The new boy sat, quiet, shy, and abashed, in the seat given him that
morning by the principal. His seat mate was a stranger to him, and,
being well up in front, right under the desk of the principal, there
had been no communication between them. During the morning recess he
had made no friends, standing close against the fence that divided the
boys from the girls, timidly watching the rough games of the others;
and at noon he had run to the new home to which his parents had taken
him, with boyish disapproval of the school and the pupils. But now, at
three o'clock of this Friday afternoon, he was compelled to change his
opinion. The weekly exercises had begun, and, as his last school held
no such entertainment, he was intensely interested.
A girl of sixteen played a very pretty march on the piano, and moderate
applause was permitted. A boy delivered "Bingen on the Rhine," and
received no applause whatever; but the next boy won a little compulsory
approval, led by the principal, for declaiming the Declaration of
Independence. Then followed more recitation, music, and essay reading,
lukewarmly received; but when the principal rose and said, "And last,
we shall have a song by Zenie Malcolm," a suppressed commotion went
through the school, and each boy sat straighter.
The new boy started, and an unknown thrill surged from heart to brain.
He seemed to know that name, but could not recall where he had heard
it. The girl called to sing approached from the rear of the school, and
he was too well versed in school-room etiquette to turn and look; but
when she came into view, crossing the space between the front desks and
the low stage, he rose half out of his seat, his eyes wide open, and
the delicious thrill of recognition again tingling through him. He had
known her; but where, and when? He could not remember, and sat down
under the principal's disapproving frown, staring hard at the girl at
the piano.
She was about his age--eleven--a rather pretty child, with dark blue
eyes, and a wealth of golden hair, confined only by a ribbon, and
hanging loosely down her back. And she sang, in a sweet, trembling
voice, a lullaby the music of which the boy seemed to know--that is, he
anticipated the coming notes of the tune before they left her lips--but
he could not recall where or when he had heard it. She went to her seat
at the end of it, applauded by the whole school, and unaware of the
silent worship of the new boy. All his life he had imagined the angels
as having hair of this hue; but he had never seen it on a human being.
Dark blue eyes he was familiar with; his mother had them--and the
angels, too.
That night he hummed the tune to his mother; but she had never heard
it, and with motherly intuition advised him not to think of girls at
his age, and to attend to his studies. The boy racked his brains for
a few days, trying to remember where he had seen this girl and heard
this song, then gave it up. Later, with a larger acquaintance among
the pupils, he learned that her parents had moved from a neighboring
town only a month prior to his advent in the school. Coincidence was a
large word to him at his age, and meant nothing; so he remembered his
emotions at first seeing her.
But the strenuous life of a healthy schoolboy is such as to preclude
investigation of mental phenomena. He made friends and joined the
games of the others. From being shy and embarrassed, he grew to be
confident and plucky. He had his fights and won his victories; but
never at a time when his small goddess could witness--she was always
somewhere else, and other girls applauded his prowess. But she must
have learned from these other girls; nothing else could explain the
shy little smile she gave him as he came into school one day, both
eyes blackened and his coat torn almost in half. She had never even
looked him in the eyes before, and he went forward at the stern call
of the principal with a glorified joy in his soul that carried him
triumphantly through the pain of his punishment.
With his enterprise in playground friction came an enterprise in study.
He easily distanced the rest, winning prizes and standing near the head
in all classes. With his advancement came a change of seat, and he
found himself near her; in a position where, by a slight turning of his
head, he could catch a glimpse of the pure, clean-cut little face in
its gold-hued framing. But she never returned these glances. He never
dared hope that she would; so he never tried to make her acquaintance.
After school he would follow her, at a distance of half a block, until
she entered her gateway, and then return to the boys. She lived in
a large, well appointed house among others equally well appointed,
and, satisfied that her parents were very wealthy, he gave her the
additional prestige that riches always carry in the minds of children.
He worshiped her more while actually seeking her less. Yet he could
not bear too long an absence from her vicinity. He would play truant
occasionally, with other boys; but invariably he would be dragged by a
longing and a hunger to be near her that was irresistible; and against
the derision of his fellows--which he would silence when he met them
again--he would shamefacedly sneak into school, bear his punishment for
being tardy, and cheerfully make up his studies, satisfied with the one
glimpse he could get as he passed her on the way to his seat.
There came a severe winter and an epidemic of sickness among the
children of the town; but this school escaped except for these two.
She was first to succumb, and for two weeks her place was vacant--two
weeks of utter wretchedness and misery for the boy, during which he
could not study, nor recite, nor even remember on call the lessons he
had learned. He could feel and suffer to the utmost; but, unformed,
untrained, unschooled in tact, diplomacy, or any of the amenities of
adult life, he could not even arouse himself to ask of her, or to take
his mother into his confidence and obtain the relief of knowing the
worst. It was not that his emotions took the form of anxiety so much
as they crystallized into a sense of loss--a sense of something taken
from him, that he could neither find nor name. One morning he saw her
in her seat, pale and wan and thin, and the sense of loss left him.
