PART FOUR THE OPEN BOAT

1

Bellair was athirst. The fact that he had taken a deep drink less than a half-hour before, did not prevail altogether against it. In the very presence of Stackhouse there was a psychological intensity of thirst. The master sat hunched and obscene in the stern of the boat, patting the wet folds of his shirt—a pure desire-body, afraid of death, afraid of thirst, afraid of the fear of thirst and death. Picturesqueness and personality were gone from him; romance and the strange culture of the man, for the eyes of Bellair; the old wonder, too, which the seas and the islands of the seas had given him. Bellair could not forget the ankles, the moving of those bare masses up and down, as Stackhouse had clung at the same time to the small boat and the gunwale of the Jade. What a poison to past tales—this present passion and method of self-salvation. He was less than a beast, in retaining the effigy of a man.

Bellair turned to Fleury. Like swift pleasant rays in the dark, the last scenes of the main-deck recurred. Again he marvelled at the falsity of his first judgments, by which he had formerly set so much, and so complacently. It had seemed a fat face to him at first, a face out of true with the world, the face of an easy man who placates things as they are, because he was not trained to see the evil of them and give them fight. All that was remembered with difficulty, even for this moment of contrast. It would not come again. Fleury had stood up in the crisis, a man to tie to. He would never be the same again in look or action or intonation; as Stackhouse could never be the same. Fleury had risen and put on a princely dimension; the other had lost even that uncertain admirableness of gross animalism.

The preacher was leaning forward toward the knees of the woman, talking to the babe. Bellair imagined its eyes wide-open and sober; certainly it was still. The mother’s face was partly turned away. Fleury said:

“He is having his adventures. He will be a great man. He will have the world at his finger-tips, when he is as old as we are—and then his real work will begin. For when we know enough of the world, we turn to God.”

The note of the preacher in this did not embarrass Bellair, as it would have done before the Jade’s sinking.

“He will be a great power,” Fleury went on, for the heart of the mother. “These things which for him pass unconsciously, will form him nevertheless. They will do their work within; and when he is grown he will know what to do and say.”

“How do you know?” the mother asked.

“Chiefly because I believe in you,” he answered.

“I want him to live,” she said.

“We want that, too,” said Fleury.

Bellair felt himself nodding in the dark.

“If he is to be a great man, he will have to live through his first—at least, through this adventure.”

The meaning came very pure to Bellair. It had to do with crackers and water for the nourishment of the child. So strong and sure was her own fortitude that she did not need to say she was thinking only of food and drink for him. It meant to Bellair, “If I cannot nurse him, he will die.”

He regarded the length and beam of the small boat. It was not more than eighteen feet long—and only the Polar seas could be emptier than this vast southern ocean. The nights would be more easily endured, but the days, one long burning. Still it would not be torrid heat; they were too far south for that. The thought of storm, he kept in the background of his mind. They all did. Roughly estimated, there was food and water enough for them to live without great agony for a week, possibly for a day or two over, but Stackhouse was not a part of this consideration. He could not live a week without an abnormal consumption of water....

Fleury was talking about the stars. They would see Venus before dawn, he said; the great one in their meridian now was Jupiter. “If we had a marine-glass, we would be able to see his moons.... That,” he pointed to the brightest of the fixed stars, a splendid yellow gleam in the east, “that is Canopus, never seen north of the Gulf States at Home. It’s so mighty that our little earth would turn molten in ten seconds if it came as near as our sun.”

Bellair leaned toward him listening. The preacher pointed out the Southern Cross, and Alpha Centauri, almost the nearest of the sun’s neighbours.

Their thoughts groped naturally to such things. In the full realisation of their helplessness, they looked up. The background was a deep fleckless purple. Bellair hadn’t known the great stars of the northern skies, much less these splendid strangers. The brimming closeness of the dark sea harrowed the landsman’s heart of him; and there was something as great or greater than the actual terror of ultimate submerging. It was the fear of the fear; the same that causes men to leap from high places through the very horror of the thought of leaping. The water lapped the clinkered sides of the small boat. He touched it. His flesh took from the coolness something that numbed the pervading alarm; a message which the wet hand sensed, but the brain could not interpret. The presence of the others forward sustained him; Stackhouse in the stern was the downpull; thus Bellair was in the balance.

It was yet far from dawn; certainly no lighter, but Bellair could see better. The woman was looking away. He knew that he would see her so, until the last day of her life—that profile of serene control, that calm, far-seeing gaze.... What gave her this quiet power?... Already the thoughts of the three were intimate matters to all. It seemed very natural now to ask Fleury what gave the woman such strength.

