The Sailor

The plain fact was he was coming to believe that he had not had a square deal. Life was tolerable for some, no doubt; for people like the Pridmores, for instance, and his friend Edward Ambrose – he was not envying them meanly, nor was he merely pitying himself – for those who had been born right, who had had a fair start, who had been given a reasonably plumb wicket to play on, as Klondyke expressed it. But for gutter breeds such as himself, there was not one chance in a million of ever winning through. He had done all it was possible for a man to do, and now with a feeling of more than impotence, he realized that he was out.

He had learned a trick of praying this last year or two, but in this cold summer dawn he had no longer a use for it. What was the good? Somebody – it was not for him to say Who – had not played fair. Henry Harper, you must be a man and bear it! A sudden gust of rage swept through him as he lay. The voice of Auntie was coming back to him out of the years. And she was exhorting him to an inhuman stoicism in order that she might serve her private ends.

Some time between six and seven, in a state of awful dejection, he undressed and got into bed. He did not want Mr. Paley to find him like that when he brought the water for his bath at eight o'clock. It would not be right to wound the feelings of a good man. But if Henry Harper had had the courage to take a razor, well… Mr. Paley would not have found him in bed. Since that night on the railway, now many years ago, he had lost the nerve for anything of that kind. He had always thought that on that night something had snapped in the center of himself.

At eight o'clock, when the punctual Mr. Paley came with the water can, Henry Harper told him that he was not going to get up at present, and that he would not be in need of breakfast.

"Aren't you well, sir?" asked Mr. Paley, in his discreet voice.

"No, I'm not very well."

"I'm sorry, sir." Mr. Paley had the gift of expressing true sympathy in his tone and bearing. "You have been a little run down some days now, have you not, sir?"

"Longer than that," said the Sailor. "Ever since I've been born, I've been a poor sort of brute."

"Robust health is an untold blessing. I'm glad to say I've always enjoyed it myself, and so has Mrs. Paley. Would you like to see a doctor, sir? I'll go along at once to Dr. Gibb at the end of the street."

"A doctor is no use for my complaint."

Mr. Paley was grieved, but he wisely withdrew without further comment.

The Sailor turned his face to the wall with a vague sort of prayer that he might be allowed to die. But it was not to heaven; the deadly pressure of events had forced him in spite of a lifetime's hard and bitter fighting to accept Mr. Thompson's theory. The troll of Auntie, who was exuding gin and wickedness around his pillow, had been now reinforced by the mate of the Margaret Carey.

A pleasant pair they made, these trolls from his youth. And there were others. If only that delicate spring had not snapped, he must have jumped out of bed and settled the business out of hand. "Be a man," said the voice of Auntie. "There's the case on the dressing table straight before your eyes. Be a man, Enry Arper, and set about it."

Auntie was right. He got out of bed. He took up the case and stood an instant holding it in his hand.

"Lay holt on it, bye." That was Mr. Thompson's gruff tone, and it was followed immediately by Auntie's shrill and peculiar snigger.

There was one other thing, however, on the dressing table: a comfortable, green-backed edition of the "Poems of John Milton." The Sailor didn't know why, but he took up the now familiar volume with his unoccupied hand. It may have been mere blind chance, it may have been one last cunning effort on the part of the genie, for by some means the book came open at a certain place in the middle. Suddenly the brown case fell to the carpet with a thud.

In spite of the trolls besieging him, the Sailor crept back to his bed with the book in his hands. What wonderful, wonderful worlds were these! And he was little more than twenty-eight. And the sun of Brinkworth Street had entered his chamber to tell him that this was a gorgeous morning of midsummer.

The battle was not over yet, however. Auntie and Mr. Thompson in the hour of their necessity had summoned to their aid the Old Man and Cora Dobbs. It was now all hell let loose.

"Chuck it, ducky." It was Cora's voice now. "You are not a man, you know, and never will be. You are no use, anyway. Get out of your little bed, now, and cut off the gas at the meter."