He was content now that she was near him, and fretted no more, even
suppressing a curiosity as to the nature of her sickness.
Then came his turn; two weeks in bed, fevered and delirious at times,
thinking of her in lucid moments, talking of her to a puzzled mother
when the delirium gripped him, and surviving at last through careful
nursing, to return to his seat in school as pale and thin as was the
girl. One glance he took, and his content came back. She paid him
no attention, not even joining the others in the friendly looks of
welcome he received, and he took up his studies at the foot of all the
classes--with his divinity just above him.
"It is rather funny," commented one class teacher, with a smile,
"that the two best scholars are at the foot. Johnny Bridge went behind
when Zenie Malcolm was sick, and Zenie Malcolm went behind when Johnny
Bridge was sick. You two must study and catch up."
He felt a curious elation, but did not look at her; so he did not
notice that her cheeks were flaming red.
And now there came to him a real, or at least a tangible, sense of
loss. A small sister, his pet, whose dolls he had mended and whose
tears he had dried, fell heir to the sickness that he had survived,
and he followed her little body to the grave. His grief was normal,
untortured by boyish remorse, and lasted long enough to serve as buffer
to a deeper grief that followed. The mother who had nursed him so
lovingly followed the sister. He shed no tears now, only his strained
look of dumb and helpless pain indicated that he suffered. He could not
analyze his emotions--could not think, much less question the decree of
Fate that had robbed him of something he was accustomed to, something
he needed. But, as he took his seat at school on the day following the
funeral, he found an immediate cessation of pain that he ascribed to
her silent sympathy. He knew she sympathized--he had seen her at the
crowded doorway of the house when they were taking his mother out--and
the cheer and the charm of his daily proximity to her soon wore out the
grief, and in another year he was again a lively boy, light-hearted,
studious, and combative, following his divinity home each day, and
still worshiping at a distance.
But the Fates had not yet presented the whole of his problem. She was
not in her seat one morning, and he spent a futile day, wondering and
longing, then went near her house after school hours. A boy passed, and
said:
"Zenie Malcolm's dead. Come on up to the ball ground!"
He did not go. The sky had grown suddenly darker, and the summer air
was cold. He walked nearer her home than he had ever gone before, and
there on the doorknob was a black and white drapery, such as they had
hung out for his sister.
"Dead!" he said to himself, and repeated the word again and again;
but he could not understand. He wandered the streets alone, trying
to realize, to accept; but he could not adjust himself to this. Why
should she be dead? He knew his mother was dead, and his sister; but
this could not be! His consciousness refused it. His mental horizon was
close to him, and crowded. This thing could not find entrance.
He did not go home to supper--only when bodily fatigue overcame him did
he creep into the house and up to his bed. He went to sleep easily,
with the word "dead" on his lips, but the realization hammering vainly
at his brain. In the morning, still unawake from the shock, he ate
what breakfast he could force down his throat, and went to school. Her
place was still vacant, and at recess he left the playground, going
near to her home again. The crepe was still on the door, and he walked
the streets as before, muttering, "Dead, dead!" He was absent from the
midday meal; but arrived before supper time, still in a daze. An angry
stepfather read him a note from the principal, reporting the truancy,
and took him out to the woodshed.
"I've had enough of this!" said the man, as he doubled a clothes
line. "You were not home to supper last night; but I said nothing at
breakfast, because I wanted to think it out. I'm going to give you what
you need. Your mother spoiled you, and I always knew it."
He struck the impassive boy round the legs. Partly from this, partly
from the mention of his mother, the tears welled into his eyes, and,
the barriers removed, the uprush overwhelmed him. Down on his face in
the ash heap he fell, sobbing convulsively, while the unrestrained
tears streamed through his fingers.
"Dead!" he said in a choked voice. "Dead, dead! Oh, father, she's dead!
She's dead!"
The abashed stepfather stayed his hand. "I can't very well whip you,
boy, if you feel like this," he said kindly. "I never thought you
cared for your mother. You didn't take on like this when she died, nor
for your sister. Come into the house when you're through crying. I
don't like to hear you." The man went in, troubled in mind at having
misjudged the boy.
The boy sobbed his aching heart dry on the ashes, then lifted his face,
drawn, tear stained, and old--very old, for a boy. "Zenie!" he called
softly. "Zenie, Zenie!" The voice rose to a wail. "Come back! Zenie,
come back! Come back! Oh, God, send her back! Please send her back!
Zenie, come back!" It ended in a cry of utter despair.
Then, close beside him, so close that it seemed almost within his ear,
he heard a voice, clear and distinct, yet without sound or volume, say,
"Yes, I will come."
He stood up and looked around. No one was there. He went out of the
shed; but the back yard was empty. He went back to the ash heap,
marveling to the extent that his benumbed faculties would permit; and
as he sat there, a peace, a tranquillity, and a content that he had
known only in her presence, came to him, and the dragging pain at his
heart passed away.
