“It is gone——”
“Surely?”
“Yes.”
“Thank God.”
The preacher breathed deeply, contemplated their faces one after another. From Bellair lying in the stern, his eyes turned significantly to the woman’s, and his own lit with zeal.... Bellair was on the borderland then, coming up through the fathoms of dream. Already he felt the heat; the sun had imparted its ache to his eyes. The three were half-blinded by the long brilliance of the cloudless days on the sea.... Bellair was trying to speak, but could not because of the parch in his throat. Moreover, no thoughts could hold him—not even Bessie. She came to mind, pink and ineffectual, lost in her childish things. She had failed this way before....
There was a cup to his lips. He smelled the water, and wanted it as he wanted decency and truth—as he wanted to be brave and fit to be one of the three. It almost crazed him, the way he wanted it—but it would be taking it from her. All the violence of one-pointed will was against the cup. He pushed it away.
“Don’t, Bellair,” said Fleury. “You’ll spill it. Drink——”
“I won’t. Take it away.”
“You must drink. It is yours.”
“Yes, he must drink,” said the woman.
Bellair sat up. Fleury was holding the cup to his lips.
“It is gone from behind,” said the preacher.“Drink your water. I have. I will speak to you after you drink.”
He stared at them, and at the open sea behind her. Then it came to him, as if from Fleury’s mind, to obey.... Fleury then served the woman. They ate a cracker together; at least it seemed so. Then Fleury spoke:
“We have the child to serve—that is our first thought; therefore we must think of the child’s mother first. As for her other part, as our companion, she will be one with us, of course. We have been here five full days, and we have not been allowed, by the presence of him who is gone—and may God rest and keep that—we have not been allowed to do the best we could in this great privilege of being together and drawing close to reality. Many have gone without food and drink for ten days—to come close to God. There is food here and water—to keep us in life. This is what I would say: We must change our point of view.”
He paused, and their eyes turned from one to another. The child’s face seemed washed in the magic of morning. The preacher added:
“We must cease to regard ourselves as suffering, as creatures in want, as starving or dying of thirst. Rather, as three souls knit, each to the other, who have entered upon a pilgrimage together—a period of simple austerity to cleanse and purify our bodies the better to meet and sensereality, and to approach with a finer sensitiveness, than we have ever known—the mystery and ministry of God.... So we are not suffering, Bellair. We are not suffering—”
He turned to the woman.
“We are chosen ones. This is our wilderness. When we are ready—God will speak to us. We are very far from the poor needs of the body—for this is the time and period of our consecration. God bless you both—and the Gleam.”
9
It was the seventh evening, the cool coming in. Bellair could not feel his body below his lungs, unless he stopped to think. The child was on his knee, his hands holding it. The little face was browned, but very clear and bright. Bellair’s hands against the child’s dress were clawlike to his own eyes, like the hands of a black man very aged. He could move his fingers when he thought of it, but he did not know if they moved unless he watched. The effort of steadying the child he did not feel in his arms, but in his shoulders. It was like the ache in his eyes. No tears would come, but all the smart of tears’ beginnings; and the least little thing would bring it about. He had to stop between words and wait for his throat to subside—in the simplest saying.
He saw everything clearly. The open boat waslike a seat lifted a trifle above the runways of the world. He could see them, as one in the swarming paths beneath could never hope to see. It was all good, but the pain and the pressure of them all!... Bessie Brealt in pain and pressure; Davy Acton in the hard heavy air; Broadwell who was trying to be a man at Lot & Company’s; the old boarding-house woman who had forgotten everything but her rooms—her rooms moving with shadows whom she never saw clearly and never hoped to understand—shadows that flitted, her accounts never in order, her rooms never in order.... There had been people in there whom he never saw—one girlish voice that awakened in the afternoon and sang softly, a most subdued and impossible singing. She worked nights at a telephone switch-board—the night-desires of the great city passing through her—and she sang to the light of noon when it came to the cage.... Sunday afternoons when it was fine, a bearded man emerged from a back-room, emerged with a cane and cigarette case. Always on the front steps he lit the cigarette....
Bellair now couldn’t smoke.... Once there had been moaning in a lower back room, moaning night and morning from a woman. He was not sure if it were the millinery woman, or the one who worked in Kratz’s. The moaning stopped and as he passed through the hall, he heard a doctor say to the landlady:
“King Alcohol.”