“It’s the sense that all is well, in spite of this physical estrangement from the world,” the preacher said. “Bellair, it’s the sense that nothing matters but the soul. It’s not belief; it’s knowing. She has lost the sense of self. She is through talking. It is finished with her. We talk, because it is not finished in us—but it is being accomplished. We talk because we want that peace; when it comes we will not talk, but live it. It is exactly opposite to desire; you can see that——”

Yes, Bellair could see that. He had but to turn back in his seat to confront Stackhouse wringing his heavy twitching hands and begging for water, begging like a leper, now that a face turned to him—the most frightful picture of the work of desire and the fear of desire, that the world or the underworld could furnish. Less than two hours before he had drunk a quart and wasted a pint in his greed; and behind Bellair was the silent woman and Fleury, thinking of others, full of the good of the world.... In the worldliness that came to him from Stackhouse, the intimacy of the matter they had just talked about seemed startling.

“One can’t help but notice what you get from somewhere—and what the woman has,” Bellair added.

They were in the grey mystery of dawn—alone, for they had drifted, and the sailors in the other boat had begun to row at once. Stackhouse was lifted a little, brought nearer, possibly by the tension, which they all came to know so well—the tension of that grey hour, before the day reveals the sea.

“It was my ship,” he whimpered. “It was my hamber—McArliss was mine and the service——”

“You’d have had them all yet, but you amused yourself watching poor McArliss fall into the drink. You would have had it all—just the same this morning—for he would never have hit the reef on duty——”

It was Bellair who spoke, and the thing had suddenly appeared very clear to him. Stackhouse did not falter from the present, his huge head darting east and west to stare through the whitening film.

“It was my hamber. There is room here at my feet. It was little, yet meant so much. I should not have troubled you——”

The lack of it seemed suddenly to hurt him even more poignantly.

“You will all go to hell with your talk of beace,” he declared, looking between them but at no pair of eyes. “I will go first, what with the drink dying out, but you will not be long. There is hell for me, but for all alike. You may live days—but the longer, the more hell. And you will all come at last—to the long deep drink of the brine——”

“Oh, come now, Stackhouse,” said Bellair. “It may not turn out so badly. You’ve had luck before. You’ve talked much to me of luck—and deaths of others. If it’s your turn—face it as your innumerable friends faced it.”

The man was undone before them. The flesh of his jaws stood out, as if pulled by invisible fingers. His heavy lips rubbed together, so that they turned from the sight of them.

“There was room in the boat for that basket of rum,” he called out insanely. “It was all to me. There is no talk of God for me—rum was all I had!... I would have been so quiet. It would have been here at my feet, but for that fool who talks of God, and can never know the thirst of men.”

Fleury turned to him, his face deeply troubled. It occurred to Bellair that there was something to what Stackhouse said. Fleury, in kicking back the hamper, had kept the devil of Stackhouse from entering the boat, and Stackhouse served no other.... More and more it was twisting his brain, as young alligators twist at a carcass.

“I would have had it here between my knees. And I would have had the little bottle from the cabin—the last that boots you to sleep——”

“And so that is what you sent her back for—sent her to her death——”

“You lie. She was held here—trying to get the hamber to me. There would have been time. She would have gone and come. She would have been here now——”

Bellair and Fleury glanced at each other.

“I am rotted with drink—and will drink the brine first, but you will follow me. You will bring it up with your hands and drink—and drink——”

He was looking at Fleury now. The intensity of thirst in the spectacle of him—the presence of that vast galvanism of thirst—was like a burning sun in their throats. The baby cried, and the mother drew him shudderingly to her breast. Fleury swallowed hard, his face haggard and drawn in the daybreak. He went over and took his seat before the monster. Bellair was tempted to ask him to be easy, but there was no need. Fleury turned and drew a cup of water and handed it to the other. Bellair’s jaws ached cruelly from the drain of empty glands.

“We should pity you, Stackhouse,” he said, “but we are not facing death now. You fill the boat with thirst—you fill the sea—with your thinking drink and talking drink—until you bring a cry of thirst to the little child. It’s as if we had gone sixty hours—instead of six——”

He talked on for the sake of the woman. Stackhouse drank and grew silent. Bellair felt better and braver—even though the full light revealed nothing but empty sea and heavenly sky.

