CHAPTER IV
THE WRONG MAN STUMBLES HELLWARD
O P. JONES himself, had he not departed this troublous life and perhaps come into certain ghostly advantages, could not have recognized the Sally Martin when she was re-rigged. If one did not know her with that disillusioning intimacy that comes from putting a paint-brush over her timbers, a good opinion might have been formed of her. She looked all right. But the feel of her was disquieting. From keelson to truck, from forecastle to cabin, from stern to rudder, she was worked over.
Trim and safe and speedy was her appearance. Her bow was sharp and her buttocks tumbled home sharply. It was probably because of her lines that she had been kidnapped in the first place.
Williams had an eye for boat-beauty, as other men have for the next most feminine thing, a woman.
I have a preference for the ark-like ship, high out of the water; and if it needs two guesses to tell her stern from her bow, I like her the better. She may ride the sea like a sailor on horseback and be stupid at her helm, but she won't be headstrong and full of the devil.
Sally Martin was reasonably behaved while she lay on the beach, turning from one side to the other like a lazy lady in the hands of slaves. But we had to take her out unballasted, stern on.
And she objected. She was warped first in one direction, then the other, for rocks were all about; and there was no chance to turn her around on the boulder-bound beach. She had been practically embayed by rocks.
She hung back and tugged like a calf at the end of a rope. She was indignant at being hauled out by her heels. Finding herself unable to shake her bow loose from a running hawser that played over her stern, she swayed from side to side, determined to smash her hull timbers.
She nearly succeeded, too. She did succeed in getting stuck, coming against a rock—but too gently to serve her purpose, being held by the pay of the cable over her bow. Nothing was damaged but some twelve hours of time.
It was almost impossible and it was dangerous to lie at work near that beach. The surf swirled and leaped, the waves—thick-bodied and high-crested—smote the rocks and flung their spray as if tossed upward from giant hands; and the surface of the water was boiling foam.
We took on rock ballast and stowed it—under Williams's eyes—and overlaid the ballast with timber. Our hands were torn and raw, our backs ached, our hearts were heavy, our stomachs light. There were no watches and no sleep, for when the sun went down lanterns came out.
A dozen times a day almost any one of the men could have killed Williams; he was back to them and often head down, working hard, harder than any. Something more than fear of him held them to a weary dog's life.
Perhaps they realized that without him there would be small chance of getting off the desolate coast; but that was less true than that they admired him, even though they hated him. I hated him myself. Hawkins, puffing like that well-known puffer, the porpoise, said that he would personally add a pound or so to the reward for his capture—he was that tired of work. We talked disconsolately of the half-filled flour-barrel I had stowed in the fire-hole.
Williams in almost every turn and move disclosed a remarkable knowledge of work. He seemed to know even the weight of a stone at a glance; in the same way he seemed to know measurements and capacities; and without a moment's hesitation he could tell what and how to do anything about shipwork.
He showed no apparent attention toward anybody. A man might be dying without Williams saying a word to him. He noticed though. Try malingering and one would see how quickly he noticed. I had seen him stay by a sick native all night. Also I saw him send white men, tottering from weariness, to bear a hand at heavy hauling. He was heartless.
But at the first sign of weakness from him every man on the ship would have instantly become sick. I should have. I would gladly have lain down on a deathbed just for the chance of a bit of rest; but not at the risk of being yanked up by the ears.
Fresh water, tea and coffee, we had in plenty. Wood was the only thing we found on the island to carry away. It had been cut above the cliff and thrown down. Some of the men had thought about running away, but they were wisely afraid of taking to the strange forest with no station or settlement on the coast. But with plenty of wood our condensers filled casks as fast as they were emptied.
At last we sailed, dropping away before a light, steady wind that blew south, and when we had plenty of sea-room we changed course and began beating northward.
Naturally we got into rough weather, for nothing else could be expected with a dozen Jonahs aboard. Cold slatey clouds came low in the heavens. The rain swept us like a fusillade. The winds boomed and thundered. Each time we went about we were nearly capsized.
We bucked a heavy sea for two days and a night, with me at the helm most of the night—or it seemed like it anyway—and I was so soused with coffee that I could not sleep for another day and night.