Just that.... He saw the millinery woman afterward, so it wasn’t she.... The air in the old halls was of a character all its own. It was stronger than the emanations from any of the rooms. The separate currents lost their identity like streams in the ocean, like souls in Brahma.... How strangely apart he had kept all that five years! A face not seen before in the halls, and he did not know if it were a newcomer or old. So few came to the board to dine—the chorus-woman from the Hippodrome, who came up nightly from the water.... He saw the view from his window—over the roofs and areas. It was a wall of windows—dwellers in the canyon sides; boxes of food hanging out, clothing out to freshen itself in the dingy and sluggish airs—the coloured stockings and the faces that looked out. Everything was monotonous but the faces—faces grim and sharp—faces of kittens and bulls and rabbits and foxes, faces of ferrets, sleek faces, torn faces, red and brutal, white and wasted faces; faces of food and drink, faces of hunger and fear; the drugged look; few tears but much dry yearning, and not a face of joy.
There was no joyousness and peace in the lower runways, but pain and heavy pressures.... Bellair saw himself moving among those halls again, not a stranger, but with a hand, a smile, a dollar. No one would moan for days without his knowing.He would find day-work for the little telephone miss, and send orders for hats to the milliner. He would awaken that shadow of all the shadows, the landlady, with kindness and healing. He would call across the windowed cavern.... They would say, “Come over and help us,” and he would rush down stairs, and around into other streets, and faces there would be ready to show him. He saw it all clearly, such as it was, but no facts. They would not call to him. They would not be healed. They would take a dollar, but say he was cracked. He could move about passing forth a dollar here and there—that was all. They would welcome him at Lot & Company’s if he passed it out quietly enough. The dollar would go into the Sproxley system and emerge unbroken to the firm itself, there to be had and held and marked down in the house of Lot—Jabez, Nathan, Eben, Seth, each a part, the jovial Mr. Rawter a small but visible part—one hundred Sproxley-measured cents.... Davy Acton wouldn’t get one, nor Broadwell, nor the girls upstairs. The firm would not encourage him passing beyond the cage of Mr. Sproxley.... There were many who wanted food and drink and hats—hats——”
He was with Bessie Brealt now ... that night and the kiss. It was another life.... He went back to those who needed food—New York so full of food. Then he felt the heavy walletagainst his breast—one paper in there would fill the open boat with food....
“My God,” he said.
He didn’t try to explain.... Sometimes he fell into a little dream as he sat. Once he was drinking at the narrow throat of a green bottle,—a magic bottle whose base was in the sea, and the trickle that passed through was freshened drop by drop. But it was a trick like all else in the world and the drops passed with agonising slowness. He came to, sucking hard upon his brass key, his mouth ulcered from it.... There were times in the long days that he hungered for the stars almost as for drink; times in the night when the stars bored him like some man-pageantry that he had seen too much of; times when the thought of God was less than the thought of water; and times when the faith and the glory of the spirit of the world made thirst a thing to laugh at, and death whimsical and insignificant.... Sometimes in the night, he fancied the woman was Bessie Brealt. It would come like a little suspicion first hardly stirring his faculties; finally it would be real—that the singing girl was there, all but her song. He would sit up rubbing his eyes in rebellion. Once he had spoken to be sure.
“Yes, it is I,” she said huskily, and the voice was not Bessie Brealt’s.
10
They did not speak of ships. Through the wakeful night hours they watched for the lights of ships, but they did not speak of vigils. Their eyes were straining for uncharted shores during the days, but they did not speak of land; nor of rain, though they watched passionately the change and movement of wind and cloud.
It is true that they suffered less in the days that followed the passing of Stackhouse. The underworld was gone from the seat in the stern; sunlight and sea air had cleansed it from the boat. They were weaker, but pangs of thirst were weaker, too. Small pieces of metal in their mouths kept the saliva trickling. The real difference was an exaltation which even Bellair shared at times, and which had come to them the fifth morning with Fleury’s talk, and with refining intensity since.
The child was well; his imperative founts still flowing. She was pure mother; it was the child that was nourished first, not her own body. She was first in the passion for his preservation. Indeed, she would have told them at once had any change threatened him. But she was the soul of the fasting too; the austerity of it found deep sanction within her; and there were moments in which she bewildered Bellair, for she becamebright with the vitality which is above the need of bread.
Fleury talked of God, as Stackhouse had talked of death. Indeed, there was a contrasting intoxication in the days and nights of the preacher, but one without hideous reaction.
“There comes a moment,” he said, “when I am alone—when you two are asleep—that I feel the weakness. I drink and eat—perhaps more than my share. But when we are all together—sitting here as now, talking and sustaining one another—oh, it seems I was never so happy.”
Bellair suspected that this talk of lapses into abandonment while others slept was an effort to make their minds easy on the subject of his share. Both the Mother and Bellair doubted this; it preyed upon them. In the main they were one solution, each separate quality of their individualism cast into a common pool for the sustaining of a trinity.
