CHAPTER V
TO A MERMAID THE WAGE OF SILENCE
THERE was scarcely room for the two of us to sit down. She did not sit for a time; how long a time I can't say. I put down the lid of a chest, filled with various feminine things, colored and soft-textured, folded neatly, and sat on it.
I leaned against the bulkhead and looked at her, perhaps with something of light, triumphant amusement on a stupid face—my own. I was not drunk, at least not in the full sense of that ambiguous word that means anything between high spirit and a sodden body; but I was well across the border into an exalted carelessness, indifference.
I was but returned to a certain normal state, one from which I would never have departed willingly. The world could go smash itself against the sun, and I would have ridden along jeeringly, my tongue loose at both ends.
Dutch courage? No, not courage at all; for whatever virtues I have had, drunk or sober, the quality of courage was not among them. But when that earthenware vessel of a body of mine was well moistened, I had the levitating sense of being a spectator, an onlooker, free to be impudent as a gallery god of Drury Lane, and as detached from the dangers in the plot when the passions of the stage found words and blows.
Being close to her, with my feet almost touching hers, and a yellow lantern playing the sun in a match-box of a room, she still seemed less of a woman, of an individuality, to me, than the figure in some tableau. Perhaps it was because the cape was still about her, for she shivered with frozen blood, chilled by something more than weather; and needed warmth. Her lips were tight-pressed, as if she were afraid to open them.
Retrospectively, I have shuddered at my half-hour in that cramped space with the murderess; and shaken at remembering she hated traitors. There was purpose in her; the purpose that settles down on itself like compact coils which a finger's pressure may release.
“What do you want?” she said at last.
Her lips quivered, her voice trembled—but as a rapier shivering from a blow, not tremulous in an unsteady hand. That was not what she had intended to say when she had ordered me in. It was an equivocation.
“I? Nothing. Show me your hands and I'll tell you again why I came. I'm no palmist to read fortune in the criss-cross of a hand's map. But if your fingers are empty I can show where you left your knife; and mine was not the red sheath for it—as you hoped.”
“What do you mean?” she asked unconvincingly, perhaps not greatly caring to convince, but falling conventionally on to that sort of evasion.
“Why did you send Tom Gibson naked on such a night as this to God? Once I gave a withered wizard over at Rotuna a slab of tembac and a bottle of brandy and he laid magic stuff on my eyes, so I could see through such things as cloth and capes. Oh, yes. I can. On deck you had a knife. Now you have none. The hilt that studded the body of Tom Gibson is the same—as you carried.”
I had no way of knowing that it was, or rather of proving it. But I had no doubt.
“Who?”
It was an exclamation.
I told her again that poor Tom, all amazed and wondering, wrestling with memory to discover how and why it had happened, since he was no quarrelsome fellow, now stood in the anteroom of Heaven waiting to be kicked hellward. Later on, in years to come, she could meet him there and apologize; that I would probably come too, and sustain her, help convince him that it had been a mistake.
She had both hands to her face, covering her eyes. She was shaken, but not sobbing. Not at all. Her eyes were tearless when her hands fell away, dropped, and her arms hung for a moment loosely as if tied to her shoulders.
“It wasn't Raikes?”
She spoke low- voiced, driving at me a.t one and the same time a question and a confession.
“Raikes!”
“Wasn't it Raikes? Tell me! Oh, wasn't it?”
I thought I understood. Raikes, ill-fated, hearing her secret through no fault of his, was expected to have kept it as only a dead man can. She had made a mistake, after all, but I had not been fortunate as I thought, though Tom Gibson's luck was bad as I had thought it.
She said it was “terrible” and seemed to mean, it, but was not broken down. She stared at me, or rather through me, in a kind of dazed wonderment; and seemed sincere without being horrified. She put her hands together and the long, pale, strong fingers weaved in and out; but otherwise for seconds she was motionless, looking toward but scarcely at me.
“All my life I could never do anything otherwise than wrong.” Her voice had the vacant, hollow sound of one thinking aloud, or addressing one's self. But as she talked she seemed to focus, more and more, her gaze on me, and at last was talking to me directly.
All her life, she repeated, her mistakes had been tragic; and, bitterly, she said that long ago she reached the point of not caring what she did. Look at her here with Davenant!