Williams was on deck practically all of the time. I swear what sleep he got was standing, eyes open, on the weather side, staring into the rigging. He was stubborn as Vanderdecken. Whether, like that Dutchman, always beaten back at the Cape, he had cursed God, I do not know; but he never cursed man, wind, sea or luck. He was a lunatic. One of the kind that seldom fails at anything to which his will is set.
It was hell, I was sober; and we were bearing for the Bass Strait. Not even a miracle would take us through without being sighted. But why care? Besides, nobody would expect Williams to sail in that direction.
I went to him. I could stand it no longer. He was working with a book of sailing-directions before him—sailing-directions for the lower coast of China, Java and the Malay Peninsula, and he ponderingly made notations which he afterward wrote into a virgin log-book.
I was desperate.
“Listen,” I said. “I don't care anything about where we are going. I don't care anything about what we have to eat. And the other men are about the same. But we want something to drink and we have to have some sleep. There's not going to be anything left but ghosts to work your ship for you if this keeps up.”
“Did the forecastle send you?”
“No. And I've got too much sense to admit it if they did.”
Without a word he got up, unlocked a sea-chest, lifted the lid. There was bottle on bottle of rum and gin.
A gleam, that I may have misinterpreted as a gleam of amusement, was in his eyes as he said, jerking phrases out, that I had forgotten it. That he had had it sent down to the beach in the wagon.
That liquor was always good for trade—implying with a glance and a gesture. “If I can keep your hands off it.” He said, however, that I could help myself the day I found out what Davenant and the woman were after at Dakaru.
“And why does she stare at me?” he snapped, as if I had something to do with it.
“Does she?” My voice was innocence itself.
“Her eyes are like beaks.”
I had no sense to say it, but words were always slipping out—truthful words.
“I think them more like black opals.”
His answer was a short, throaty growl. A pause. Then he spoke harshly:
“Raikes knows. I don't want to hang him up by the thumbs. He's a good sailor. Not to be trusted—bad shipmate. But you find out. A woman always talks—if she's giving away somebody's secret.”
“Now listen, Skipper,” I pleaded. “Just a nip or two, you know. You can't expect a sober man to talk to a woman like that.”
I must have mistaken that gleam that I had seen in his eyes. It wasn't amusement. It was anger. It came back again, and words with it. He did not raise his voice. His words were hard and dry, and snapped like the breaking of sticks:
I was a drunken wastrel. A club to drive and a bottle to lure were the things that had an influence on me. But at least I didn't have the mark of Judas in my hand. Find out why they were going to Dakaru—and I could get drunk, drunk like the beast I like to be. Williams said:
“I know why I am going to Dakaru.”
“Grahame?”
“Yes, Grahame. But not what you think.”
And I didn't know what to think by the way he said it.
But I must find out what they were up to. Davenant, he said, was dark and deep and sinister.
“Coldly evil,” were the words, and he put meaning into them. So much meaning that a nervous little thrill ran through me.
“The woman”
He did not finish. I knew he felt the curse of the serpent was on all women. But no matter who they were or what they wanted, he, Williams, would take them as promised to Dakaru.
It was true that an outlaw's word was all he had left.
Something made him hate the world and the people in it. Out of my own meager knowledge of him I knew how unfailingly he had been deceived, abused, had treachery come at him, every time he trusted a white man.
I knew what rumor said of his past: how women, and one whom he loved, had used perjury to bring him to the gallows; and how he had been hanged and buried alive (one report had it that a dummy had been buried instead; in quick time, too) by convict laborers who furtively kept him from being smothered until they could secretly dig him out.
Strangely enough, rumor said that she was dark, black-eyed—beautiful—and vain. A tenfold revenge had smitten her a few years later when a native girl, jealous, hacked her face with a knife; and the pretty strumpet died of bleeding vanity. The background of the life of the man known as Hurricane Williams was tragic; and who could have sanity with such memory-ghosts haunting the brain? Or trust women?
“Hawkins,” I said as we leaned against the galley, “you've made a sighing furnace of many a woman. Tell me, how do you win their confidence?”
