded the
_Jade_. “She balances to a hair--eh? Good old girl--they don’t breed
her kind any more.”
It was he who balanced her to every wind, meeting all weathers with
different cuts of cloth. Having only a distant familiarity with his
fellow-officers and not even a speaking acquaintance with the crew,
McArliss made her sing her racing song night and day down into the
lower latitudes, until one played with the suspicion that he managed
the weather, too,--with that same nervous, effective energy. It was
all tremendously satisfying to Bellair. He had reacted on the last
reaction, and was healed throughout. Worldliness was lost from his
mental pictures of Bessie; daily she became more as he wanted her to
be. Lot & Company had lost its upstanding and formidable black--was
far-off now and dimly pitiable. He had not cared what was ahead; it
had been the _Jade_ and the voyage that had called him, but now the
Islands and all that watery universe of the Southern Pacific were
in prospect, to explore and make his own. Perhaps men were younger
there; trade less old and ramified; perhaps they would bring him the
new magic of life--so that he could live with zest and be himself....
Always at this part of the dream he would think of Bessie again. She
was the cord not yet detached. Sooner or later, he must go back to
her. At times he thought that he could not bear to remain very long;
sometimes even watching this endless passage of days with strange
concern.... But there was a short cut home--straight up the Pacific to
San Francisco--and four days across....
Fleury and the Faraway woman had their increasingly fine part in his
life. The preacher was always finding some new star, or bidding adieu
to some northern constellation.
They had chosen the passage through the Straits because of the settled
weather. At least, they called it fair-going--wild and rugged though
it was, with huge masses of torn cloud, black or grey-black, hurtling
past, often as low as the masthead, and all life managed at sick
angles. The _Jade_ bowed often and met the screaming blasts with her
poles strangely bare, except, perhaps, for a few feet of extra-heavy
canvas straining at the mizzen weather-rig.... Stackhouse nudged him
one night and a laugh gurgled up from his chest as he pointed forward
where McArliss stood in the waist lighting a cigarette.
“He will not sleep to-night. He will come to me--and you will never
hear such talk as from this silent man. He will look for gompany
to-night. One must be bolite.”
It was true. McArliss apparently fell into the cigarettes first,
or perhaps he had fallen deeper. Bellair did not join them in the
cabin, but heard their voices. The next day McArliss hunted him up,
an inconceivable action. This was not like timid Spring, but sudden
redolent summer after the austerities. The man was on fire, but
perfectly in hand. All that he had thought and kept to himself for
months appeared to come forth now--books and men, the great oceans of
spirit and matter, and the mysteries of life and release. It seemed as
if his body and brain had suddenly become transparent. The Captain was
happy and kind, without oath or scandal, full of colour and romance;
returning with excellent measure all the good thoughts that Bellair had
given to him, and showing forth for one rare forenoon the memorable
fabric of a man.
There was no repetition to his stages. In the afternoon he passed
Bellair brusquely, and drank the night away with Stackhouse. The
next day both face and figure had a new burden; the real man was now
imprisoned more effectively than even his sobriety could accomplish....
Then the descent day by day--the narrow, woman’s waist and the broad,
lean shoulders becoming a hunched unit, face averted, hands thick.
Bellair always felt that Stackhouse was in a way responsible--for the
old Master had known what would come and lured it on. He had foretold
each stage--even to the last of McArliss drinking alone.
On two nights Fleury was with him while he met his devils. He had
outraged Bellair at every offer and entrance. Even Stackhouse was
surprised that the preacher was permitted to attend. His poor vitality
at length began to crawl back into his body with terrible pain and
shattered sanity--that old familiar battle, the last of many storms.
And now the _Jade_ was sailing up into the summer of the southern
ocean. Midwinter in New York and here a strange, spacious sort of
June, not without loneliness and wonderment to Bellair for the steady
brightness and exceeding length of day.
The new moon had come down, extraordinary in its earth-shine which
Fleury explained. The _Jade_ was marking time, just making steerage
headway, the breeze too light for good breathing.... To-night (as
had happened a dozen times before on the other side of South America
before the cold weather) Stackhouse had begun his story with, “It was
a night like this----” As of old it was the tale of man and death, of
the Stackhouse escape from death, sinuously impressing the Stackhouse
courage and cleverness. Not that the story was without art; indeed,
as usual, it was such a one as a man seldom leaves until the end; but
Bellair had long since reached the moment of sufficiency. He had come
to the end of his favourite author; had begun to see the mechanism and
inventional methods of the workmanship. Vim was lost for the enactment
of Stackhouse’s fiercer strength. The man was a concentrated fume of
spirit, every tissue falsely braced, his very life identified with the
life and heat of decay....
Alone, Bellair glanced about before going below. A breeze had slightly
quickened the ship in the last hour. There may have been a dozen
nights of equal mystery but this he appreciated more soundly and
was grateful for freedom. His mind answered the beauty of it all
... something of this, he might be able to tell Bessie in a letter.
The stars were far and tender; the air heavenly cool and soft, the
night high, and the ship’s full white above, had something to do with
angels--a dreamy spirit-haunt about it all. He would always see the
_Jade_ so, as he would see the Captain in that wonderful forenoon of
his emancipation--poor McArliss who had not been on deck for days.
Twenty minutes later, with paper before him in his berth, Bellair was
deep in the interpretation of his heart, when the _Jade_ struck the
cupola of a coral castle, and hung there shivering for five seconds. It
was like a suspension of the law of time.