Of course, I understood then nothing of what that meant. She did not pause to explain. I listened. I had the curious sense of detachment, so alcoholically pleasant, of unreality; the sense that it was tensely interesting without affecting a personal contact—as when one is a spectator at a tragic play.
She had watched for Raikes, she had watched closely, by the galley. From the shadows, where she half-crouched and half-pressed herself into the outline of the bench, so as not to be noticed, she had kept her eyes fastened on whoever came within the light of the lantern hung up there. Hot tea was at hand for whoever wanted it—at all hours of night or day there was hot tea or coffee. She had seen Raikes come once—seen his face—but there were too many people about; she could not follow him.
At last she saw him, just after the watch changed, alone—recognized him by the tar blot on the back of his shirt though she had not seen his face. She followed. She spoke, whispering. He turned—she struck.
She could use a knife! Oh, how well and for what cause! Most damnable, too, if I may be permitted a comment. That was why she had been so interested at what I had said the first night about Williams and his thirsty knife. Another of my lies, come home with a sharp beak.
It was strange, it was impressive, she said, how many little things touched her and Williams alike; and some big things too. She too was an “outlaw”—her word. There was such a thing as fate in the world. Her uncle—the father-relation vanished—by sheer accident, fate, had engaged Hurricane Williams.
She hated her uncle—with an almost casual frankness she said that. She hated all men, particularly her uncle; but not him so much as— She checked herself abruptly; a glint of alarm passed through her eyes that she should have come so close to admitting something, whatever it was, that was not to be confessed by even a murderess.
Davenant was a terrible man. Her family was a terrible family. The mother's side came from Sicily; the grandmother had been born a countess there. Terrible in vengeance, she meant; and with a little pride she emphasized it. She did not put on pride; it simply emanated.
But Davenant was more than terrible; the English blood, I judged, had evidently given him poise, patience, an icy, deceptive shell. She had much the same.
Davenant could not be trusted—ever. He regarded her only as a gambler regards his loaded dice.
Davenant had intended to kill Raikes. Raikes had heard why he and she were going to Dakaru. But the devil always keeps his pot stirring: Raikes was a sailor, and Williams treated Davenant no better than, no differently from, the men he drove. Besides, there was a reward for Williams's head: Davenant would go far from his way for money. He was now some twelve thousand miles from his home—after money. So in the stirring of the devil's spoon, Raikes and Davenant got their heads close.
She—she had tried to warn Williams. He had ignored her. He bruskly turned away when she approached, or tried to approach, him alone.
That afternoon she had gone right into his cabin and told him—not listening to his impatient interruptions, not paying attention to his manner of turning away from her. She had told him, and he had not believed her. He had been silent, but his expression seemed to say that she was lying for some obscure purpose, such as a woman is never long without.
With any other man, at any other time, in her disturbed—and disturbing—life, she would have been furious. To be treated so! When intentions were noble, at that. And, too, her blood was Sicilian, or much of it.
But somehow fatalism had spread its black wings over her. She recognized Fate, or thought she did. More than fate—or as a part of fate—was a blind idealization of Williams. Love. She did not say that. She did not say idealization.
”I understand—everything,” was her sentence, not nearly so revealing in words as in voice.
She had, in the course of her interest in Williams's name—both of them had had bitter relations with Grahame of Dakaru—searched all of the many articles written by returned travelers and antipodean scribblers for English papers. Most of these were imaginative; and journalists are inclined to be sympathetic toward the picturesque.
Much that Williams had done, and a great deal that he had not done, had found its way into print; and more than once the purported story of his basic tragedy—the woman who sought to have him hanged, who did have him hanged—had been told. The frequent efforts to betray him on all sides were, more or less accurately, summed up from time to time in the press; and traitors that even try to serve the law are likely to find journalists unsympathetic. Miss Davenant had found color in plenty to heighten her own picture of him.
She knew more about him, or more of what was said about him, than I did. She was tensely interested in the fact that no person—and “person” was shaded by something subtle in her manner and voice to mean no woman—had ever been loyal to Williams. There was some kind of a story about how his own mother, at some time or other, had been fearfully prejudiced against him.
And I knew that deep within this tragic Sicilian was love of Williams—though she slid the word “love” scornfully from her lips when it came casually into her remarks.
