CHAPTER XI.
It was the last night aboard the Orontes, and an air of subdued excitement pervaded the great ship. The red-carpeted corridors were thronged with a hurrying, chattering stream of passengers, and the open doors of staterooms revealed a chaos of struggling humanity, clothes, and cabin trunks.
As Sprague emerged from the smoking room, muffled to the ears in a heavy topcoat, he half turned and glanced down at the deck behind him. The movement was hardly noticeable, yet it did not escape Stone.
“You've done that so often,” he said, with his slow smile and characteristic drawl, “that you must forgive me asking the reason.”
Sprague answered him with a momentary look of incomprehension, then gave a short laugh of annoyance.
“Habit, I suppose,” he said. “I left the best pal I ever had back there in the sunshine, but I keep forgetting and looking for him at my heels.”
“A dog?”
“Yes—a black cocker spaniel. Shall we walk?”
A biting wind was blowing from the east, and for a while the two men strode briskly and in silence. Sprague's hands were thrust deeply into his pockets, his head bent forward, and his mouth set firm.
“I feel as silly as a schoolgirl before her first dance,” he said presently. “I'm right on the edge of things, Stone; shall I fall into the charmed circle of success or outside it?”
“I shouldn't bother,” Stone advised. “It's on the lap of the gods—and Miss Holmes. Besides, does it matter?”
“Matter!” Sprague looked round at his companion with a perplexed frown. “Good Lord, man, look what it means!”
“What does it mean?”
“To me the success of 'Lorette' means everything—everything I hold to be worth while.”
“And what is that?”
“The realization of my dreams, the accomplishment of my destiny.”
The American's pale-blue eyes wandered off over the ship's rail.
“Lucky man!” he drawled.
“Why?”
“To have such a cheap destiny.”
“You think it cheap?”
“I do. To realize a dream is more often to shatter it; and, supposing your 'Lorette' is a success, well, what then?”
“I can go on”
“And on, and on—and what then?”
“Then—well—what a rum un you are, Stone! That's life, isn't it?”
“I wish I could think so,” said the American. “Mind, I'm not saying that a man's work isn't part of his life, and an important part—if we don't work, most of us pretend that we do, which proves its necessity—but to say that it is life” He shook his head slowly.
Something in the man's quiet assurance jarred on Sprague.
“Perhaps you don't have to work?” he suggested, with a touch of asperity.
For answer, Stone held out his hands.
“Those,” he said, indicating their gnarled palms and shapeless fingers, “are the result of gripping a cant hook in a Cascade lumbering camp six days out of seven for three years.”
“Then your definition of life is the accumulation of money by means of manual labor?”
Stone smiled faintly.
“Oh, dear, no; I didn't do it for money; I have what we call in America 'slathers' of it, and that is what I'm trying to show you—that a man's work is not his life, but what he works for. In your case, we have thinned the incentive down to 'going on and going on,' which seems to me so aimless that I can't for the life of me see why you should get into a fever over the possible success or failure of 'Lorette.'”
“Then, in Heaven's name, what do you work for?”
The American paused in the shelter of a ventilator to light a fresh cigar.
“You probably wouldn't understand,” he said, after drawing it into a healthy glow. “I hope you don't mind me saying it, but I'm almost sure you wouldn't understand.”
Sprague was annoyed in spite of himself. He not understand! It was Stone who never understood; who could hope to understand anything without a sense of humor?
“Very possibly not,” he admitted tartly.
Again the exasperating smile twitched the other's lips.
“And don't get annoyed about it; there's no need. I said that because I once told it all to another man—the only man I ever did tell it to”
“And he didn't understand?”
“He laughed.”
“Then he ought to have been shot,” said Sprague.
“You haven't heard it yet; perhaps you'll laugh, too,” Stone suggested. “Just do as you like. I'm going to tell you, anyway. Let's sit down; this wind is smoking my cigar for me.”
They found two chairs, and dragged them into the lee of the smoking room. Stone crossed one bony knee over the other, and fixed his gaze on a swaying shroud.