“It changes the whole order,” Fleury declared. “Why, whole crowds have died of hunger—in half the number of days that holy men and women have fasted as a mere incident of their practice toward self-mastery. This is our consecration.”
Bellair found it true. He had ceased to marvel at himself. Deep reconstruction was advanced within him; and a strange loyalty and endurance prospered from the new foundations. If this were self-hypnosis—very well; if madness—very well,too; at least, it was good to possess, seven, eight, nine days in an open boat, on a one-fifth ration of water and food. To Bellair, who felt himself inferior to the others, it appeared that they already lived what he was thrillingly thinking out. He remembered his first thoughts of them—in the cold worldly manner of a fellow-traveller. It was almost as far as a man’s emotion can swing, from what he thought of them now. Before God, he believed he was right now, and wrong then. Certainly he would test it out, if he lived to move among men again.
He thought often about the child’s voice—at the moment that the heart of Stackhouse broke—as the point of his turning and salvation. This furnished a clue to many things, though he did not miss the fact that the world would smile at his credulity in accepting such a dispensation as real. The world would say that he had been driven to far distances of illusion by thirst and hunger; in fact, that anything which he had seen, other than the original entity in the eyes of Stackhouse, was a part of the illusion. Bellair considered this, and also that in every instance of late in which he had held the world’s point of view he had been proven wrong. He granted the world its rights to think as it chose, but accepted the dispensation.
There had been good and evil within him. The balance had turned in favour of the good, withthat cry. It had turned from the self. The purpose of the Enterer had been to keep himinthe self. It had come from the unfathomed depths of evil—that purpose and the devil which he saw. Bellair had heard repeatedly that some suchdwellerappeared to each man who makes an abrupt turn from the life of flesh to the life of the spirit. Each of the three had seen something foreign in the eyes of Stackhouse. It is true they had not talked of it; possibly to each it was different in its deadliness; perhaps theirs was not the demonhesaw, since Fleury and the woman were much farther on the way than he, but they had been good enough to share responsibility for the visitation. Indeed, the Faraway Woman could not have been acting, since a cry came from her the instantitappeared.
This he loved to study: that his thought of the child had balanced the whole issue against the intruder; that something within him had brought that saving grace of selflessness out of chaos. It was a squeak, he invariably added, but it had shown him enough, opening the way. There must be such a beginning in every man; in fact, there must come an instant of choice; an instant in which a man consciously chooses his path, weighing all that is past against the hope and intellectual conception of a better life.
Bellair brooded upon this a great deal, especially on the ninth day, and that was the day,Fleury talked—the holiest of their days in the open boat. Bellair found many things clearer afterwards. As soon as he understood fully, he meant to close it all, so far as his own relation was concerned. In its very nature it must be given to others, must be turned to helpfulness. It was a sort of star-dust which did not adhere to self, but sought places of innocence to shine from, and used every pure instrument for its dissemination. The key to the whole matter was the loss of the sense of self. Having accepted this, Bellair knew that he must go up into Nineveh, so to speak. He trembled.
“We learn by austerities apart,” Fleury said, “and then we return to men with the story. We are called up the mountain to witness the transfiguration, and then are sent with the picture down among men. Oh, no, we are not permitted to remain, nor build a temple up there. First we receive; then we must give. We must lose the sense of self in order to receive; and having received, we do not want the sense of self. This is the right and left hand of prayer—pure selfless receptivity, then tireless giving to others. It is the key to the whole scheme of life—mountain and valley, ebb and flow, night and day, winter and summer, the movement of the lungs and the heart and the soul. We cannot receive while our senses are hot with desire; therefore we must become delicate and sensitive. Having received, wemust make the gift alive through action. Dreaming is splendid; the dreamer receives. The dreamer starts all things; but the dreamer becomes a hopeless ineffectual if he does not make his dreams come true in matter. That is it. We are here to make matter follow the dream. That’s why the spirit puts on flesh—that’s why we are workmen. Action is the right hand of thought.”
The preacher was ahead of him in these thoughts. So often he said just what Bellair needed, the exact, clearing, helpful thing. For instance, Bellair had followed his own fascinating conviction that the world is full of secret values; that the world is ready to pull together, only it requires a certain stimulus from without—some certain message that would reach and unify all. Fleury tightened the matter by his expression of it:
“The socialists are doing great good. The church is still doing good; the societies that have turned to the East have heard the great message; even in commerce there is a new life; everywhere in the world, the sense of having foundsome new spiritwhich works to destroy the sense of self. If one great figure should come now—come saying, ‘You are all good. You are all after the same thing. One way is as good as another—only come.’... What we need is for some one to touch the chord for us—to give us the key, as to an orchestra of different instruments. We areall making different notes; and yet are ready for the harmony—some of us intensely eager for the harmony. The great need is for a Unifier.... It seems that we, here in the small boat, can see America so much clearer, than when we were there——”
Bellair had felt this a thousand times.