Hawkins extended a mandatory hand. Extended it with the careless authority of one exercising an immemorial prerogative. I gave him my pouch. He filled a diminutive cask that he used as a pipe-bowl, and blew a cloud of smoke at the masthead. Sentimental reminiscence overspread his massive face.
“Women; women,” he said deeply. Paused. “Ah, women!”
A reflective pause.
“But you can't tell, though. Blue-eyed uns—ah, what liars! Brown-eyed uns—so hurt if you don't b'lieve 'em when you know they're lyin'! Black uns—you can't tell nothin' about 'em any more 'an the others. If only I had a little somethin' to swallow! Talkin' o' women; thirsty work.
“Give me a bouncing, black-eyed lass;
Give me a deep an' steaming glass.
When I'm back from the ocean's roll.
Aye, give me a broad low tavern bench,
An' the soft white arms of a black-eyed wench,
And the devil can have my soul!”
“Mercy,” I said. “How cheap our fat Faustus holds his soul!”
Hawkins grunted impersonally.
“He's got it anyway. Can't meet a woman an' not give your soul to the devil.”
Very meditatively:
“Yes. If she's a saint, deeper his claws get into it. I've met 'em east and west, when I was drunk and when I wished I was. I've had 'em lie an' I've had 'em talk straight, and you can't tell the difference. So when you meet the saint, you think she's like the others.”
“The saint?” I said insinuatingly, lifting my brows.
It was something new to find this fleshy bulk sentimental. I had the impression that it would be diverting, though just yet he was a little too earnest to be laughed at. Earnest people may be mocked. But even when they are ponderously fat it is poor sport.
Why shouldn't the distress of women's love hurt a fat man as much as a lean? Is his belly a buckler for his heart, so that while we mock the heavily armored man that's pinked, we cry out over the wounds of the naked gladiator?
“No, friend Burly Ben,” I said to myself; “though tears roll down your hilly cheeks I'll be sympathetic—for I enjoy the sad tales of fat men.”
“I was young once,” said Hawkins. “But al'us had a good sheath of flesh for my soul. I danced a merry jig to a woman's tongue an' bent my back to hones' work. But she wanted to go hellward with a greasy-haired gambler. Told me I was a fool not to know a woman wanted somethin' better 'an a home an' a cradle to jiggle with her foot.
“An' I was never young again. … God, if I only had somethin' to drink! …
“Well sir, I met 'em east an' I met 'em west. Near as I c'd tell, they was all like her. Then one day I met a blue-eyed un. 'Frisco. Said she loved me, an' I said:
“'’Course you do. I got a sack o' dollars.'
“'Don't spend 'em,' she said. 'Let's buy a patch o' ground an' raise vegetables an' get rich.'
“But I called for another bottle. I was drunk for a week, an' she never three feet away. I was too soused to know she stayed sober to keep other people's fingers out o' my pocket.
“There was a fight. Somebody poked a gun in my hand, an' I killed him. … God, if I could only get somethin' to drink I wouldn't tell all this! …”
I said nothing. I watched him as a skeptic beholds the dead rise. He puffed like a man at work. He was throwing something off his conscience. Somehow in the conversation he had stumbled, and was falling headlong into confidence. He couldn't check himself. He went on:
“When I come to, she was in jail with a lie down an' sworn to. Said she done it. They let me see her. The fools, ought 'o killed me.
“'Why? Why?' I said. She smiled. You know how they smile—just so they've got what they want. She smiled like that. 'Boy, I love you.' Just that.”
There were tears dripping down that big, ugly face.
These men, these men that one meets right and left! Grimy and evil and drunken, gargoyles and satyrs; if only they had skylights in the breasts! But the One who looks down sees anyway perhaps. Perhaps, too, He loves his outcasts best of all.
“'Boy, I love you.' To me.”
He dropped his hands—palms open—in a sort of gesture to show how empty he was of anything worth anybody's love.
“I done my best, but they said I was only tryin' to save her. Save her—why, I thought she was like the others till it was too late. She was always kissin' me an' had 'er fingers in my hair. I thought her just more eager 'an most to fool me.
“Her name was a bad one. I guess they can love like the others. Maybe the firs' un loved her greasy-haired gambler.