Peace, tranquillity, and content are poor attributes with which to
fight the battle of life. Being a boy, he soon worked clear of the
shadow of death; but, without the helpful influences of his life he
relapsed into the old shyness and indifference. Deprived of all that
he had loved, he found nothing new to love; and, thus unreceptive, he
ceased to respond to it when given and became unlovable. He lost ground
in study, became sullen, suspicious, and at last incorrigible. When
he had worn out his teachers' and his stepfather's patience, he left
school ungraduated, with a scant knowledge of the lower studies to his
credit. He went to work at driving a delivery wagon, and failed. Again
and again he obtained work of this character, but could not hold his
place.
Then his stepfather, after repeated advice and punishments, gave him
up, furnished him with a suit of clothes and a sum of money, and turned
him out. He sold papers for a time; but lost his money in this venture.
He blacked boots at the few hotels of the small town, until this too
proved a failure. He went off with a circus, and learned of real
hardship and ill treatment; which embittered him the more. He drifted
to New York, a newly fledged hobo, found the Bowery and its adjuncts,
and, seventeen now, and grown nearly to full stature, he was in due
time shanghaied aboard an outbound deep-water ship. At the end of the
voyage he had learned to steer, to loose and furl a royal, and to get
out of the way, which is all that is required of an ordinary seaman,
and thus equipped the crimps saw to it that he signed again. Lacking in
ambition and initiative, he remained at sea, and, compelled to learn,
went through the grades of ordinary and able seaman, becoming in five
years a competent boatswain of square-rigged ships.
Physically he developed into a man of iron, tall, straight, and
symmetrical, brown as a Moor, and with his sullen stare changed to
a meaningless frown. Mentally, except for the growth of a splendid
professional courage, he remained at a standstill. He did not go
backward. He read an occasional book, and the correctness of diction he
had acquired at school remained with him, unspoiled by the associations
of the forecastle. But he was a drifter, an ethical bankrupt, signing
in ships picked by the boarding masters, robbed by them of his money,
lending it when asked, or spending it with hopeless indifference, as
resigned to the life he lived as any fatalist, and unable to realize
that there might be a better within his reach; until, starved into a
mental activity by a long passage on short rations, he moved himself
sufficiently to secure a berth in one of the Atlantic liners, where
good food was plentiful. Here his acquirements were of little use
to him--he scrubbed paint by day and decks by night. But he came in
contact with passengers.
Engaged with bucket and swab on a section of the after saloon one day,
in the dull, apathetic frame of mind that was now natural with him, he
noticed the approach of two passengers, a bewhiskered, peppery looking
man of middle age, and an elderly woman with an unusually kind and
sympathetic face.
"Look there!" said the man, in tones that Bridge could hear. "See what
seamanship amounts to in these floating blast furnaces! That fellow's a
sailor, if I know one, from his head to his heels. But they've made him
a scrubwoman."
"I should think he would try to do better," answered the old lady,
after a searching look at Bridge's expressionless face. "Notice
his bearing. He is Othello, off the stage. There are unlimited
possibilities in such a nature."
They halted near the rail for a further inspection of him. Bridge,
swabbing industriously, pretended not to hear. He had not attracted so
much attention for years.
"See the slumbering fire in those dark eyes," went on the innocent old
lady--"the reserve power, the strength to do, and dare, and die--the
tremendous will of a strong man, who lets nothing baffle him when
aroused. That man has not been aroused. See his hair--"
"Nonsense! A stiff drink'll arouse him."
"There you are again, skeptic," laughed the old lady. "But, I tell
you, eyes and hair indicate character! His hair is the very opposite
of Zaza's, but equally rare and matchless in hue. Each indicates
temperament."
They went on, and Bridge dropped his swab and watched them till they
were out of sight. He had never seen them, to his knowledge, and their
comment on himself and his work had not greatly disturbed him. But the
name Zaza, the name of someone they knew, had seemed familiar. It had
brought the same thrill of recognition that he had experienced years
before at school, when the little girl was called up to sing--the
little girl that died, and whom he had almost forgotten.
"Zaza, Zaza," he repeated to himself. It was a strange name. Where had
he heard it?
It was his lookout at the bow that night from eight to ten, and he took
his place clad in sou'wester and oilskins; for a fog thick as darkness
had settled down on the ship. He could see the stem in front of him,
but little farther in the smudge. Aft was the dim outline of the
windlass, and beyond the dimmer outline of the V-shaped breakwater. To
starboard and port were the two mighty anchors, magnified by the fog.
Eyes were of little use on such a night; but he dutifully kept his ears
open for sound of foghorn or steam whistle, and paced up and down,
thinking of matters unthought of for years--his old home and school
days, his mother and sister, and little golden-haired Zenie who had
died. Step by step he reviewed his life of failure and incompetence.