Time went on, but he made no attempt to reckon how much of it. He was too fiercely occupied in fighting the damned. Once or twice it seemed that they must surely down him. Their insane laughter hovered round his pillow continually, even in the broad light of a very glorious day. Sooner or later, he feared, there could only be one end to it all. John Milton or no John Milton, they almost had him out of bed again, when Mr. Paley came quite unexpectedly into the room.

"Mr. Pridmore, sir, has called. Shall I ask him up?"

Klondyke, however, had come up without waiting to be invited.

"Mary told me you were a bit below the weather," he said, "so I thought I'd come and see you. What's the matter?"

The Sailor could not answer the question. He could only gaze with wild eyes at his friend.

"You've been working too hard, I expect," said Klondyke, looking at him shrewdly. "Overdriving the buzz-box, my boy, with this new book that Ted Ambrose thinks is going to be great. You'll have to have rest and a change."

Klondyke perched on the edge of the bed, as if it had been Sailor's bunk in the half-deck of the Margaret Carey.

"Mary said you talked of going away for a bit, and she thought you might like me to come with you. Now what do you say to a little trip as far as Frisco, for the sake of old times? You can put me down there. I'm just beginning to feel, after a month here, that I shall be none the worse for another trek to Nowhere and back. And then you can come home by the next boat and finish your job, or go on a bit further round the coast, if you fancy it. What do you say, old friend?"

The Sailor, supine in his bed, was unable to say anything. But the trolls had no use for Klondyke. Hissing and snarling they had flown already to distant corners of the room.

"Shall we fix that? I'll go now to Cockspur Street and see if I can book a couple of saloon berths for tomorrow – there's a boat for Frisco most Wednesdays, and you are not up to roughing it at present. Besides, there's no reason why you should. Now, Sailor, what do you say?"

In spite of all the trolls there were in the universe, Klondyke was still Klondyke, it seemed. Perhaps he alone could have conquered them.

"That fixes it," he said. "Just get your gear together. You won't want much. And mine's ready any time. I'll go along at once, and come back and report."

Two minutes later, Klondyke was away on his errand, only too happy at the prospect of being in harness again.

For the time being, the trolls were overthrown. The battle was not yet won, but a staunch friend had given the Sailor new fighting power. He was by no means his own man; he felt he never could be again; all the same, when Klondyke returned about an hour later with the news that he had been able to secure two berths for the following day, Henry Harper was dressed, he was bathed and shaved, he was clothed in his right mind more or less.

XIX

On the following night, the Sailor put once more to sea. But it was very different faring from any he had known before. A craft of this kind was another new world to him. Indeed, so little did it resemble the Margaret Carey, that it was hard to realize at first that he was once more ocean bound. Even the tang of salt in the air and the wash of the waves against the sides of the great ship were scarcely enough to assure him that he was again afloat.

It was the presence of Klondyke which really convinced him.

"I never thought we should come to this," said his friend as they lingered in boiled shirts over an excellent dinner and a band the second day out. "It's better than having to turn out on deck at eight bells with your oilskins soaked and the nose of the Horn in front of you. You think so, Sailor, I know."

Henry Harper confessed that he did.

"How you stuck it all those years, I can't think," said Klondyke. "How any chap sticks it who doesn't really take to the sea passes me. But you were always a nailer for keeping on keeping on."

The case might be even as Klondyke said, but the Sailor had about reached his limit.

Klondyke himself, who was not a close observer, was struck by the change. He couldn't quite make him out. In his peculiar way, he had a great regard for the Sailor. He considered him to be a white man all through; and knowing so much of the facts of his life, he felt his grit was quite extraordinary. But now it had begun to seem that this gallant fighter was losing tenacity. There was something about him which suggested a boxer who has been knocked to the boards, who is trying to rise before he is counted out and sickly realizes that he can't.

What had happened? It was clear that he had had an awful facer. How had he come by it? Klondyke belonged to a type which strictly preferred its own business to that of anyone else, but it was impossible not to ask these questions, knowing as much of Henry Harper as he did.