“She said: 'Wait for me. I'll be out soon.' I said I would. I meant it. God, I never meant anything like I meant that! But I wandered around, got a long way off, an' other things come up. I'd curse myself all day—if I'd think of it—for not goin' back.
“At last I turned up. She'd been out over a year an' was dead. Somebody'd broke her head with a bottle. A woman, it was. So I couldn't do nothin'. I'd 'a' killed a man—just so—I don't know—so her ghost would've known I wasn't the kind that forgot everything, anyway.”
All hands were being roused. We were to go about on the starboard tack; and without a word of parting Hawkins and I separated to go to our stations.
As I went toward the poop I glanced up. The sun was going down through a gray mist that belted the horizon, and gloom like a vapor seemed lifting itself from the water. Sunset in wet clouds is a dismal hour.
Above me stood Miss Davenant, looking out to sea—at nothing. Her long black cape was half-blown back and exposed a vivid crimson lining. Tall, braced to the wind, motionless, she was more of a symbolism at that moment than a woman. And the black cape was lined with red. Was that symbolic too?
I went directly past her. She turned slightly and glanced at me as if I had been merely a noise that attracted her notice—as if I simply were not there. There was nothing of the artificiality of pretending to ignore me; her thoughts were elsewhere.
I spoke in passing. “The sun's making a stupid death-scene to-night, isn't he?”
A little look of surprise—surprise; nothing more—no shade of hostility—leaped into her eyes for a moment. Her smile was slight.
“I like it,” she said. And added: “Oh, immensely.”
She turned to westward as she spoke, then glanced at me.
Before I could speak again, Williams appeared—he had a habit of doing that; not coming, but appearing. He shouted and I jumped.
In the course of the next few minutes' work I was too busied to watch her.
A man passed me. I spoke to him as Raikes. He turned. In the twilight I saw that it was not Raikes but a fellow known as Tom Gibson. He had two good eyes, but he wore a blue cotton shirt with a daub of tar near the middle of the back. It was Raikes's shirt and fitted Gibson.
He gave me a hand the same as if he had been Raikes, and went on forward.
“McGuire,” said Williams, “take the wheel for the first watch. Raikes'll have the deck. Keep a gun where you can use it—out of sight. Look out for him. I must pretend to trust him. Wish I could.”
He turned away. But I, within his cabin, cast a longing look toward the chest.
“Skipper, for the sad confidence of a fat man, I ought to have a nip—or two. Hawkins opened up. I'm not coaxing when I say he shook me a bit. He's got another secret too. I'll get that by and by—why he took on with you. He's dropped hints that make me think he knows Dakaru. Too much of a liar to admit it. No, he didn't lie this afternoon about that woman with the blue eyes. Listen.”
I repeated Hawkins's story; ending:
“And his words aren't what rammed a hole in my chest. Maybe the girl was drunk when she confessed, and crazily—as women do—stuck to it sober. But it's the year and more after she came out. Drinking, you know, with every man off the sea; and asking each if he knew Ben Hawkins. Half-breathless for the answer. Looking up at every step. Peering at faces in the alleyways—eager. Trying not to believe that he didn't care. Setting her teeth to faith that he at least had decency to be grateful. Drinking to keep up hope. Quarreling because she was having a fight inside herself. Getting sloppier, blearier, and losing that hope. He was like all the others, she said to herself. And sinking into death under the crack of an empty beer-bottle—with a sigh of relief.
“Women like her, and men like him, feel and have pain the same as—the same as I don't know much about God, but I'd rather go to Him, drunken, dirty, eaten out with sin, like that woman than like one that never told a lie to save the man she loved. An' I've got to have a drink!”
As I talked, Williams stood, legs slightly apart, his brows contracted, his eyes glaring in that habitually crazed listening manner of his, and awaited the end. He always appeared to resent conversation not pertinent to immediate work. His attitude, never putting me at ease, was disturbing to strangers. Few—none—understood him. Some—for there is a streak in men that takes up every challenge of manner, no matter from whom—were at once truculent. Let the biggest man alive put a chip on his shoulder, and it will be impudently knocked off. Williams, not wholly unconsciously, wore a chip. Most people, either cautious or sensible, not necessarily timid, gave him headway.