2

Bellair surveyed his world as the dawn came up.... Thirst and fasting; possibly, the end.... The peculiar part of his open boat contemplations, no two were alike. Physical denial hurried him from one plane to another from which he regarded his world—his two worlds, for Stackhouse behind was one, and his friends forward, another; the one drawing his love, courage and finest ideals; the other, repression of self, lest he wear himself out in hatred. They were not talkers in front. He had not seen quite the entire fulfilment of Fleury’s meaning about talking until late moments. The Faraway Woman invariably said little; the child was the silentest of all; Fleury had met this demon and put it away. Stackhouse had talked and talked, and to the pictures he made with words, he belonged not at all, but to unspeakable things. Bellair remembered his own talk to Filbrick. It made him writhe. He had become crossed and complicated and ineffective that day. He had not talked in the straight line of heart and brain. He saw that a man who talks that which he is not, is less than nothing, as Stackhouse was less than nothing.

“How far are we from anywhere, Bellair?” Fleury asked.

“We weren’t supposed to strike land before Chatham or Bounty Island—two days’ sail this side of New Zealand, as I understand it. We lost land six—a week ago to-day—Madre de Dios, McArliss called it—off the west Coast of South America. With good wind McArliss planned to sight the Islands off New Zealand in three weeks. We had a week’s good sailing until yesterday—so we are a fortnight, as the Jade reckoned, from—your home.”

Bellair turned to the woman. She did not speak.

“Do you suppose we struck coral?” Fleury asked.

The subject seemed very hopeless. “I saw the charts in McArliss’ cabin. No reefs were charted according to our passage. We may have been off our course. But I do not understand. The mate took our bearings yesterday noon. I do not know what he reported to the Captain——”

“It may have been a sunken wreck that we struck,” said Fleury.

Bellair had thought of that. He turned to Stackhouse, who might have had something to say, but the other stared at them balefully—at their faces, not meeting their eyes. Either he had not followed their words, or chose to take no part.

“If we are in the course of any ships at all, it would be of one passing our route, from the Horn to the Islands,” Fleury added. “I doubt if it would do us any good to row. We must not tax our strength. If we are off our course, we cannot tell whether it is to the north or south, so nothing is positively to be gained. It’s a question of hands up. The other boat set out for somewhere at once. If they find ship they will tell the story——”

It appeared a useless recounting of obvious things. Bellair had thought this out bit by bit several times without finding the least substance to tie to. Fleury’s addition merely accentuated the bleakness of their position.

“Still,” the preacher added, “if there is nothing for us to do in the way of struggle—the rest is simplified. We may be thoroughly tested, but I feel a strange confidence of our ultimate delivery. I thought of it before we had parted from the Jade. It came to me again in the night. I believe it now. We do not belong to the deep—not all of us.”

Bellair wondered at the strength which came from this. He placed his trust upon this man, as one having familiarity with a source which he personally did not draw from. The preacher’s words were designed to cheer the woman, but he could not let them pass as merely for that. Fleury had a conviction, or he would not have spoken so.

The air grew cooler during the long closing of that first day. Bellair thought of his overcoat which lay in a roll under the narrow planking forward where the woman sat. The bundle of New York papers dropped out, as he drew the garment forth. He opened one of the papers laughingly.... The headlines were like voices from another world. The abyss between the real and the unreal yawned before his eyes now in the open boat. New York seemed to be fighting in prints for things so little and unavailing. So little ago, he, Bellair, had moved among them, as among things that counted. Now what was real was the woman’s courage and the substance of Fleury’s faith, and the hope that came from the immensity. The deep contrasts of life held Bellair.

As the message of the press came up to his eyes, he sunk into queer apathy, believed himself dreaming when he read his own name. He was not startled; even that was not his, but an invention like the clicking of a watch, which marks off an illusion of the illusion time.... An afternoon paper, dated the second day after his departure from New York; a brief statement of his departure with certain funds of Lot & Company; one item of a thousand dollars, several others suspected missing.... There was a follow story in the next day’s issue: Bellair as yet unfound, was believed to have gone to the Cobalt; Bessie Brealt, a professional singer, had passed an hour or two with the missing man on the eve of his flight. He had spent money recklessly.... This was all.

He dumped the papers overside, and was sorry afterward; still, there was not physical energy in him to explain, nor comprehension in the other two for such details. Lot & Company had sacrificed him to ward off disclosures he might make. Possibly Attorney Jackson had suggested the step. It was very clear. Even if the station-porter had not mailed his letter, they would have found his order of release in the safe. It was a part of the other world—proper business from Lot & Company’s point of view. He was marked a thief in his small circle. He seemed to see the face of the boarding-house woman as she heard the news. She would search her house.... And Bessie Brealt.... The tempter, notoriety, was responsible for her small, mean part. It wasn’t an accident. She must have looked at his card and told, for the reporters would not have come to her.... It began to hurt him, mainly because of the thoughts and dreams of helping her, which had come to him since, especially here in the open boat. She had fallen into one of the little tricks of New York—to break into print at any cost. There wasn’t much reality in the rest, nor much chance of his needing New York again.