Voyage after voyage, event after event, men and influences--all came
under the criticism of his aroused faculties, until they ended with
the comment of the old lady on the after deck. "That man has not been
aroused," she had said. Where was the reserve power, the strength, the
will to do, that she had seen in him?
The review went backward, man after man, happening after happening,
to the meeting with his stepfather at the ash pile, and back of this
to the boy in the street, who had told him a casual piece of news and
asked him to the ball ground. Here was where it went out of him--the
courage to do, and strive, and work, and win. He now realized that it
was not the passing away of his mother and his sweet little sister,
nor the mis-judgment of his stepfather and the ill treatment of men,
that had unnerved him; it was the losing of Zenie, who had never looked
at him but once, but whose presence on earth had made him a strong,
victorious boy and a good scholar. And the heart hunger and pain that
had left him at the ash pile came to him again.
"Zenie!" he called almost inaudibly into the fog. "Zenie, come back!
Come back to me!"
A patter of footsteps on the wet deck aroused him, and he looked
around. A small cloaked figure had just clambered over the breakwater,
and it ran up to him, peering into his face with wide-open, wondering
eyes. And they were the eyes of Zenie, set in the same clean-cut little
face fringed with the same golden-hued tresses.
"Did you call me, sir?" she asked. "Oh, I beg pardon. I thought I knew
you, and that you called me. I don't know--" she stepped back. "My
name is Zaza Munson."
"Zaza!" called an anxious voice from the breakwater, and she left him.
The bewhiskered man showed faintly through the fog. "Come along,
kid, and go to bed. You mustn't bother the man on lookout. 'Tisn't
shipshape."
"Papa," said the child as he lifted her over the barrier, "was my name
ever Zenie? Did you call me Zenie when I was little?"
And Bridge, with his tongue hard against the roof of his mouth, and
somewhat unsteady on his feet, could just hear the receding voice of
the man as he answered:
"No, kid; but your aunt's name was Zenie. She died the day before you
were born. You're the dead image of her."
Bridge did not see the child again. He thought of her, of course,
marveling at the resemblance and relationship, which he ascribed to
coincidence--that now had a meaning to him--but marveling the more
at his change of heart, which he ascribed to the kindly thought and
comment of the old lady. It began as a furious disgust at his waste of
time and energy, but became a serious, practical ambition.
He finished the voyage, and for the first time since going to sea
chose his boarding house--the Sailors' Home--and here he talked with
second mates and a better class of seamen. He borrowed an Epitome of
Navigation, looked it over, and bought one in a second-hand shop, with
other books that appealed to him. He stopped drinking, and, with money
in his pocket, was able to choose his next ship, an English deep-water
craft, whose rules were such as to give him his afternoon watch below
and time for study. He furbished up his unused knowledge of arithmetic,
and in this ship found a kindly disposed first mate, who lent him an
old sextant to puzzle over and become familiar with. He reached for the
theory of seamanship as distinct from navigation, and, procuring such
textbooks as he could find in foreign ports, mastered the reasons of
the various evolutions which so far he had helped perform under orders.
When able to, he applied for and passed a second mate's examination,
and won a Board of Trade certificate. Then he bought himself a sextant.
He made two voyages in this ship, when a sick and dying second mate
left a vacancy, and this vacancy was filled by Bridge, who had
attracted the captain's attention by his intelligence and energy.
An officer now, his progress was more rapid. He reached farther,
laying in for private use magazines and standard works of the world's
literature, and gave himself that quiet self-confidence so valuable
in conversation, and so difficult for a seaman to acquire. His voice,
while losing none of its power to be heard against the wind, became
softer and evenly modulated. Few could have told, from his manner and
personality that he had not gone through the usual course of an English
apprentice, with a capital of good home influences to start with, and a
protection from bad as he advanced. No captious shipowner's wife would
have said he was not a gentleman.
In seven years from the birth of his ambition, with an English master's
certificate and an American ocean license to his credit, he shipped
first mate of a large sky-sailyard American ship at New York, and
at the orders of the agent who had engaged him took her down to the
Horseshoe to await the captain, who was also the owner, he said, and
was to join her on the day of sailing. The captain came on the tug that
was to tow them to sea, and stepped aboard, brisk, bewhiskered, and
peppery, and with him was a young woman who, as Bridge was introduced,
he said was his daughter, who would make the voyage with them.
Bridge, after seeing them below, went forward to the windlass, with
his brain reeling as it had reeled on the forecastle deck of the
liner. The captain was the breezy person who had noticed him scrubbing
paint, the daughter the child that had come to him on lookout--whom he
still imagined as a child, but now grown to womanhood, and with the
same pure, clean-cut face, the same wealth of golden hair, and dark
wondering blue eyes--the living, breathing, matured, and perfected
image of the little girl that had gone to the angels twenty years
ago. He felt, as he supervised the weighing of the anchor, as he had
felt when this little girl had come forward to sing to the school,
the glorified sense of recognition, and, added to it, the uplift of
victory and achievement, the content that comes of long search and the
finding of the thing sought. He knew this woman, knew her well, though
she had not spoken a word. He knew her now as part of himself, that he
had missed, and found. And she was here, in the same ship with him! He
would see her daily!