I ignored his manner; though not his words. Commands were things he meant. He was not a bully. And when he gave his loyalty, his friendship, his word, not the combined admiralties of the world could frighten or fight him out of it.
“Too much imagination,” Williams snapped angrily.
I had talked of a woman.
“I'm a mummy inside, Skipper.”
He said that when he gave me a drink it would mean a ration for every man. I told him for the love of Heaven give it then. That he had a crew of walking dead men, too tired and hopeless even to mutter.
It was largely true. The men did not know Williams, did not know the rewards of keeping faith with him—that is, of having him keep faith with them; and so they were morally beaten, broken; no heart was left in them. The gibbet dangled before their eyes, and not a glint of pirate gold thrilled them for the great chance.
He perhaps did not hear what I said, or hearing gave it not so much as a thought. A wounded man he would nurse on his own knee; but a man dying of overwork—he didn't appear to recognize any such death.
I was given two quarts of gin. I took them to Raulson, and word was passed. Nobody believed it, but all came. I, lying a bit, told Raulson they were from the skipper because he was satisfied with the way the men worked; and, as I intended that he should, Raulson repeated that. It was like a distribution of medals.
Not that it made the men love Williams. Far from it. It livened them up—the nip and praise—to damning him for thinking to buy them cheaply; but they did not mean the damning so much as they had meant the silence.
And I, watching and listening from a little distance apart, turned too late to get a drink for myself. Raulson emptied the second bottle of the half-pint remaining when all had been served—except myself. He was humble, and could afford to be, since three times his share was warming his stomach. I cursed to the tune that Hawkins was singing interminably in the forecastle:
“Come, all you brave sailors, an' listen to me.
I'll tell you a yarn o' the Mary Magee,
An' how she went down with her whole companee”
There is nothing that sucks at my bones like loneliness, when I am sober. The marrow goes out of them and I want to crumple like a used rope.
It is a horrible thing for a man to be thrown on himself with nothing to think about but himself. Particularly when it is dark, black, and the boat drives on, moaning and complaining, and the wind is hissing as from clenched teeth.
A small aura of light, not unlike a saint's wreath of beams, spread from the binnacle and gave a little magic shelter to my—not fears, but the something in me that hates the dark. Vague blurs of white splotched the darkness at the points I knew sails were forward. The mizzen leaning out on the larboard was more visible, and something like a great protective wing. I wished it might fold me, hide me, let me sleep indefinitely, and awaken when—But why awaken at all?
The sea bumped and hissed, not ferociously, but displeased. Behind us the water closed fussily in our wake, a sibilant chorus of froth. Too much imagination, as Williams had said.
I felt we were followed by ghosts, bodiless, impalpable, but hissing in a certain weak, futile fury. Among them would certainly be a blue-eyed ghost with an empty beer-bottle—and blood-covered hair.
Davenant, stiff and aloof, seemed to want loneliness. He had taken the air for a few minutes and gone. He was more unbending than ever of late. Nursing, perhaps, his injury from Williams's tongue. It had been reckless, crazy, of him to turn for even only a short time a man like Davenant to work.
Not because there was anything degrading about the work, but because Davenant was Davenant. Davenant was polite in the way of a man who seems a little startled when there is a call for his attention; as when I spoke to him. A casual, “Good evening.” A pause; a cool modulated, distant, but polite, “Good evening” came back.
There was something about him that seemed awkwardness without being any such thing. A kind of angularity perhaps, such as inordinately self-contained people have. Davenant had gone—back to his shadows. He seemed to like them.
The devil has a throne of fire, but it is hid in shadows; perhaps if Davenant sat on that throne in his absence the devil might wander up and down the earth without being missed. Again, too much imagination. Looking straight at Davenant, I could see nothing of the satanic features in him; but his reflection in my memory made me wonder which image it was, his or a childhood trophy of reminiscence about the devil?
Satan was proud too. Some saint once had him by the nose, 'twixt hot tongs. I couldn't remember which one, if I ever knew. Williams would have been such a saint as that.