Not knowing Williams, she had been alarmed by what Raikes and Davenant planned.
I mean not knowing him as I knew him.
Not that he was invulnerable. At least I don't suppose that he was. People could hurt him, did hurt him.
But kill him? The man that struck murderously at him was nearly doomed if he failed a hair's breadth; and all had failed. He was sudden in movements and hard in blows.
But it was difficult to understand, for me to understand, why he never seemed to hold a grudge against anybody lucky enough to strike at his life and get away alive. Some did—if they shot from a distance.
She was sitting down, her face framed in her two hands that pressed against the cheeks, pressed into a kind of symmetry the irregular outline of the sunken temples and exposed cheek-bones.
“What is to become of us all?” she asked, reaching over and putting a hand on my knee, and peering at me as if I had in some way prophetic sight.
Her hand returned to her cheek. There was nothing helpless, nothing even appealing, about her question or gesture. She asked it interestedly, as if I might know; but not as if any answer I could make would assist or would injure. What is written must be.
There are some with spirits bold enough to stare into the black eye-sockets of Fate—and not flinch. I did not think of her as being particularly bold, but as amazingly cruel, hardened.
“What is to become of us all?” she asked again.
I ask, how could I know? If we got before a storm we would probably have a reef for a tombstone, then the mermaids that salted the sea with their tears would weep over such of us as were handsome sailor men; but if the fool ship went on then. …
Her hands were lowered on her face; the chin rested on the knuckles; and by the parted lips and puzzlement in her dark eyes I saw her wonder that I could say such things at such a time. Below the hair that lay close against her temples, I saw the green pendants, twinkling in the light, dim as it was. Some way they seemed to match her eyes, to be complement to them, though the eyes were black.
“You made me think you hated him,” she said accusingly, as if by some means, indefinite but nevertheless responsible, I was concerned in the mistake that tripped poor Gibson into death.
I did not see any connection between the two sentences. She seemed to feel that one led to the other.
“Why shouldn't I hate him?” I asked. “What has he ever done for me? Fished me out of water once. Flung me over his shoulder once when my knee was broken by a war-club. He backed shooting through the surf to a boat of fellows that were afraid to land and help. Strapped me flat to my back and let me howl through long nights for somebody with half a heart to shoot. I hate pain. Things like that: for what? To keep me alive? Think of sleeping forever and forever!”
“I can't sleep at all,” she said simply.
That appeared to be the only thing she heard—my comment on sleep. But it wasn't so.
After a minute of thought she remarked, as if something had been made clear to her, that I owed my life to him. I told her I owed a lot of things that scarcely made life worth while to him, too. Having to work, for instance.
Her manner, not her voice, asked what was the matter with me. Women can't understand a drunken man, unless they know he is drunk; and as alcohol for a time goes to my tongue instead of my legs I was the more incomprehensible.
But I gradually realized that what she meant by the repeated question as to what would become of us, was what would be done about Tom Gibson's murder? It was only the disconcerting, haphazard speech from me that checked her intentions of getting me more or less implicated in secrecy, if not sympathy.
She got to the point deviously, remarking—with a hopeless sigh, resigned, perhaps sincere—that if her uncle found it out, well— The rest was left to be imagined; the impetus she gave the imagination shot it straight to the conjecture of something unspeakably tragic.
Then she demanded: “What will he think?”
She cared more for that answer than for her uncle's finding out.
For some reason I was quiet and made no kind of answer; perhaps I was a little drowsy. I had the sensation of hearing her only from afar.
With sudden resolution she got up and threw the cape off her shoulders; and, all crimson, it fell to her feet. She had thrown it off to have her hands free; and to me there was something startling, mildly so, in the abrupt revealment, for I had not before seen her without that somber drapery.
Her body was rather slender, not thin, but more certainly not rounded. She wore a short skirt with a broad belt, vividly covered with yellow, perhaps gold braid. The full, silken, blouse-like waist was wine-colored. Whether excitement flushed her pale cheeks or whether they caught color from the red cloth, it would be difficult to say; but her face was no longer pale.
Her fingers snatched, rather than loosened, the earrings, and with a gesture and a word she asked me to get up from the chest. She opened it quickly, tumbled the clothes to one side, so that some fell unheeded to the deck; and, coming at a chamois bag, she pulled open its mouth and thrust the good handful of glittering things at me.