But, as a matter of fact, he saw very little at first. He was a watch
officer, who slept part of each day; and a suspicious and peppery
father, with an eye out for good looks in an otherwise efficient and
valuable first mate, saw to it that she took her meals with him in his
own after cabin, and also that she took her daily exercise on deck
when Bridge was asleep and the ship in charge of the second mate, an
unbeauteous and beauty proof old sea dog. In the exercise of this
watchful function of fatherhood, the old man grew more and more peppery
in his manner toward Bridge and his crew, and finally took no pains
to conceal an actual dislike for the first mate, which no amount of
professional care and forethought on his part could offset.
And it was all wasted energy as far as Bridge was concerned, for a more
inoffensive and non-progressive lover never loved. Try as he might,
he could not bring himself to address her when they occasionally met,
unless she spoke to him first. She seemed to carry in her personality
an inhibition on his thought, speech, and action that prevented an
overture. And this continued until the ship had rounded the Cape of
Good Hope and sailed along the fortieth parallel to the vicinity of St.
Paul, by which time the father, having worried himself into insomnia,
was compelled to relax his vigilance by the physical necessity of
sleeping as long as he could, night or day, whenever sleep came to him,
and the daughter, intent upon matters far removed from love and lovers,
unconsciously placed herself in the way of a better acquaintance with
Bridge.
She came on deck alone one night in the first watch, when the ship was
tearing along before a quarterly breeze that she could barely carry
the kites under, and from the break of the poop watched Bridge on the
main deck giving the last orders toward the setting of a main royal
staysail; then, as he mounted the poop steps, she accosted him.
"Mr. Bridge," she said, holding up her father's sextant, "will you
please point out to me the Magellan Clouds and the Coal Sacks?"
"Why, certainly," said Bridge, all his shyness vanishing. "Come around
to the lee quarter, Miss Munson. I've noticed you before with the
sextant. Studying navigation?"
"Yes, as I can. Father has tutored me, and I've got as far as meridian
observations and chronometer time; but I want to go farther, and father
is a bad teacher. He's somewhat cross, and, Mr. Bridge, do you know I
think I'm going beyond him!" She smiled a little roguishly.
"That ought to be easy," answered Bridge. "You are young, with a fresh
mind. It is hard for men to study."
"But so easy to do other things--to command ships, to fight, to shoot,
to ride horses, to swim. I'm a swimmer, though it took me years to
learn. I swam a mile once."
"You can beat me," answered Bridge simply. "I cannot swim at all."
"I am ambitious," she said, "to do what men do. My present fad is
navigation. I shall never be satisfied until I have an ocean license."
"It is a great force in you, Miss Munson," said Bridge earnestly. "It
is rare in women; but men feel it now and then. It gripped me seven
years ago, and lifted me from the forecastle to the cabin. Do you
remember?"
"What?" she asked.
"The man on lookout in the _Umbria_, on the night you came forward,
when you thought I had called to you? Remember, it was foggy, and your
father came after you."
"Was that you?" she asked. "Oh, now I understand. Oh, Mr. Bridge! No, I
don't understand. I thought I knew you then, and I have thought since I
came aboard that I knew you, that I had met you somewhere; but father--"
"Never mind, Miss Munson. These things are inexplicable. I thought, as
the years went on, that it was a certain, curious sort of praise of
myself, from an old lady I saw with your father that day, when I was
aft scrubbing paintwork."
"My grandmother. She died last year."
"I thought it was her good opinion of me," went on Bridge earnestly;
"but now I know it was your visit on the forecastle. Miss Munson, you
were then the exact duplicate of a little girl who died at thirteen--a
little girl that I worshipped as one of God's angels, and who went to
the angels. Her name was Zenie. I have read of reincarnation. I wonder
if it is possible that her soul returned--in you."
The girl stiffened and drew back, while her eyes opened in the old
wonder of the night on the forecastle. Bridge, looking forward, went on
gravely:
"What right have we--poor wretched human souls!--to say that we will
do this or that thing, that we will strive and succeed, when there are
forces within us past our understanding, that decide the matter for us?
I loved that little girl Zenie. She made me a plucky, ambitious boy.
She died, and I became a wreck, a tramp, a scrubwoman on a liner. I saw
you, and went to work; and here I am--as a sailor a practical success.
I once read a poem that I liked. I forget the title and the author; but
one verse ran like this:
"'The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all your Piety nor Wit--'"
A heavy cane came down on his head, and an angry voice broke in, "Damn
you! Is this what I shipped a first mate for? To keep my daughter up
till near midnight, and wake me up making love to her over my window?