Somehow there wasn't anything incongruous to me in thinking of Williams as a saint that might have been; some of those old warrior saints must have been crazy, intense, resolute as he. Imagination—too much of it.
Raikes came with the slow step of importance out of the darkness. He came up and stooped over the binnacle. He was talkative. He talked as he looked at the card. Everything was going fine, he said, or something like it. But if he had the ship he would lay his course a little nearer the middle of the strait. No use hovering in sight of land.
I silently remarked how long his nose was; his unshaven face was covered with a substance that looked more like fur than hair. Splotched, too. The blind eye—I had an impression that it wasn't really blind. He simply didn't need it. Perhaps he could see with it in the dark—just open it and close the other, and cat-like look about.
He was mate now, he said. There was a grin like a sneer, too. Was the man drunk? He knew ships and, the sea, he did. No, Williams had not said he was mate, but given him the work and a berth aft.
Williams—Hurricane Williams—“How did he get such a bluster of fame?” The question wasn't sincere. Yet Raikes seemed to think Williams wasn't entitled to it—to the fear of men.
“I had a ship once,” Raikes began. Liar.
On he went, lying. He laid a dozen men in gore, or maybe only one or two, but spoke of them with that swaggering tone that makes dozens, not individuals, the unit. He would get another ship one of these days—a woman had lost his first for him. Well—on he went.
What was in the air to make men talk of past women this day? Was I turned father confessor to a ship of pirates?
I crooked an arm about a spoke and loosened the holster inside my shirt. Raikes was a little too amiable. Suppose he wanted to step behind me. Mate? It was queer. I was at the wheel to kill the mate if
Something had set Raikes dreaming about a ship he never had. Perhaps a lugger, or maybe only a jolly-boat stolen when nobody was looking. He might be drunk. Other things than sweet biting rum will make men drunk. Other things besides women—so I have heard.
He was speaking of the woman. I couldn't remember what he said at first, or how he brought her in. It wasn't of the woman that had lost him his ship. It was of the one on our ship.
I gave him both ears, but he had nothing to say that was important. The importance was in the way he said it. As if there were intimacy between them. Aye, yes! He knew her secret. Davenant's too.
That would make for a feeling of intimacy.
He had never seen a woman like her. Well, few men had.
The wind changed slightly and he hurried forward. I could see nothing. My eyes, from gazing at the binnacle, were accustomed to light, so that when I looked into the darkness I was little better than blinded. My ears seem blinded, too, for the first I knew of her presence was her voice.
“Don't you ever sleep?” she asked with that simulated flattering interest that is the preliminary of an intruding woman. Not that she was intruding.
She still wore the long black cape, a sort of robe of invisibility—for night anyway. The night was her element. There seemed a kinship, a sistership, between them. Perhaps my nerves were raveled.
She came close enough to be touched by my aura. Stronger light gave distinctness to the irregularity of her face but dimness softened the outlines—not the expression—of the face. It was not a soft face, but pretty; a certain evil prettiness.
There is nothing more irresistible—to some men. I am one. The ocean's bottom is paved with bones of others.
There are men who hate women because they can't help loving them—the women. I can help it; nothing like Hawkins's blue-eyed ghost haunts me. But this isn't of my affairs; so it is more to the point to say Williams could perhaps help loving them, too. But he seemed simply not to see them. That may be the coward's way out, but it is the safest a brave man can take.
Miss Davenant—Raikes had said a quarter of an hour before that her name was Dula. How did he know?—Miss Davenant talked friendly. I could tell that she was not talking about what she wanted. Her lips moved easily and she smiled, but her eyes remained coldly steady. I felt that the veils of those eyes had been pulled aside, that I was looking at the woman—the other woman inside of her. But one might as well look from one sphinx to another.
My tongue must have tripped unsteadily, for though talking is one of the things I do with the greatest ease she made me uncomfortable. If I had not looked at her eyes I wouldn't have minded; though also I was wondering what she really wanted. Why on deck so late to talk to me?
Bluntly it came:
“You would do anything for him, wouldn't you?”
Strange, but I knew to whom she referred, though his name had not been mentioned. Strange too, but it seemed the other woman—the other sphinx that lurked behind her eyes—speaking. I had an impression that she spoke through motionless lips, as if it was an actual voice from within. I evaded her face, and fastened mine to the card.