“The greatest story in the world is the story of the coming of a Messiah—the one who may chord for us. I think He will come. He will come out of the East, his face like the morning sun turned to the West. Don’t you see—we are all like atoms of steel in a chaos? You know what happens when a voltage of electricity is turned upon a bar of steel? Order comes to the chaos; the atoms sing, all turned the same way. That Voice must come—that tremendous voltage of spiritual electricity—that will set us all in harmony—all with our tails down stream.”
And Fleury finished it all by pointing out what had happened to them in the small boat. They had lost separateness; they were each for the others.
“That’s what must happen in America, in the world,—the pull of each for the whole—the harmony. You have seen an audience in the midst of great message or great music—they weep together. They cry out together. They are all one. That’s the story. That is what must happen. It will happen when the Unifier comes. Itis the base of all gospel—that we are all one in spirit. Don’t you see it—every message from the beginning of time has told it? All one—all one—our separateness is our suffering, our evil. To return to the House of Our Father—that is the end of estrangement.”
... And Fleury was the one who had ceased to talk. But he had acted, too.... They saw that he was held by some power of his giving to them. He was like light. He had given the whole material force of his body to hold off that destruction which had come with the dying of Stackhouse. He had not eaten, even as they had eaten. They feared for him, because he was the centre and mainspring of their pilgrimage. Especially this haunt became more grippable in the heart of the ninth night.... There was a small tin of water left, less than three pints, very far from clean; and somewhat less than a pound of crackers. Bellair awoke to find Fleury gone from his place between him and the woman. He was in the stern, in the old seat of Stackhouse, praying. ... Fleury met the tenth day with an exaltation that awed Bellair and the woman; and there came from it a fear to Bellair’s heart that had nothing to do with self, nor with the Mother, nor the Gleam.
They were all weak, and two men utterly weak. Through their will and denial, and the extraordinary force and health of her own nature, the child had not yet been dangerously denied. It had becomea sort of natural religion with the three—a readiness to die for the Gleam.
“This is our last day,” said Fleury, before the western horizon was marked clear.... The Faraway Woman told them another story of what the wise old shepherd dog told the puppies—that it was better to begin on crackers and water—and end on cookies and cream....
11
Bellair believed about this being the last day. The authority was quite enough, but there was still something akin to eternity in the possible space of another daylight and distance. The announcement did not bring him an unmixed gladness, for the mysterious fear of the night haunted him—the thing that had come to him under the full and amazing moon while Fleury prayed.... Day revealed no sign. They sat speechless and bowed under the smiting noon—the little boat in the wide, green deep under a fleckless, windless sky, proud of its pure part in infinite space.
That was the day the child moaned, as significantly for the ears of men, as for the mother. He was a waif to look at—the little heart at times like one of them in stoicism—then nestling to the mother-breast and the turning away in astonishment and pain. The Mother’s eyes were harrowing.
“This is our last day,” Fleury repeated.
“I believe you,” she said.
“Then drink and eat——”
“I did—it is—it is—oh, I did!”
“Land or rain or a ship, I do not know—but this is the last day——”
Bellair regarded him, between his own wordless vapourings of consciousness. The preacher was like a guest, not of earth altogether—like one who would come in the evening.... Yes, that was it. He was like the old man who came to Olga, only young and beautiful. It did not occur to Bellair now that he was regarding his friend with a quality of vision that a well-fed man never knows.... That which he had fancied placid and boyish was knit and masterful. The cheeks and temples were hollowed, but the eyes were bright. There is a brightness of hunger, of fever, of certain drugs, but these were as different as separate colours—and had not to do with this man’s eyes. Nothing that Bellair knew but starlight could be likened—and not all starlight. There was one star that rose late and climbed high above and a little toward the north—solitary, remote, not yellow nor red nor green nor white, as we know it—yet of that whiteness which is the source of all. Bellair had forgotten the name, but Fleury’s eyes made him think of it.