Zaza, go below at once!" The captain had rounded the corner of the
house in his pajamas.
The girl screamed as the cane was poised for a second blow; but Bridge
said nothing, nor did the cane descend again. The mate raised his two
arms high above his head, leaned backward over the low poop-rail,
sagged down, and slid headlong over it into the sea.
Again the girl screamed, and the captain, shouting "Man overboard!"
sprang to a life-buoy fastened to the taffrail, tore it loose, and
threw it. "My God! what have I done?" he said chokingly. "I did not
mean to knock him overboard."
No one heard this. The girl had swooned in the alley, and the man at
the wheel was snugly ensconced in a warm, sound-proof wheelhouse, with
but one window open.
"Put your wheel down!" ordered the captain through the window. "Bring
her up till she shakes. All hands forward, there! Come aft four men and
clear away this quarter-boat. Weather main-brace the rest of you!"
They did all that men may do. They hove the ship to, lowered a boat,
and searched till daylight. But Bridge, who could not swim, was not
found; and the ship went on, with a remorseful captain trying to
comfort a frantic girl, who in two days was down with brain-fever.
Zaza was a troublesome patient, and as the captain had now to stand
watch with his second mate he could give her little of the attention
she needed--he could spend with her only an hour or so from each watch
below, and, if all was well with the ship, a few minutes from the
watch on deck. In her lucid moments there was small comfort for the
unhappy man. Not a drop of medicine would she take from his hand, nor
a morsel of food, and not a word would she speak to him; but in the
steady, scornful, unforgiving look in her dark blue eyes was a world of
reproach.
Yet, when the fever pressed her hard, she would talk, calling him
"father," and ask him to look so that he too could see. And, as he
could not look into the realm she was in, she must perforce explain,
insisting that he could see if only he would look. For she could see
so clearly, she said; and as her explanations were repeated again and
again, broken in upon by the awakenings to lucidity, it was some time
before what she saw took on sequence and color. Then it was a picture
and a story complete.
A long, heaving sea she saw first, and a floating life-buoy; then a
man clinging to its edge, not intelligently, as would a man who knows
life-buoys and the way to use them. This man made no attempt to place
it under his arms; he simply clung to its edge, and was frequently
immersed, as the circular ring turned in the water. This man was Mr.
Bridge, she said; but on his face was no perturbation as to his plight.
He smiled, and clung to the life-buoy as though animated by instinct
alone. There was no expression other than the smile, nothing of shock,
nor interest, nor anxiety. With the rising of the sun there came into
the picture a lateen-rigged craft filled with swarthy men, and it
steered close to the man; and they pulled him, still smiling vacantly,
into the vessel. They gave him a flagon to drink from; but he would
not, till tutored. They put food to his mouth, and after a time he ate
mechanically.
The picture now embraced a high, mountainous coast, deeply indented
with fiords and bays, and the dark men of the lateen craft were
landing, taking with them the smiling man who could not eat nor drink
without help. Then she saw him wandering alone along the beach in the
rain, still smiling, and looking at the sea from which he had escaped.
She saw him again, unkempt and unshaven, still alone, still smiling;
and later with his clothing in tatters, his hair to his shoulders, his
beard covering his features, and the merciless rain beating him. But
though his mouth and chin were hidden, in his eyes was still the vacant
look at the sea, and the smile. One more picture completed the list;
he was more than ever a creature of rags and ends, and emaciated--a
living, breathing skeleton, asleep in a cave, but smiling as he slept.
It ended in time, and Captain Munson sailed his ship into Melbourne
with his daughter convalescent, but so worn out himself that he
deputized another skipper to unload her and take her up the China
Sea with a cargo of wool, while he and the girl recuperated. She was
still reserved, if not frigid, in her manner; but never alluded to the
unfortunate happening that killed her filial love for him. And little
by little the color came to her cheek, and the light to her eye, so
that her father hoped that her trouble of mind had left her.
But he hoped too much. She came to him one day and said, "Father, when
does the ship come back?"
"Ought to be here next week, Zaza. Why?"
"Have you chartered her?"
"Thought of a load of hides for New York."
"Give it up. You will admit that she belongs to me, will you not?"
"When you're of age, of course. Your grandmother left you everything."
"I was of age yesterday--twenty-one, legal age in all countries. As I
own the ship, I shall decide what to do with her."
"What do you want to do?"
"Go back to the middle of the Indian Ocean. There is a man there who
needs help."
"Daughter, Zaza, my poor girl! Your mind has left you. Don't be so
absurd. He is dead. He could not have lived. You know I'm sorry. I'll
never forgive myself. But this will do no good."
"He is not dead. He is calling me all the time. I hear it strongest
as I waken from sleep. I hear it as I have heard it all my life. He
calls me the name I called myself when little, before I knew my own
name. I called myself Zenie. I would say Zenie will do this, or that.