A warning subtlety suffused me. At times I feel myself very clever. Guided a little, too, by her poised fierceness, the fierceness of eyes and voice, I surmised that she had no sympathy with doing anything for Williams.
For one thing, he had humiliated her father. I had no reason then for not supposing that Davenant was some one else. For a more important thing, Williams had treated her as if her cloak did actually confer invisibility; and, in my experience, nothing more enrages a woman than being ignored.
She was not the cold creature of her seeming—of her poised appearance. I had only a few hours before made one slight friendly advance, and here she was back seeking to talk with me, to share a certain familiarity of opinion.
“Do anything for him?” I half-snarled. “Why should I? I never sleep, you say. How can I? Work and blows, damn him!”
If she were surprised she did not show it, or at least I did not see it. I flashed my eyes at her. She was motioness, expressionless, except for a certain hard stare—motionless except for the tugging of the wind at her cloak.
“Look at him,” I went on.
“I have.”
Her voice was even. It told nothing.
“No more emotion, feeling, in him than in—in a woman who's lost her illusion.”
She half-smiled, but not pleasantly.
“Why should she have no emotion, no feeling, because she may have lost what was not worth having?”
“He hates women,” I said. “All kinds.”
Just why I said it I don't know, unless I meant to convey further cause for seeming not to like Williams. I perhaps intended to elaborate. But I was disconcerted by the unexpectedness, the savage little tone, of her quick-flung reply.
“And I hate men—all kinds. That's part of the wisdom of having lost illusions. I distinctly hate traitors.”
She turned away. The wind swept her cloak from her side, flung back the crimson lining and revealed her hand, and in her hand a knife caught the faint transparency of the binnacle's aura. She half-turned, but did not look again at me so that the wind brought her cape about her.
I wished I had not been the subtle fool. After all I might have known subtleties are worthless against women. They are impenetrable—the women, I mean. It is like using loaded dice, then betting on the numbers, not top or bottom, but on the side. Now I could not possibly convince her that I, too, hated traitors.
Not that it made any great amount of difference what she thought of me—so long as that knife was kept at a distance. I could not imagine what she had it for. For herself? She, being a woman among men of a kind that are not thought to be trusted? She did not appear squeamishly fearful; yet since the cape had never been off her when she was on deck perhaps the knife had never been out of her hand.
I had lost the chance of getting at her secret, the one Raikes inadvertently shared. But I had another. One perhaps she did not intend to have me learn any more than the one pertaining to Dakaru.
She did not leave the deck, but stood at the starboard rail, the invisible cloak losing her, or all but losing her, to my eyes. I saw her more clearly in my imagination than I would have done had she been close. I saw her symbolically, and symbolism is more vivid than the thing it stands for.
That is, to my mind there she stood, resolute, brooding, her pale, irregular face framed by black hair, calm, cold to appearance, but fierce at heart; enveloped by black cloth, lined with red; and in her hand a knife. Not a woman so much as something tenuously palpable and, to repeat, symbolic of all women of all time; disillusioned, and the more impenetrable for it.
It was a chill night and my bones ached with something other than cold.
The next hour passed, I know not how. It stretched itself along into time. I don't know when she had left the deck.
Raikes had come back, singing to himself or rather humming. He did not talk with me. He walked to and fro, but did not meet her. She was not there. I wondered what was the matter with him.
Once he made as if to come behind me, but I, alert, cried, “What is that?” and pointed. There was nothing. I knew it. But I nearly frightened myself. Raikes, catching the alarm in my voice, turned, hurried to investigate, peered, asked what I saw.
“I could have sworn there was somebody there,” I said. “And something glinted.” I had to add that.
He stood looking for some time, not concerned, merely idle. He had had no real purpose in getting behind me; and I had been cowardly for nothing. Presently there was more pulling and hauling; the men came aft, silent of voice, shuffling about—perhaps sleepily, but to me it seemed something more; lifelessly.
The watch changed. I gave over the helm. Williams was on deck. I knew that I couldn't sleep, so I stayed about, waiting for I knew not what.