... Three and a child in a small boat. The pale moon-crescent, her bow to the sinking sun, appeared higher in the west. What a cosmic intervention—since last night when he had seen her first arc and the earth-shine from the deck of the Jade! And what a supper he had gone down to afterward! There was wrench in that—an age since then.... No one had spoken for a long time. Bellair wondered if the man and woman thought of food as he did.

Three and a child in the empty sea, and the great suns of night were coming forth in the deepening dusk. They were strangers, but more real than the sea. This was not like the earth at all; and yet the Jade had been of the earth. Her fabric had contained the bond that held from port to port. Stars and sea—one more real than the other, and different, too, for there was horror in looking down, but hope in looking up. Something in his breast answered the universality—but quailed before the deep.

... Just now Bellair, lifting his overcoat to draw it closer around him, sensed its unaccustomed weight on the left. His hand sped thither, touched the full bottle of Bourbon whiskey purchased in Savannah. His hand remained with it a moment. A shudder passed through the small boat from Stackhouse, who had come to from another hideous sleep.

3

Bellair stared into the sea. No one had spoken for many minutes. It was close to noon. Though all that had to do with memory since the sinking of the Jade was treacherous, according to his recounting, it was but the second day; that is, the mother-ship had gone down in the heart of night before last.... Bellair had given away to temptation, when he let his eyes sink into the depths. He had fought it for hours, and knew that nothing good would come of it, but there was so much to fight, he had not the further strength for this.

The sea was calm on the surface, but there appeared a movement below, so vast and unhurried, that it was like some planetary function. There seemed a draw of the depths southward, an under-movement toward the Pole. At times a cloud of purple would rise from far beneath and shut off his peering, like the movement of blueing in a laundry-tub before it is well-diffused. It came to him that this was but a denser cloud-land—an ocean of condensed clouds, moved not by winds alone, but the stirring of the earth’s mysterious inner attractions, which in their turn were determined by the sun and moon and stars. It was all orderly, but he, Bellair, was out of order. And such a little thing—a quart of cool water, and any one of the thousands of meals he had thoughtlessly, gratelessly bought and paid for—thousands consumed with a book at hand, or a paper to keep his mind off the perfunctory routine of feeding himself. Hundreds of meals he had taken, because it was the hour, and a cigar was more pleasurable afterward; meals in his room—paper packages of food, pails of ice, chilled bottles with a mist forming on them; saloon lunches, plates of colored sausages, creamy-rose slices of ham, tailored radishes and herring pickled in onions.... There was not a fish in the sea, not a movement but the blueing, and that slide of the under-ocean river to the Pole.

Yet there was something in there—an end to this disorder. It would take all he had left—the good air. It was like a knife or a gun or a poison-pill.... The movement below was so strong that it would grip him, shut him from the air, and leave him slithering along toward the Pole, sometimes sinking sideways, and then rising, forever seeking his balance ... not forever. He pictured himself in a school of herring, thousands of bright lidless eyes, thousands of bubbles, like eyes, from their mouths opening and shutting—he slithering sideways—his hands moving in the tugs and pressures. They would cease to dart from his movements, understanding them as the ground-birds know the wind in the grass. Lips and eye-lids and nostrils—they would have food. Food was the great event of the day to all things—except men. Men ate by the clock, ate to smoke, ate to soften the hearts of women ... yet after all food was food.... Or one big fish.... Or two fighting for him.... Or one finding him lying still, a slow fanning of fins against the purple pressures, watching to be sure—then the strike.... Once he had examined a minnow after the strike of a bass.... Where would he be in that strike—or in that herring school-room—not that slithering sideways thing—but he? Would he be watching humorously, or back in the cage with Mr. Sproxley, or in Bessie’s bedroom? Was it all a myth about that other he? It seemed a myth with his stomach sinking, tightening like a dripping rag between a pair of mighty elbows. In the centre of the rag was a compressed cork, and in the cork, a screw was twisting.

Cork—that made him think of the whiskey. He turned from the water to the coat under the seat, his eyes blinking. His bare foot moved painfully to the coat and along the breast to the pocket, to the hard hump of the bottle.

His eyes suddenly filled with the figure of Stackhouse, whose attitudes were an endless series of death tableaus, as his stories had also pictured. His face had broken out into more beard, his eyes glazed, body shapeless, like clothing stuffed with hair. His hands held the primal significance of birth and death. They lay upon his limbs, the thumbs drawn into the palms, the first and little fingers of each pointing straight down. Bellair thought of how death contracts the thumb, and how infants come with their thumbs in-drawn.