... The woman’s head was lying back. Something that Bellair had noted a hundred times,without bringing it actually into his mind’s front, now appeared with all the energy of a realisation. Her throat was almost too beautiful. The diverging lines under the ear, one stretching down to the shoulder, the other curving forward around the chin, were shadowed a little deeper from her body’s wasting, but the beauty was deeper than flesh, the structure itself classic. It was the same as when he had noted her finger-nails. Beauty had brought him a kind of excitement, and something of hostility—as if he had been hurt terribly by it long ago. But this was different; these details had come one by one, as he was ready. Her integrity had entered his heart before each outer symbol. He had not seen her at all at first; recalled the queer sense of hesitation in raising his eyes across the table in the cabin of theJade. He had studied her face in the open boat, but something seemed to blur his eyes when she turned to him to speak. Two are required for a real understanding. As yet they had not really met, not yet turned to each other in that searching silence which fathoms. But the details were dawning upon him. Perhaps that was the way of the Faraway Woman—to dawn upon one.
The day was ending—their shadows long upon the water. Fleury raised his hand as he said:
“It is surer to me than anything in the world——”
“What, Fleury?” Bellair asked, though there was but one theme of the day.
“That this is our last day in the open boat.”
Bellair did not answer. His own voice had a hideous sound to him and betrayed his misery.
“It was thetoo-great light—that I saw,” the preacher added huskily. “It began last night as I prayed. I saw that this was the last day for us—but more——”
“I saw something about you as you prayed,” the woman said.
Fleury surprised them now, taking a sup of water. They saw that he had something to say about God and the soul of man—that was the romance he worshipped. They listened with awe. In Bellair’s heart, at least, there was a conviction that tightened continually—that they were not long to hear the words of the preacher.
“... For two years I have been in the dark and could not pray. Before that I prayed with the thought of self, which is not prayer. I could not stay as a church leader without praying. I said I would pray when I could pray purely for them. I told them, too, that I could not look back in service and adoration to the Saviour of another people who lived two thousand years ago. They called me a devil and a blasphemer. For two years, I have tried to serve instead of to pray, but no one would listen, no one would have me. They said I was insane, and at times I believedit. At last, it came to me that I must go away—to the farthest part of the world——”
He turned yearningly to the woman.
“And then you came with your strength and faith.”
Now to Bellair:
“And you came with the world in your thoughts, and I made the third. We went down into the wilderness together—with that other of the underworld.It was a cosmos.It has shown me all I can bear. Last night, it came to me that Icouldpray for you. It came simply, because I loved you enough——”
His face moved from one to the other, his hand fumbling the dress of the child beside him.
“It was very clear. As soon as I loved you enough, I could pray for you, without thought of self. It was the loss of the self that made it all so wonderful. And as I prayed, the light came, and the Saviour I had lost, was in the light. And the light was Ahead; and this message from Him, came to my soul:
“I am here for those who look ahead; and for those who turn back two thousand years, I am there. Those who love one another find me swiftly.”
Bellair scarcely heard him. Fleury’s eyes were light itself. The man’s inner flame had broken through. Something incandescent was within him; something within touched by the “glitteringplane.” But it did not mean future years together. Bellair had wanted that.... Fleury smiled now, his eyes lost in the East. He lifted his hand.
“It always comes from the East,” he said strangely.
Bellair had searched that horizon a few moments ago. He knew exactly how the East had looked—a thin luminous grey line on the green, brightening to Prussian blue, then to vivid azure. He dared not look now, but watched the woman.
Straining and terror were in her eyes—then sudden light, a miracle of light and hope, then her cry.
Bellair seemed to see it in her mind—the smudge upon the horizon—before he turned. It was there—a blur on the thin grey line.
To lift the oars was like raising logs of oak, but he shipped the pair at last, listening for the words of the others and watching their faces. It seemed simpler than straining his eyes to the East. Fleury tried to raise the overcoat from the bottom of the boat, but it fell from his hands, and he sank back smiling:
“It doesn’t matter,” he said. “They’re coming. They’ll see us soon.”
To Bellair it was like seeing a ghost, that smile of Fleury’s. It meant something that in the future would be quite as important to him as the ship’s bearing down to lift them up. He pulled towardthe east—felt the old fainting come, pulled against that,—to the east, until a low, thundering vibration was all about him, like the tramp of death. Perhaps it was that—the thought flickered up into form out of the deep blur.... He was drinking water again. This time he did not fight.
“You may as well have yours, Bellair, man,” Fleury was saying, “and you need not row. They’re coming. It’s a ship coming fast. There is light for them to see us well—if they do not already——”
“But you haven’t drunk!”
“Bless you, I’ll drink now.”
The woman handed him the water. The cup was in his hand. He covered merely the bottom of the cup, and made much of it as if it were a full quart.
“The fact is—I’m not thirsty,” he said pitifully, when he saw their faces.
“You’re all in,” Bellair said in an awed tone.