“That is everything I have. You won't tell? You needn't tell. No one will know, and some day I may show how I can't forget when any one does me kindness. Once I had— Oh, these few are nothing!”
Then remembering that she was driving a bargain, corrected herself. They were not nothing—only by comparison. The earrings were valuable. All the stones were genuine. She would never have paste—never! Her contempt was not theatric.
I took a step backward.
Was I refusing? It was everything she had. Besides, no one need know.
I shook my head. What the devil, I asked, could I do with the stuff? Natives didn't know gems from glass, or care for gold more than for brass, and my sole use would be in gifts or trade. Sell it? What for? Money?
I was getting tangled, or rather losing my sense of detachment. She was bringing me, so to speak, on to the stage. I don't like to talk when there is need for seriousness. I am awkward. I feel implicated, caught.
Besides, what was there to be bribed for? I knew better than to tell Williams a woman had done murder on his ship; and who else was there to tell?
Her seriousness was inescapable. She was aroused. To her this appeared a fair bargain, not so much because of what she was buying as because of what she was offering; that is, everything of value that she had. If the widow's mite, or the rich man's load that pyramids the camel's back so it can not pass the eye of a needle, be all that can be offered as a purchase price, one is expected to consider the sacrifice rather than the value.
Why did I refuse? Did I think there was something more? Bah—I was like all men! What did I want? Name it.
For a last time, would I or would I not accept? Look, this was gold and precious stones—and the glittering trinkets were plucked up and dropped temptingly between her long fingers.
There was a hard glaze over her eyes. She was terribly in earnest; the dormant southern blood was foaming; an idea, a determination was in her brain.
I was not afraid. It was later, when I was sober, that I had chills over it; and of course when drunk I am rarely sincere. Never so when sober.
I have too sensitive an appreciation of the dramatic not to have known what I was doing. Besides she was a woman, and a woman draws bravado to the surface.
All the gallantry in the world, I suspect, has been, not through courage, but to impress woman. Men are gallant at times when no woman is around because they remember her.
So, suddenly exalted by the opening of a full-blown idea in my own head, I extended my hand, took the chamois sack and pulled tight the thong. For that second she had the intent look of one who has thrown a rock at a mark, and stands in concentration awaiting the result.
I turned my back on her, loosened and opened the window. Through the port went bag and gems, and a flap of spray came back in that sentient, accurate way that ocean water often has. Salty drops besprinkled my face. Perhaps a mermaid gratefully splashed her thanks.
I closed the port and turned to Miss Davenant, myself again. The devil, I told her, had bought me long ago; it was superfluous to force pay on to me for any work of his.
She was not used to the truth, at least not used to having it from men. She demanded why I did that. Her anger was apparent, but she suspended judgment for a second or two.
What did I mean by that? Why, I meant that I hadn't lost enough sense yet to weigh down myself with stuff that some fool might want, and crack me over the head to get.
What did she want? Silence? Couldn't she have it as well with her rings in the bottom of the ocean as in the bottom of my pocket? She could have it as well with them on her fingers; but a woman never feels she has got what she really, deeply wants unless she suffers.
Good-by—and I went out.
I was a little unsteady, but, too, the ship was rolling. I went on deck, ascending the stairs with great deliberation.
On deck I saw two forms about a lantern. I approached. They were talking.
Davenant held a knife in his hand. He was examining it, and Williams held the lantern almost against the knife.
“As I said,” Davenant remarked, slowly turning the knife back and forth, “this looks—this is hers. Not that she wouldn't use it—her grandmother came from Sicily.
“This is very queer—very queer. Dula never spoke to the man in her life. I am sure of that. You don't think—” Davenant broke off.
“One of my seamen has been murdered,” said Williams coldly. “I'd swing whoever did it from a yard-arm.”
He said it not as a threat but as a statement, as he might have said: “I'd pitch any man over the side that refused to obey orders.”
He might do that; but the chances were he would jump over and fish the disobedient one out. But the Sally Martin didn't have a yard-arm. A mere technicality perhaps. I might call his attention to it later.
“Your justice is severe,” said Davenant. The sneer was subtle.
