PART THREETHE JADE: II
1
Bellairhad to wait less than two days in Savannah, for theJadehad 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 hadskuffedforward 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 eventhe 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 theJadewas 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.... TheJadehad 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. TheJadehad a dear inner life for him, satisfied him with her lines, her breathing, settling and repose. A finehunger 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. TheJadehad 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. Onehand 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 thehair 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, theskuffingof 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 associationfor 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 theJadewas drawn in the soft, irresistible strength of nature.
He knew that this would pass, that he could not continue to sense thisrapportwith 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 thisstory, 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 theJade, 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 theSmilaxat Hong Kong, when the harbour was raving and the seas were trying to climb the mountain—they usedto 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 apparentlyfor 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 nowine 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 wishedshe 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’sbeing one of her rounds; as she might speak of the beer atHolbeck’sor the chops atSharpe’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 theJade, reported that the Faraway woman was returningto 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 theoffering. 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. Bellairhad 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 theJadeand 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 timein 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. TheJadehad 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 withFleury. 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 thegreatest. 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 largeand 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.... TheJadeseemed 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-chaircreaked; 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 aftby 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 wasver-eelittle, 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 hazeabout 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 thismotif, but the Third of the trinity was always invisible. Yet he hadentered 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 greatmadonnasof 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 drinkwith 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 theJade. “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 theJadeand 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. TheJadebowed 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—booksand 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 manystorms. And now theJadewas 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. TheJadewas 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 dozennights 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 theJadeso, 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 theJadestruck 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 causewithin the year. He heard the running and the hard-held voices on deck, and one great bellowing cry fromStackhouse. 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 theJadeslid 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 oldJadeto 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 theJadecould 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 recoilingfrom 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 theJadewas 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, drypeakinginstead.... 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 patchesof 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 theJade’sgunwale. 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 anddarted 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 theJade’srail 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 andskuffingpitifully 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. Bellairwould have waited for the Japanese woman, but theJadedipped 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.... TheJadeseemed 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.