And ever since I can remember I have heard this voice calling to me,
'Zenie, come back!' I heard it in the fog that night on the steamship,
and I went to him. I could not help it. He was the man on lookout, and
I seemed to know him. You came after me. Do you recall it? He told me
later that he had loved a little girl named Zenie, who died. I am that
girl. I know it. I know it!"
"Great God, girl! What nonsense is this? Are you crazy?"
"I fear I may be unless this stops," she answered, pausing in her
restless pacing of the floor, and looking at him with dilated eyes.
"I dreamed of him this morning. He was on land, and it was raining.
His clothing was in tatters, he was bearded, and his hair was long and
matted. He was thin with starvation and suffering; but he called to me,
so beseechingly, 'Zenie, come back!'"
"You had such ravings when you were delirious, Zaza. It is part of your
fever, nothing more."
"It is more! It is truth! He is alive, or I should not hear. Were he
dead, I should not be alive; for he called me back from the unknown to
meet him and help him. He needs me now. I am going to him!"
The father stared in silence, while the girl walked the floor.
"I expect you to waive all legal transfer of the property," she went
on. "I expect you to recognize me as owner of the ship, and to take her
where I direct. If you will not, I shall take such action as I find
necessary, or possible, and employ another captain. If I am thwarted, I
shall go myself. I am a navigator."
"Zaza, you are mad!" said the father solemnly.
"Do not say that, or I shall go mad. There are things in life past our
comprehension or analysis. This is one of them. All I know is what I
feel--that he is part of myself, or I part of him."
"You have fallen in love with him, and you think these things."
"Do not confound cause and effect."
"What land is he on? Do you pretend to know that?"
"We shall find him. Something will guide us--God, if you like."
The father regarded her fixedly for a moment; then sighed, and said, "I
suppose I may as well humor you, for a while at least. We shall take in
ballast as soon as she arrives, and go. But what a waste of time!"
So the big ship, able to earn an annual dividend of sixteen per cent.
of her cost, left Melbourne in ballast, practically in charge of a
crazed girl bent on finding a man drowned ten months before.
According to accepted standards no alienist would have hesitated in
pronouncing her crazed. She slept little, was careless of her personal
appearance, and walked the deck aimlessly, occasionally peering at
the compass, and looking at the helmsman in a way to make him steer
better for a time. She nagged her father when stress of wind compelled
the shortening of sail. She took the sun at midday with Bridge's
sextant, and took chronometer sights to work out the longitude,
sharply criticizing her father for an error of a few seconds in his
calculations. She grudged the necessity of reaching south to the
forty-fifth parallel to avoid the strong head winds on the fortieth.
Night and day she was up, worrying her distracted father and the two
mates with questions, comments, and speculations. She pored over the
chart, on which was pricked off the ship's position when Bridge had
gone overboard, and pricked off herself the daily position as the ship
beat her way westward.
But it was not till the ship had arrived at the fatal spot, and
her father had prepared a series of logical deductions for her
consideration, that she showed anything of definiteness in her whims
and fancies. She had insisted that they heave the ship to that night,
as she did not care to go farther in the darkness, and had lain down to
pass the night as she could--not to sleep, she told her father, but to
pray to God for light and hope and method. And in an hour she was up.
"Father," she said as she awakened the old man in his berth, "we must
head south by west, half west. I know the course."
"What do you know?" grunted the wearied and conscience stricken man.
"Go back to bed, and let me sleep! Sleep yourself! Let me alone, or
I'll be as mad as you are!"
She got out the chart and spread it on the cabin table. Then, with her
eyes gleaming with the concentrated stare of the insane, she traced
out the drift of the ship since the last plotting, and from the point
reached drew a line south by west, half west. It struck a large,
irregular island, and she read its name, Desolation Island. She went on
deck, disheveled and careless, her hair flying in the wind, and asked
the officer of the watch to heave the log and give her the best of his
judgment as to the ship's drift through the night. Then she went back
to her berth, and did not appear until daylight, when she came up and
again interviewed the officer in charge.
"Father," she said, when the old man had turned out for breakfast,
"look at this chart." She spread it out, clear of the dishes, and drew
a line from the night time position of the ship to the point indicated
by her drift, and from this point drew a line south by west. It
intercepted the other on the coast of Desolation Island.
"Last night, father," she said, "he was calling insistently. I saw
him plainly, and he held a compass in his hands, and pointed to the
lubber's point. It was at south by west, half west. I told you that;
but you refused to believe me. I have plotted the drift during the
night--eleven miles due southwest--and here is the drift on this line.
Here, too, is our position this morning. Just before I wakened I saw a
large compass, filling the whole room, and the lubber's point was at
south by west. A south by west line from here intercepts the same spot
on the coast of Desolation Island as the other. Father, he is there! It
all fits in. We must go to him."
"Well, well, we'll try," said the old man weakly. "God knows I want
to ease your mind, and until you are sure I suppose you'll think he's
still alive. It's a tough job, though, to search an island eighty miles
long where it rains continually."