“The reason that I worked—worked hard with my hands—was that I might occupy my day, and get thoroughly, physically tired and ready for sleep at its end. I wanted oblivion, and that was the only way I could get it. I had tried the others. I was thought promising by the lights of the law at one time; at another I looked like making no end of money that I didn't want in real estate; yet something I was trying to forget kept obtruding itself between me and my work. This memory and my work fought for mastery in my mind, and the memory was always victorious in the end. I rushed blindly into every kind of sport in the endeavor to thrust it from me; but it still followed me. I toured the world, and it was this that finally brought me to a decision. Those lonely voyages offered less resistance to the thing I was trying to forget than anything I had tried previously, and I determined that my only hope was a hard, routine day of manual labor, in which I should become a machine, a mechanical contrivance for doing some crude work, work that I could do day in, day out, and lose myself in the rhythm of doing it, until I became conscious of bodily fatigue and could rest by sleeping, thus forcing my brain to rest, too. And so I got work at a lumbering camp in the Cascade Mountains. I had to wait until men loaded my wagon in the bush with logs, drive them to the mill skidways, roll them off with a cant hook, and return to the bush. I found myself counting the trees that lined the trail. Between the skidway at the mill and the skidway in the bush there were exactly one thousand six hundred and forty-two on the right side, and twenty less on the left. I made eight trips in the day; my nigh horse took usually about eight hundred steps to make the trip, and my off horse seven hundred and forty or fifty. So I managed to occupy my mind all day and lose it in tired sleep at night. I have been doing that for three years, and by comparing my state of mind now with what I remember it to have been three years ago I feel I have made headway.”
He ended abruptly, and, with a dexterous movement of the tongue, conveyed his cigar to the opposite corner of his mouth.
“And this memory” Sprague began, and checked himself.
“I said I was going to tell you all,” Stone continued doggedly. “I was just coming to that; this is where the other man laughed.”
He unfastened the center stud of his shirt front, and detached a small gold locket from a slender chain encircling his neck.
“That is what I was trying to forget,” he said.
Sprague looked down into the face of a very commonplace woman of about twenty. The hair was dark and parted in the middle with severe simplicity; the features were undeniably handsome in a coarse, voluptuous way that suggested the Jewess; the eyes were, of course, expressionless, the picture being a photograph. He studied it carefully for a few seconds, and then returned it.
“You see,” said Stone, attaching the locket to the chain, and speaking in a deliberate monotone, “we were engaged to be married. I bought fruit land in California, and built the home, and when I went back East to fetch her she had changed her mind—that's all.”
After a brief pause he looked up at Sprague almost appealingly.
“You're not laughing?” he said, without a trace of cynicism.
Sprague was not; the thing annoyed him to such an extent that he resolved to speak.
“I see nothing to laugh at,” he admitted. “But tell me—you never had much to do with women?”
“She was the only woman I ever really knew, or cared to know.”
“And you have never seen her since—not for five years altogether?”
“No.”
“And because she jilted you you went to the Cascades and buried yourself—you thought it the best way to forget?”
“It is the only way. This trip was an attempt at a holiday, but it has proved for the second time that I can't stop work. I shall take the first boat back.”
“I still see nothing to laugh at,” said Sprague; “but I see a great deal to exasperate the ordinary mortal.”
“I knew you wouldn't understand,” said Stone wearily. “I must be different somehow—I've often thought it. I don't want to whine, and God knows I say this out of no conceit, but I must be a man in a thousand. The other nine hundred and ninety-nine would look upon it as a misfortune—perhaps it is—but I can't—I can't love and ride away. Where I loved once I shall always love; she is a part of me, though belonging to another. I, you see, was not part of her; there is some gigantic mistake somewhere. She was something ethereal to me; she will always be that—whatever happens.”
“Man's love is the same the world over,” Sprague blurted brutally. “To see a man like you buried in a hole like that, going through day after day what you went through, for the sake of a dream, a chimera, it—it”
“Yes, I know,” said Stone.
“And if you call it understanding,” Sprague went on hotly, “understanding to sanction suicide and premature burial, then I'm sorry, but I certainly don't understand. You carry that picture round your neck and in your mind's eye; you see her always as she appeared to you in the old days; you worship her image—do you understand?—not her, but her memory. If you could see her now—why, she has probably developed the temper of a fiend; she has grown fat and coarse; she has three children; she may have had some disease that has disfigured her for life—smallpox—anything. You loved her, not her character; she was too young to have one when you knew her. Oh, wake up, man! There are lots of good things left in life if you only get out and look for them.”
Stone gazed fixedly into the darkness.
“Please don't say any more,” he said. “It won't do any good, and I don't like to hear it; it's worse than the laugh.”
“Look here, Stone,” said Sprague firmly, “you're going to stay with me in London. We're going to take rooms that I know of in the Gray's Inn Road—not a very salubrious neighborhood for a man with slathers of money, but cheap and central for me. You'll come to the rehearsals and take an interest in 'Lorette' in spite of yourself. You'll do the sights, and spend meditative evenings over them in a good armchair by a roaring fire; and you'll see how many days it takes to drown this dream of yours.”
Stone shook his head slowly, but deliberately.
“It's good of you,” he said, “but you”
“Then that's settled. We dock about ten to-morrow. I must go and pack.”
But the American still sat in the deck chair, a huddled, ungainly figure in the darkness.