Was Mary the cause? Had the blow been dealt by her? Somehow, he did not think that could be the case. And yet there was a doubt in his mind. He knew, at least, that Mary was fearfully upset. It was she who had come to him with a particular look in her eyes and had proposed a voyage for the Sailor on the plea that he had been working too hard. That certainly did not suggest any unkindness on her part. All the same, he knew that his family strongly disapproved of her intimacy with Henry Harper.

Putting two and two together, he was half inclined to believe that the Sailor had proposed to Mary, and that against her own wish she had refused him. But even that hypothesis did not account for the morbid and rudderless state he was in now.

Nevertheless, the Sailor had still a little fight left in him. About the third or fourth day out, he had begun to make an effort to pull himself together, and then it became clear that the voyage was doing him good. In a week he was a new man. He was still deeply mysterious, he was not keen and alert as he used to be, but to the unsubtle mind of Klondyke that implied a case of overwork.

Indeed, as far as he was concerned, that must always be the primary fact in regard to the Sailor. How the chap must have sapped in the nine years since last they had put to sea. It was almost incredible that a man who had made a reputation with his pen, who in speech and bearing could pass muster anywhere, should have been picked out of the gutter unable to write his own name, and set aboard the Margaret Carey.

Yes, this chap had enormous fighting power. There was not one man in a million who could have overcome such a start as that. It would be a tragic pity if he went under just as he was coming into his own.

When they reached Frisco the Sailor was so much more himself that Klondyke, who at one time had been disinclined to leave him, felt that now he might do so without any fear for his safety. In every way he seemed very much better. He was brighter, less silent. There was still a mysterious something about him which he could not account for, but he felt the worst was past and that there was no reason why Henry Harper should not go home alone.

Therefore, when they came to Frisco, Klondyke carried out his plan of trekking to nowhere and back, where boiled shirts would cease to trouble him, and where, with a rifle and a few cartridges, and one or two odds and ends in a makeshift carry-all which had accompanied him to the uttermost places of the earth, he would really feel that he was alive. He invited the Sailor to come with him, yet he knew that such a mode of life was not for Henry Harper. And the Sailor knew that, too. For one thing, he would be wasting precious time he could not afford to lose; again, now that fighting power was coming back to him, he must run his rede, must prepare to outface destiny.

Still, in taking leave of his friend, he was trying himself beyond his present strength.

The fact struck him with cruel force at the moment of parting on the waterfront at Frisco. Klondyke, wearing a fur cap the replica of one that would ever be the magic possession of Henry Harper, was on the point of going his way, and the Sailor had booked a return passage to Liverpool. It came upon him as they said good-by that it was more than he could bear.

"You'll win out," were the last words spoken in the familiar way. "You've not got so far along the course to be downed in the straight. Keep on keeping on, and you'll get through."

That was their farewell. But as soon as the Sailor was alone, the awaiting trolls were on him. He was in better shape now than in those hours in Brinkworth Street, but the conflict was grim. Every ounce of will was needed.

He went aboard feeling dazed. Even yet he had not grasped the worst. He did not know until the next day that England and Brinkworth Street were not yet possible, and that perhaps they never would be. Therefore, when they touched at the port of Boston he changed ship and put about, having suddenly determined to make the grand tour as a saloon passenger.

He was well off for money. Popularity had come to him as well as technical success. He could afford to sail round the world first class. And having reached this wise decision, he began in earnest to fight destiny.

He had made a pledge that he would not write to Mary, also, if his will endured, he would never see her again. It seemed the only course after that last failure.

John Milton was with him, also the Bible and Shakespeare and Shelton's "Don Quixote" and Boswell's "Life of Johnson," and a translation of Montaigne. Moreover, he had the Iliad and the Odyssey in English, also a Greek Lexicon. With the aid of this, he spent many an hour in quarrying painfully, but with a certain amount of success, in the original. This royal company did much to hold the trolls at bay. But in the evening they would hover round the lamp in the saloon; and during the night, when he awoke to the wash of the sea, expecting to hear eight bells struck and half wishing he was dead in consequence, because he would have to tumble out of his bunk and ascend shivering to the deck of the Margaret Carey, then was a time for the foe. But with John Milton and a greater than John by his elbow, and with Aladdin's wonderful lamp still burning fitfully through the night, although of late the genie had apparently forgotten to trim it, the demons for all their hissing and snarling were never really able to fasten their fangs upon him as they had done that morning in Brinkworth Street.