I came from the shadows, talking:
“Inquest? What have we here? Well, well, a knife. Gibson was about your build, Skipper—in the dark, you know. A good strong hand sent home that blow.
“Well, well, what a sharp knife! Miss Davenant early in the evening told me she'd lost a knife. Right out of her room. Stolen. Wonder if 'twas this one?
“Who could have done it? What'd you think, Mr. Davenant? Somebody mistook poor old Tom Gibson for the Skipper?
“Miss Davenant said the knife was an heirloom. Looks like one, doesn't it? Is it hers? Oh, it is? Now who could've been snoopin' around in her cabin?
“A knife, she said. Didn't know she meant a youthful cutlas.
“By the way, Mr. Davenant, Raikes has been boasting a good deal about— But you understand, no doubt. He's dropped hints that— And he's the sort of fellow that looks at home dangling from the end of a yard-arm.”
Davenant, with an ill-concealed trace of anxiety, asked what Raikes had said.
“Said? What could he say? Nothing, more than I to whom you have also been—ah—polite.
“But the manner of the man, his hems and haws, and the wise winking of his lone eye— Why, sir, to see Raikes strut it, you'd think that you, the owner, conspired to make him captain though the scuppers ran blood. He's a rascal, liar and cutthroat, like myself, so I know”
“Stow that nonsense,” said Williams, his voice steely and final.
He always gave orders, big ones and little ones, in just such a voice as Joshua must have used when he commanded the sun and moon to stand still. So I went off and to bed, but being too sober to sleep I dreamed.
Many things happened in the following days, and none of them important.
The first thing that happened to poor Tom when he came blundering into this world, much as he had blundered out of it, was to be swathed in flannel by a midwife; and the last thing was to be swathed in canvas, sewed snugly in by Hawkins and myself, with a link or so of iron chain at his feet to make sure that he went toward the place where he belonged.
Over he went, feet first. The only prayer that went up was a suppressed, strained, “God forgive me!” from Miss Davenant, who, again in her black cape, with a black scarf thrown over her head and tied around her face and neck so that little was seen but her eyes, stood on the poop looking down.
I was near her. No one else was near enough to hear; or if he had heard was near enough her secret to understand.
Over he went with a heavy relieved sound at the water's surface, like a great sigh. For two seconds, scarcely longer, there was a hushed, solemn pause as our eyes strained at the white streak passing from sight in the green crystal waves, edged with foam.
Williams shouted, quickly, throwing words as if he flung them with his hand, and stood watching, somberly, critically, as the men moved to their work. The burial service, such as it was, was over. The Sally Martin was cracking on her way.
And we poor futile fools went on with the sweat and sins of life, though do what we might and fight as we would, in our own time we would follow poor Tom. Whither away and why? Perhaps he already had learned, and smiled in drowsy faint scorn to think how men hung on to life.
Most of that day Miss Davenant stood very quietly by the rail and looked down into the sea. But most of other days she had done much the same; yet the difference was enough for Hawkins to remark it.
“She feels bad 'cause it was her knife,” he offered me by way of enlightenment.
She found a moment to say that she did not understand, but she thanked me. A kind of strong inquiry was in her eyes, a doubt as to whether I had had motives of my own for saying what I had to Davenant and Williams; and if so what were they? She seemed a little uneasy rather than grateful, as if used to having to pay in pounds of flesh for every service done her.
Somehow I was less touched with sympathy than by something else, something not fear or distrust but having to do with her inordinate composure, which I knew very well was much like the composure of a serpent lying in motionless coils. Woman learns patience the last of all things; and it is terrible, this conjunction of coiled patience with woman's unreasoning, unheeding, immolating passion. She seemed not to invite sympathy; less because she was unentitled to it, than consciously to repel it as something worthless, unusually insincere.
“I was angry last night when you threw my things away. I don't understand yet. But I thank you.”
Her lips scarcely moved.
“He”—meaning Davenant—“said it was a good thing I mentioned having missed the knife to you.”
Then, as if reluctantly convinced, but with the shadow of doubt or two lingering: “You are clever.”
I admitted that I was. She looked at me again, her doubts increasing.
“I don't understand you,” she said, not inviting confidence, but being frank. And she added reflectively, as if it was after all the really important thing, “I do understand him”—meaning Williams.