Through the prolonged ending of that day Bellair watched the steamer near, but his thoughts were not held to the beauty of her form, nor the pricking out at last of her lights. He stood against the bare pole in the dusk, and waved and called—his voice little and whimsical. It seemed to falter and cling within their little radius, then run back to his ears—a fledgeling effort. But the deep bayingof the steamer answered at last. Even that could not hold Bellair’s thoughts.... She was coming straight toward them now. If it were death and illusion, so be it; at least that is what he saw.
“It would be all right—except for him,” Bellair said to the woman.
“I tell you all is well,” said Fleury. “Only I ask——”
“Yes,” they said, when he paused.
“Don’t let them separate us—when we are on board the ship to-night. I want to be with you both to-night—we three who have seen so much together—and the little man.”
... They heard her bells and the slackening of the engines. She was coming in softly like an angel, bringing the different life, a return to earth it was. The woman was weeping. Bellair could not have spoken without tears....
Just now through the evening purple, he sawthatstar in the east, off the point of the steamer’s prow.
“Fleury,” he said, “tell me—what is that one—that pure one—I have forgotten?”
The preacher’s eyes followed his finger.
“That is Spika—Spika of the Virgin,” he said.
12
The engine had stopped. She neared in the deep dusk, a harp of lights, and with the steady sound[Pg 181]of a waterfall.... She was just moving. There was a hail from the heights.
“Hai!” answered Bellair. It was a poor, broken sound.
Now they felt the strange, different heat of the steamer—earth-heat—and a thousand odours registered on their clean senses—milk and meat, coal-smoke, and the steam of hot ashes, perfumes, metal and paint.... A hoarse voice called down:
“Are any of you sick—infectious?”
“No—just hunger and thirst—clean as a new berth.”
It was Bellair again.
“Stay off well. We’re putting down a ladder. Watch the green light.”
They saw it come down to them—to the very water. Then they were uplifted. This was the world coming back—but a changed world. A great kindness had come over all men. Bellair saw the tears in the eyes of the people gathered on the deck. He almost expected to see Bessie Brealt there.... Perhaps the change had come from her singing.... There was a choke in the voices of the people gathered around them.
“Please,” he managed to say, “don’t keep us apart to-night—we three. Please let us be together.”
And down the deck-passage he heard the voicesof women, and among them, the Faraway Woman’s voice, in answer:
“Yes, I will go with you thankfully—but not for long. My companions and I must be together very soon. We three—to-night—it is promised between us.”
There was no voice from Fleury.
The kindness of every one, that was like a poignant distress to Bellair. He dared not speak; in fact, there was danger of him breaking down even without words. The eyes about him were searching, in their eagerness to help. An Englishman came forward at intervals and gripped his hand; a German spoke to others of the remarkable condition of the boat and its three, after ten days; another German moved in and out helping, without any words, though his eyes lifted Bellair over several pinches of emotion. The American ship-doctor was the best of all; young, gruff, humorous, quick-handed, doing and saying the right thing.... They brought him stimulants and sups of water by the teaspoon. The merest aroma of thin broth in the bottom of a tea-cup was lifted to his lips. He was helped to a hot bath; a splendid quiet friendliness about it all. Now it occurred to Bellair that they were tremendously eager to hear his story. He wanted to satisfy them....
“It was the fifth day—that Stackhouse died,” he was saying, though he was mistaken. “Perhapsyou’ve heard of him ... owns a lot of ships and islands down here.... That was the climax for us. He died hard and he was a big man—but we did not murder him.... His body did not sink....”
There was a boom of running water in the bathroom; the steam rising. Bellair’s voice was ineffectual. The face of the ship-surgeon bent to him in the steam, saying:
“Cut it—there’s plenty of time.... Leave it all to us.... I say, lean back. You’ve got a bath coming. Guess you’ve never been on a sick-list before. We can wait for the story.”
Bellair did try to lean back. One by one, the sheathes of will power that he had integrated in the past ten days relaxed. It was strange to feel them go. They had come hard, and they were correspondingly slow to ease in their grip. He had to be told again and again—to be helped to rest. It was good to think that a man does not lose such hard-won strength more easily than it comes—that one, in fact, has to use the same force to relax with. It was all delightful, this friendliness, the ease of his body, and the giving—the giving into human arms of great kindliness, and the sense of the others being cared for similarly. They had fixed a berth for him, when he said:
“You know we are to be together to-night. It was a compact between us——”
The surgeon was out and in. It occurred toBellair that he was attending the other two.... He repeated his wish to the surgeon about joining the others as soon as possible.