Bellair thought of Bessie, of every one on the ship, beginning with
Fleury and the New Zealand woman, and ending with Captain McArliss and
the owner’s Japanese wife. These latter two were strangely rolled into
one, as their images came. He thought of the ship’s position somewhere
in the great emptiness between the Strait of Magellan and Polynesia. He
re-read the last line of the letter before him. It had to do with the
real help he hoped to be in Bessie’s cause _within the year_. He heard
the running and the hard-held voices on deck, and one great bellowing
cry from Stackhouse. He knew now that all the tales were the low
furies of fear; that the movement he had seen first in the eyes of the
great animal were the movements of fear....
And then the _Jade_ slid off the reef with a rip more tragic than the
strike.
5
Hissing and sucking began below, and the drawing of the centre of the
earth. Bellair felt this in his limbs, and the limp paralysis of the
sails. It was like the blind struggle in the soul of a bird, this
strain in the entity of the old _Jade_ to retain her balance between
earth and sky.... Bellair was on his knees dragging forth his unused
case. The roll of New York papers came with it, and he stuffed them
in overcoat pockets with a six-shooter, a bottle of whiskey and a
few smaller things. These arrangements were made altogether without
thought. Unfumblingly, he obeyed a rush of absurdities that seemed
obvious and reasonable as in a dream.
The touch of water on his knee as he arose was like a burn. It poured
in under the door, its stream the size of a pencil, a swift and quiet
little emissary. It occurred--a queer, rational touch--that the _Jade_
could not be thus filled so soon, that something must have overturned.
He opened the door to the deck. Night and ocean were all one; the rest
was the stars, and this bit of chaos recoiling from its death--a
little ship, struck from the deep and perceiving her death like a rat
that has been struck by a rattler. He smelled the sea, as one in a
night-walk smells the earth when passing a ravine.
He moved aft toward the voices, without yet having thought of his own
death. He passed a leaking water-cask, and this reminded him of his
thirst. He took a deep drink--all he could--and his thoughts came
up to the moment. At the same time, that which had been a mass of
inarticulate sounds cleared into a more or less coherent intensity of
action.
He heard that the _Jade_ was sinking, but knew that already; heard
that she would be under in five minutes, which was news of the first
order of sensation.... Now he heard Stackhouse again; the rich unctuous
voice gone, a sharp, dry _peaking_ instead.... They were aft at the
binnacle--Stackhouse, Fleury, the Faraway Woman, McArliss. The Japanese
woman was hurrying forward with a pitcher of wine. Stackhouse drank
from the pitcher, standing, and with greed that flooded his chest. He
spoke and the Japanese woman vanished.
Bellair saw the face of McArliss in the white ray from the binnacle.
He had scarcely seen the Captain for a week. Last seen, it was a face
swollen and flaming red. It was yellow now, like the skin of a chicken,
and feathered with patches of white beard. The loose eye-lids were
touched with blue. He fumbled with a cigarette, and called hysterically
to an officer amidships. He was not broken from the tragedy, but from
the debauch.
Stackhouse was standing by the small boat when two sailors came to
launch it. He rocked from one foot to another and peaked to them
incessantly. Fleury and the woman stepped nearer the boat. They moved
together as one person.... Bellair saw Stackhouse raise his hands as he
had done that first Sunday, pushing Brooklyn from him. His body pressed
against the gunwale of the small boat; he caught it in his hands, as it
raised clear, his ridiculous ankles alternately lifting.
His Chinese cook rushed forward with cans of crackers, and dumped them
in the boat. The Japanese woman appeared dragging a huge hamper of
wines and liquors. Stackhouse took the hamper between his legs and sent
her back to his cabin. The boat was lowered just below the level of the
_Jade’s_ gunwale. Stackhouse sprawled forward, the hairy masses of his
legs writhing after. Presently he reversed, and began to reach for the
hamper. Fleury kicked it out of reach, and lifted the woman and child
in.
“Get water,” he said to Bellair. “I’ll save a place for you.”
Bellair tossed his overcoat into the boat and darted to the galley,
where he found cans. Filling them seemed a process interminable, until
he pulled over the half-filled cask.... Stackhouse was screaming for
his hamper. The Japanese woman sped by with more bottles. She tried
to put them in the boat, but Fleury took them from her, and attempted
to force her into a place, but she had heard a final command from her
lord and broke away.... Bellair was filling his cans a second time....
Stackhouse, who had risen insanely, was rocked back either by word or
blow from Fleury. The small boat was on the sea, and the _Jade’s_ rail
leaned low to it. The sea was roaring into the mother-boat; she would
flurry in an instant.
“Yes, water, Bellair,” said Fleury. “But don’t go back.”
“One more trip,” said Bellair.
He filled the last can--his mind holding the image of Stackhouse
on his knees praying to Fleury for his hamper. Beseechings back in
the dark accentuated the picture. Fleury was calling for him.... He
passed the Japanese woman, sobbing and _skuffing_ pitifully back to
the cabin; as a child sent repeatedly for something hard to find. He
heard the launching of the other and larger boat forward; saw at the
binnacle McArliss still fumbling for a match. Then Fleury grasped him
and his can.... No, it was the woman’s hand that saved the can from
overturning. Bellair would have waited for the Japanese woman, but the
_Jade_ dipped half-over and slid him into the boat.
The mother-ship shuddered. The Japanese woman passed the binnacle,
holding something high in her hand. She was on her knees.... There was
a flare and the face of McArliss--who had struck his match at last....
The _Jade_ seemed to go from them--a sheet of grey obscured the rail.
The two who remained were netted there together, the red point of the
cigarette flickered out.... The two boats were on the sea; the night, a
serenity of starlight.... The sound of slobbering turned their eyes to
Stackhouse, who was drinking from one of the large cans.... Fleury went
to him, pressed the face from it, and placed the cans forward at the
feet of the woman. His hand was sticky afterward, as if with blood, and
he held it overside.