Williams paced back and forth, lightly striding. At last he noticed me in the shadow of the companion. A hand gripped my shoulder and whirled me about. His face came peeringly close to mine.
“Oh, you!”
He had thought it might be some one else. It perhaps would not have been well with any one else to have been lurking there.
“No sleep to-night. I've got 'em again. Whither away? Ten, twenty, thirty, fifty years at most, to be alive and then perhaps be dead. How does it go? Perchance to dream. Tell me what you are afraid of, Skipper. I'll conjure it up. You'll know how I feel then. I'm shivered.”
He had no sympathy with my recurrent weakness when the devil, or as in this case the devil's daughter—bowled me into the dumps.
“I tell you I believe in vampires,” I insisted. “One has been at my veins all night. And the sphinx said she hated me.”
He remarked truly, raspingly, that I talked nonsense.
“No. Riddles. As one should who has heard the sphinx. Listen. I have her secret. Dakaru is nothing, a trifle that may fall to any fellow's ears, as to Raikes's. But this: She loves you.”
I don't know what Williams said. It wasn't a word; it was an exasperated, inarticulate, clipped comment. And he followed it up with a ferocious order to get below.
The three words had hit him in his Achilles' heel—the vulnerable spot. Love of women was to him as the flaming shirt some hero of old time put on unsuspectingly from the hands of a woman—who loved him.
And I had told the truth. It doesn't pay. I had told her the other thing. That did not pay either. Nothing remained but silence—and I had to talk.
I went below. I went to his cabin, and in dim light of the lantern swung from overhead inspected the chest. It was locked.
I looked about for something to pry with. I went out, slipped forward for a marlinspike. I would be drunk by morning, or
By the main hatch I stumbled. My foot had struck something soft, heavy but with that plastic inertia that means a body, a human body.
I swore, chilled, surprised—aye, frightened.
My oaths had scarcely cleared my tongue before Williams shouted from above. He was like that. I mean his response to every situation was so instantaneous as to be automatic. “Good God!” I had cried, and readily, as if watching, he demanded who and what?
“A dead man!” I shouted up, convinced though really ignorant; but not ignorant if something beyond mere sense of sight and touch is admitted. There had been murder in the air. I had felt it all evening, as some of those strange wizards of wild islanders could feel the coming of storms.
It was a dead man: Tom Gibson. An inoffensive, slight-built fellow; the last mark one would have guessed for the slim knife that reached his heart and stayed there. He had no quarrel with anybody; at least none that was known. He was not the man to have a quarrel.
The men came with an air, less of excitement than of curiosity. Word passed quickly. Sleepers roused themselves out of the forecastle to look at the dead man and wonder.
A jargon of muttering, surmises, amazement, came from the circled group that closed around the two lanterns held over his body, while Williams with knees to deck bent searchingly over the corpse.
I broke into the chest before those on deck had lifted the body. I drove the cork into the bottle as the easiest way to get the liquor out.
No one will believe it, but I might as well tell the truth. I drank a quart of gin more rapidly than I could have taken so much water; and in a few minutes it was a different ship, a different sea, a different world. A warm world—plenty of warmth in it.
Quickly I slipped the staple back into the chest, moistened my fingers and rubbed—to give age—the marks of the prying it out. And, as often happens in the best laid plans of mice and other thieves, I forgot the empty bottle as I hurried out.
There was a light under the door-crack of the room Miss Davenant used. Unthinkingly, carelessly, I knocked. I knocked again. Had I been then in reach of the Pearly Gate I would have as impudently battered at it and plucked St. Peter's whiskers had he frowned.
The door opened slightly; and she, recognizing me, pushed the door wide. She stood there expectantly, black cape and all. But there was no knife in her hand. I knew it, though I could not see her hand.
I bowed low and said:
“You made a triflin' mistake this evening. It was not I you tripped hellward. I just thought I'd let you know, so you wouldn't scream in the morning light—takin' me for a ghost. Good night.”
I bowed again.
Looking up, I saw two gleaming eyes and nothing more. I heard, “Come in here,” and nothing more. Had I been sober I wouldn't have gone. Had I been sober I would never have knocked.