Weeks went by. He saw strange sights and many familiar ones, he touched at some unknown and some half remembered ports, he watched the sun gild many majestic cities. Once again he saw on the starboard bow the trees of the Island of San Pedro. Once again he saw the sharks with their dead-white bellies and heard their continual plop-plop in the water. Once again he heard the Old Man come up the cabin stairs. This time the heavens did not open, perhaps for the reason that there was no heaven to open for Henry Harper now.

About the third day out from Auckland on the homeward tack, he put forth a great effort to come to grips with "A Master Mariner," Book Three. But after a week of futile struggling he discovered that Aladdin's lamp was extinguished altogether.

The knowledge was bitter, but it must be accepted. Hope was the magic fuel with which the lamp was fed. If that priceless stuff should fail, the lamp could burn no more. Whatever he did now it seemed as clear as the glorious sun of the Antipodes that the mariner would never come into port.

Several times he changed ship. Mind and will steadily developed, but he was never captain of his soul. The demons of the past no longer besieged him, but Book Three was still becalmed. The hour was not yet in which he could return.

Months went by, but the future remained an abyss.

In the end, Ulysses came back to the shores of his native Ithaca for a prosaic but sufficient reason. It was merely that he was in need of money. After eleven months of wandering on the face of the waters, the liberal store he carried had almost disappeared. Quite suddenly one night, in the Mediterranean, he took the decision to return to London.

XX

The Sailor knew as soon as he stepped on the platform at Charing Cross that he had no wish to see again that city which had treated him with such unkindness. He left his gear in the station cloak room, and then by the time he had gone a few yards he regretted bitterly that he had ever come back at all. The mere sight of the omnibuses, of the names on the hoardings, of the grotesquely miscellaneous throngs in the Strand, told him that eleven months of ceaseless wandering had done nothing, or at the best very little, to heal the wound he bore.

These streets brought an ache that, steel his will as he might, he could hardly bear. There to the right was the National Gallery. It was on just such a morning as this that she had led him to the Turners. Farther along were Pall Mall and Edward Ambrose.

Five minutes he stood on the curb at the top of Northumberland Avenue, trying to decide whether he should cross Trafalgar Square. Once more the old sense of disintegration was upon him. Once more he was asking himself what he ought to do.

Eleven months had passed, but things were as they were. In that time not a line had been added to the work he was trying to do. Yet he felt that his first duty was to go to see Edward Ambrose. Let him go now. It was no use shirking it. But a curious instinct was holding him back. It was illogical, he knew, but every moment that he stood there seemed to make the task more difficult.

In a state of irresolution he crossed the road as far as an island in the middle. The sense of familiarity was growing at every step. Within a very few yards was Spring Gardens. He could see two doors up the street the brass plate of Messrs. Mortimer mocking him through a weird substitute for the light of day.

In spite of all the months that had passed, the sight of that brass plate was like a knife in his body. He turned from the island to dash across a very dangerous road, and came within an ace of the death that would have been so welcome. A taxi avoided him by an almost miraculous swerve, for which, when he realized it, he did not thank the driver.

All at sea he crossed the Square and entered Pall Mall. In the process of time he came to the home of Brown's Magazine. Edward Ambrose gave him a welcome that nearly brought tears to his eyes.

"My dear boy!" he said. "Not one word in all these months! Anyhow you have come back to us."

It was impossible to doubt the friendship and the affection of this greeting. The Sailor felt a pang of shame. As a fact, he had been too modest to expect such loyalty.

"I'm … I'm sorry."

"You had no right to forget your friends," said Edward Ambrose, a little resentfully. He knew the workings of this childishly open mind, and it hurt him that a sincere emotion should have been underrated.

"Yes," said the Sailor queerly. "It was rotten."

"You are looking splendidly brown and well," said Edward Ambrose as soon as it seemed the part of wisdom to speak. "You don't mean to say that Dick Smith has been sailing the high seas all these long months?"