“They’re all alike,” the latter said. “They’re all thinking about getting together again.... Good God, man, you’ve had ten days of steady company. You ought to sleep——”
“It is a compact between us.... Is he—is he?”
It came to Bellair that this man might be able to tell him the truth, but the surgeon was now at the door speaking to one of the Germans. He vanished without turning....
They were together later in one of the empty cabins of the German liner,Fomalhaut, bound for Auckland; and only the American doctor came and went. The child was asleep in the berth beside Fleury. The two others sat near.
The extraordinary moonlight of the night before, when Bellair had awakened to find the preacher at prayer, had left the spirit of its radiance upon Fleury’s face. It was there now—and such a different face from which his eyes, falsified by New York, had seen at first. This was the real Fleury—this lean, dark, white-toothed gamester, features touched by some immortal glow from that orient moon; whose smile and the quality of every word and gesture, had for him a gleam of inspiration and the nobility of tenderness.The man had risen in Fleury—that was the secret. And this that had risen in Fleury could not die.
But the flesh was dying. Bellair had known it in the dusk while the steamer neared. He knew that the woman understood—from her face which leaned toward the berth continually, from the suffering in her eyes and the dilation of sensitive nostrils.... For ten days, as much as he could, Fleury had betrayed himself. Custodian of the food and water, he had served them well. And that day of the Stackhouse passing—if it were not all a hideous dream, as Bellair fancied at times—he had not given a balance of strength that had not returned, to fight off the will of the Intruder.
The flesh was dying, but this that had risen in Fleury could not die. Their other companion had gone down, clothed in hair and filth and the desire of a beast, taking the remnant of the man with it.
Thus it had come to Bellair—the vivid contrast of cavern and high noon. It was all in the two deaths, the enactment of the second, as yet unfinished.... New York and all life moved with countless tricks and lures to make a man lose his way, lose his chance to rise and die with grace like this. New York was like one vast Lot & Company.
Fleury’s head was upon the knees of thewoman. Bellair had not seen her take him. For this last hour, the three were as one. There was a cry from Bellair that the woman heard all her days:
“Oh, Fleury, do you have to go?”
So far as time measures, the silence was long before Fleury answered, and then only to say:
“Take my hand, Bellair.”
He came up from a deep dream to obey. It had been as if he were out under the stars again,—Fleury talking from the shadows near the woman—the rest, vastness and starlight.
“It’s thetoo-greatlight, Bellair. It came when I could stand it. As soon as I could love you enough I could pray. It is the loss of the sense of self that made it wonderful. The Light and His voice came from ahead.
“‘I am here for those who look ahead, and for those who turn back two thousand years, I am there. Those who love one another find me swiftly.’... This is dying of happiness.”
In the silence, the low lights of the cabin came back for their eyes. They heard him say at the last:
“... I love you both and respect and thank you both. We found our happiness in the open boat.... And Bellair, when you go back to New York, do not stay too long. It is right for you to go, but do not stay too long.... And dear Bellair—always follow the Gleam.”
The Doctor came. It was his step in the passage that roused them. He bent to the face, then searched the eyes of the woman. She could not find his.... Bellair was puzzled. The head was in her lap, yet the preacher seemed behind them, and still with something to say. They were not sure at first that it was the Doctor who asked:
“Why did you not call me?”
He repeated the question.
“He told us—you would come afterward,” Bellair said in a dazed way.
“Yes, he wanted it so,” said the woman.
The Doctor stared at them. “Are you two going to pull off anything further to-night, or are you going to get the rest you need, and attend to the nourishment you need?”
“We’re under orders now, Doctor,” said Bellair....
“If I should want him in the night—if I should be frightened, you would let him come?”
It was the Faraway Woman who asked this of the Doctor, her hand touching Bellair’s sleeve.
“Why, of course,” the Doctor answered quickly.
“We’ve been together in strange things,” Bellair explained. “And now you see, our friend is gone.”
The door was open between their cabins, but Bellair was not called. Once he heard the childcry, but it was quickly hushed.... He thought it must be near morning at last, and went on deck. He was not suffering, except from lassitude, deep languor and numbing strangeness that Fleury was not near him—that the woman was not sitting in her place forward.... It was just after midnight, the moon still high, the weather the same. ... He was not seen. Three men were seated smoking in the lee of one of the engine-room funnels, the light from the dining-saloon on their knees. The Doctor joined them, and said presently:
“... It’s a bit deep for me. They’ve been in an open boat ten days. Old Stackhouse, well-known down here, died of thirst the fourth or fifth day, but these two and the infant have lived through it. The preacher looked all right, but seems to have suffered a fatal case of happiness since we lifted him aboard. The two knew it was coming apparently, and arranged for me to be absent.... It appears that they made a sort of pilgrimage to Mecca out of thirst and starvation, and got away with it——”
Bellair withdrew softly.