Sail was made, and the wheel put up; but as the wind was light it was
nightfall before the big, light ship sailed into an estuary, with two
men at the leadlines, and anchored in the dusk, not half a mile from
the beach. The girl would have lowered a boat and gone ashore at once;
but this was beyond all reason, they told her, the two mates joining
the captain in the protest. This was not what they had signed for, they
contended.
So, up and down from her berth to the deck, and back and forth from end
to end of the ship, the half demented young woman passed the night,
and at the first glimmer of daylight was beyond her limitations. The
quarter boat was proved leaky, and had been left behind. All others
were inboard, stowed upside down on the forward house. The ship's one
life-buoy had gone with Bridge.
She procured a piece of spun yarn from the booby hatch, triced her
skirts up to her waist, and, unseen by the sleepy anchor watch forward,
went down the side on a rope's end belayed to a pin. There was a brisk
wind blowing in from the open sea, and a short, crispy wave motion with
which she must contend; but she struck out bravely for the beach.
"I am coming!" she called wildly. "I am coming--coming!"
Skilled seamen and fishermen are often deceived in the look of a surf
viewed from seaward, and many a boat's crew that hopes to beach safely
is caught and half drowned in a furious turmoil that can be seen only
from the shore. This mad girl had no advantage of such experience, and
probably would not have been influenced by it had it come to her. She
swam vigorously at first, then rested awhile on her back, and went on,
swimming till tired, and floating until rested.
But, at a hundred yards from the beach, she found conditions which
precluded these spells of rest. The seas broke over her, and floating
was impossible. She was forced to expend her strength. Then the
spun-yarn belt loosened, and her skirts embarrassed her movements;
it became more and more difficult to make headway. All she could do
was to keep her head above water, while the aching pain of fatigue
attacked her limbs, and the bitter salt water flung into her mouth by
the spiteful seas choked its way down her throat, and into her lungs.
Struggling weakly, and more weakly, she sank beneath and remained until
consciousness was nearly gone; then the back wash of the undertow
brought her to the surface, and with the one breath of air she procured
came another inrush of water. Barely moving her limbs now, she went
under again; and when next she appeared she had ceased to struggle, or
breathe, or think.
Once more she went under, and when she came to light the surf was
rolling her up the beach, and dragging her back--an inert, lifeless
form, with eyes wide open and staring, and a wealth of golden hair
wrapped round the pale and wasted face. A final heave of the pitiless
sea threw her face downward on a fringe of rocks at high-water mark.
One large stone caught the body at the waist line, and the head sank
down beyond it until the forehead rested on another. Thus supported,
the chin sank, the mouth opened, and the water from her lungs issued
forth in a tiny stream and went back into the sea, which, having killed
her, now left her alone.
But the cold rain still pelted her.
* * * * *
A mile away a thing crawled out of a cave--a mindless creature in the
form of a man, a disorganized organism that looked into the morning sky
with lightless eyes and meaningless smile. Emaciated and begrimed, with
hair and beard to his shoulders, clad in what had once been shirt and
trousers, but were now a flimsy covering of rags, he presented but one
human attribute beyond his meaningless smile: the articulate voice.
He began to move, in a swift walk that soon increased to a jog trot and
then to a run. Straight as a path may go, over rocks, hills, and marshy
ground, down the declivity to the sea, went this smiling creature,
pausing at times to look into the sky and murmur, "Zenie, come back!"
There was something yellow on the beach, right in his path, and at the
same swift run he approached it. He stood silently over the quiet form
of the dead girl, looking at it with smile unchanged, but with the
beginning of expression flitting and twitching over his gaunt features.
Then he stooped and turned the body over, bringing to view the pale,
damp face.
"Zenie, come back!" he breathed softly. "Zenie, come back!"
The girl's chest rose convulsively, and sank, then rose again with a
deeper inhalation, and the staring eyes closed.
The mindless thing stood erect, with a face suffused by a rush of
blood, staggered, and turned; then, in a deep, sonorous voice,
declaimed:
"'Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all your Tears wash out a Word of it.'"
It was the finish of the quatrain begun by Bridge, and interrupted by
the blow of the cane.
"What?" he continued, as he looked down on the faintly breathing figure
of the girl. "Miss Munson! What--what is it? Where are we? We were in
the alleyway a minute ago. What has happened? Tell me! Where's the
ship?"
The girl's eyes opened, and a faint smile came to her face.
"What is it?" he insisted, stooping down and taking her cold, wet
hands. "Miss Munson, what has happened? We're ashore, and you're all
wet! Have you been overboard? You said you could swim! Why, there's the
ship now, at anchor! They're putting off with a boat! But why? Tell me,
Miss Munson! What does it mean? I've grown a beard! Why--tell me! What
is it? Zaza, tell me!"
The cold, wet hands of the girl closed gently on his big, bony fingers.
"Not Zaza!" she whispered. "Zenie! I am Zenie! I know I am!"