"Not Dick Smith. Ulysses."

Ambrose gave a little start of pure pleasure.

"Then," he said, "a master mariner has really come into port?"

"No." He stifled a groan. "And never will, I'm thinking. That poor sailor man is still becalmed east by west of Nowhere, and never a sign of land on either bow."

"But you must put it through somehow. Tell me … is there anything I can do to help you?"

The Sailor shook his head miserably.

"I can't accept that as final," said Edward Ambrose. "It's – it's – I hesitate to say what it may be if only you carry it out as you have conceived it. If you don't do that I some how feel the high gods will never forgive you … or me."

If anything could have rekindled Aladdin's lamp in the Sailor's soul it would have been the enthusiasm of this friend. But it was not to be; the trolls had him captive.

"I'm sorry," he said gently, knowing the stab he dealt. "It is no fault of yours. It's you that's made me all I am … and if any man could have helped me here you would have been that man. But I'm just a broken mariner. It's no use mincing it – I'm done."

The stark simplicity of the confession made Edward Ambrose gasp. He could say nothing. In the honest eyes was a look of consternation.

"A mariner has got to have a star to work by. Even old Ulysses had to have that. But there's not one for Henry Harper in all the firmament." He fell into a sudden, odd, and queer kind of rage. "It's a black shame. If only I'd had a fair chance I'd have put this thing through. You might say" – the harsh laugh jarred worse than the baffled anger – "I'm a chap who has been handicapped out of the race. However…" The Sailor became silent.

Ambrose felt himself to be shaken. The impotent fury of this elemental soul was something beyond his experience. He hardened his heart. It must be his task to anchor this derelict adrift in uncharted seas until such time as help could come to him.

"Henry," he said suddenly, "does Mary Pridmore know you have returned?"

"No."

Edward Ambrose mustered his courage.

"If you don't bring the mariner into port it will be a heavy blow for her."

"What has it to do with her?" was the almost savage reply.

"She believes in you."

"Why should she?" There was almost a note of menace.

"She is your friend. We are both your friends."

The quiet tone somehow prevailed.

"Of course," he said queerly, "you are both my friends. And I'm not worthy of either."

"Suppose we leave her to be the judge of that."

The Sailor shook his head.

"She can't judge anything until … until I've told her … about Cora."

"She has not been told?" Ambrose spoke casually, impassively. Somehow he had allowed himself to guess that the Sailor had told her, and that she had sent him away. Why he should have come to that rather fantastic conclusion he didn't know, except that she had not had a line from Henry Harper in eleven months. But he saw at once that he was wrong.

He felt that he must use great care. The ice was even thinner than he had suspected. Moreover an acute perception told him that nothing would be easier than for ill informed well-meaningness to commit a tragic blunder.

"You don't mean to say you thought I had?" The Sailor put his question oddly, disconnectedly.

"The fact is," said Edward Ambrose jesuitically, "I have never been impertinent enough to think the matter out. I know nothing beyond the fact that Mary Pridmore is very much your friend."

"There's no use in saying that when I can never be hers."

"Ah, there I don't agree," said Edward Ambrose calmly.

"Why not look the facts in the face?"

"Yes, why not?"

"Friendship between us is impossible. That's why I went away. We … we played it up too high. Friendship between a man and a woman is no use … at least not to her and me … although…"

"I'm not talking merely of friendship," said Edward Ambrose, very deliberately. "I'm talking of something else."

So charged with meaning were the words that the Sailor recoiled as if he had received a blow.

"What … what are you saying!" he cried with a sudden blind rage in his face.

BOOK V

FULFILLMENT

I

"Why do you taunt me?" cried the Sailor after a pause hard to endure.

"I offer neither reason nor excuse for the words I have used," said Edward Ambrose calmly. "I can only say that she is more than your friend. You must remember that you have been away eleven months. In the meantime water still continues to flow under London Bridge."

"I don't follow you."

"Yes, of course – one assumes too much. One forgets that you have been away so long and that apparently you have not yet seen Mortimer."