In the long next forenoon when he could not rise, he wished he had gone into that open door, when he was on his feet last night. Sometimes half-dreamily he wished he were back in the open boat, because she was always there. Something had taken establishment in his character fromthat ten days. She had never failed—in light or dark, in the twilights of dawn and evening, in moon and star and sunlight—always there; disclosing leisurely some new aspect of beauty for him. He understood now that one does not begin to see clearly any object until one is attracted to it—that all the cursorylooking at thingsaround the world will not bring them home to the full comprehension.
... He could call to her, but it was like telephoning. He had never liked that, and beside he was not the master of his voice. It would not go straight, but lingered in corners, broke pitifully—so that he knew it frightened her—and the meanings in his mind which he could not speak, pressed the tears out of his eyes.... Then there was pain. His body astonished him. He had merely been weak and undone last night, but to-day.... And he knew that she was suffering, not from any sound from her cabin, but because she did not come. Thentheyhad to feed the child. This filled him with a rebellion so sharp that it recalled him to full faculties for a second. He had to smile at his absurdity.
The second day it was the same, but the third Bellair arose; and when she heard his step, her call came. It was still early morning. He found the child before he looked into her face.
“I am ashamed to be so weak,” she said. “But to-day—a little later—he said I could rise. Weare to be on deck for a half-hour after dinner, he told me.”
“The little Gleam——” said Bellair....
She was whiter, more emaciated than when they sighted theFomalhaut. There had been a crisis that they had not expected in the relinquishment of their will-powers.... Yet he saw how perfectly her face was fashioned.... Her hand came up to him, warm from the child, the sleeve falling back to her shoulder—held toward him, palm upward. As he took it, all strangeness and embarrassment left him, and he was something that he had not been for five years, something from the Unknowable. But that was not all. He looked into her eyes and met something untellably familiar there.
A most memorable moment to Bellair.
They were on deck together in the afternoon, the American doctor helping them. They heard sacred music—as he walked between them aft. They reached the rail of the promenade overlooking the main-deck.... A service was being intoned in German. Passengers and crew were below, and in the midst—leaded and sewn in canvas, in the cover of a flag——
The sound that came from the woman was not to be interpreted. She turned and left them. Bellair would have followed but he felt a courtesy due the Doctor, who had arranged for them notto miss the ceremony. Perhaps he had held the ceremony until they could leave the cabin. Yet Bellair had already turned away.
“Good God——” said the American. “You people have got me stopped. I thought this was a trinity outfit—that we picked up.”
Bellair took his hand. “It was—but our friend left us.”
The Doctor glanced at him curiously, and pointed down to the body already upon the rail. “I supposethathas nothing to do with him?” he remarked.
“Not now—not to watch,” said Bellair.
“I’ll understand you sometime,” the other added. “Go to her. You’ll probably find her waiting for you forward.”
Bellair lay in his berth that night, the open door between, and he thought of that first real look that had passed between them. “I’m not just right yet from the open boat,” he reflected. “I’m all let down from starvation, a bit wild with dreams and visions, but I saw old joys there and old tragedies, and mountains and deserts and—most of all, partings. I wonder what I’ve got to do with them all? It seemed to me that I belonged to some of those partings—as if I had hungered with her before and belonged to her now—and yet——”
Fleury came into his thoughts. “They werecertainly great together. It seemed to me that I did not belong when they were together; and yet, this morning as I looked down at her—well, something of expectancy was there——”
Bellair found himself lying almost rigid in the intensity of his hope. Then his thoughts whirled back to New York—all unfinished. There was something in his heart for Bessie—and something in the wallet for Bessie. That was in the original conception, and he must not fail in that; and then he must clean that name, Bellair, from the black mark Lot & Company had traced across it. For a moment he fell to wondering just how he would go about that. Lot & Company was tight and hard to move.... A moment later he was somewhere in an evil and crowded part of New York, in the dark, Davy Acton holding him fast by the hand.
“... something of expectancy.”... Was it in her eyes, or in her lips? Her whole face came to him now, a picture as clear as life. He had dwelt upon her eyes before—and that billowy softness of her breast, as she lay—he had not thought of that. It was like something one says to another of such moment, that only the meaning goes home—the words not remembered until afterward. And her mouth—it was like a girl’s, like a mother’s too, so tender andexpectant. ... That word thrilled him. It was the key toit all.
He was farther and farther from sleep—listening at last with such intensity that it seemed she must call.