Also his mind was played upon by two distinct series of emotions—Stackhouse representing one set; Fleury and the Faraway Woman signifying the other. He swung from power to power. Then his concern and fascination for Stackhouse changed from loathing and the visible tragedy, to a queer passage of conjecture regarding the worldwide processes which had nourished that huge body to its fall. In fact, Bellair’s favourite restaurants returned to mind like a pageant; the little inns on the Sound that he used to go summer Saturday afternoons; the one place in Staten where there were corn-cakes and a view of the shipping; the myriad eating and drinking places of New York; and from them all, one shop of chop and chicken-broils where the miracles were done on wood-embers, so that even the smoke that filled the place was seasoned nutriment.

“They certainly knew how to buy,” he muttered aloud.

It was a kind of moan, and he added quickly: “I beg your pardon.”

Fleury and the woman regarded him with silent kindness.

“I was just thinking of a man I knew—a buyer of canned goods,” he explained hastily. “The bargains in canned-goods he had a way of pulling off! There wasn’t a man in New York who could bring in lines of stuff at the figure he copped—a little runt of a man named Blath, who knew his business——”

Fleury leaned back as if reaching for support, his quiet smile not a little tender. His two browned hands came forward to Bellair’s knees, and he said with a devoted smile:

“I’ll not forget that in a hurry.... Blath, you say his name was?”

Bellair knew well that he had not kept his mental pictures from Fleury’s mind. His entire consciousness had been in steam and woodsmoke having to do with broiling meat. The three were worn thin, worn to fine receptivity, and caught one-another’s thought without effort of many words.... Though he did not turn, a shock of pity came to him now for the master. He had meant to save the opening of the whiskey for the next dawn, vaguely thinking that if they should find the sea empty once more, there would be that false strength to fall back upon. Stackhouse could not live more than a day or two longer. He was torn by devils, his only surcease being the snap of consciousness from time to time. The whiskey had been upon Bellair’s mind like a curse. He wanted its force for himself, but never really meant to use it, had not even given the temptation leeway. His lot was cast with the forward forces; they would not have touched the contents of his bottle. This did not change the desire, however.

4

The third day. Bellair was light-headed from the scarcity of crackers. Yesterday had been a mingled thirst and hunger day, but this was characterised by hunger incessant. To-morrow he anticipated with dread another thirst horror, and after that, no hunger at all, but mighty agony that knew but the one word, Water. The keen airs of night and morning, and the sterilised burning of the noons, constantly fanned and stimulated the natural demands of the body.... He had forgotten the newspapers. Bessie’s face came before him—something of her deep heart-touching tones which changed him.

“There must be a great woman there—a great fine woman—like this one.”

He did not turn. It may have been the first concession from his every-day faculties of this woman’s actual beauty. He had already granted this deeper within, where the understandings of men are wiser, but harder to get at. Certain hours had shown him the clear quality of saints and martyrs; and he had seen in pure life-equation that the child was worth his life or Fleury’s. He would have given his, as most white men would, but it was different to see the value and rightness of it....

There was now an unspeakable need in the stern. He drew the bottle from the overcoat-pocket at his feet, without turning. Fleury and the woman watched him. He cut the small wires with his knife, tore off the wafer, half-expectant of some sound from behind.... The day was ending. The young moon newly visible in the dusk began its curve into the west from a higher point in the sky....

There was a screw in Bellair’s knife. It sank noiselessly into the cork, but the first creak of the stopper against the glass brought the jolt. They all felt it—as if the great body had fallen from a dream.

Stackhouse was staring at the thing in Bellair’s hands, his tongue visible, his face filling with light. He rubbed his eyes, the beginnings of articulation deep in his throat. He was trying to make himself believe it was not a vision. That harrowed them. A pirate would have pitied him—reptile desire imaged not in the face alone, but in the hands and all. Bellair poured a big drink in a tin-cup. Fleury passed him a gill of water. Stackhouse drained the cup with a cry.

Something earth-bound slowly left his face. In contrast it grew mild and reckonable; but within an hour he was wild with pain, and dangerous for night was falling. In the light of the moon there was treachery. Bellair and Fleury sat together in the centre. The other’s bulk was great and the boat small. In becoming custodian of a bottle of whiskey, Bellair now required help. He wished it in the sea, but there was a pang of cruelty about that. The new force that animated Stackhouse had to be reckoned with. It was both cunning and destructive. There was no murder in their hearts.... Stackhouse drew his feet under him, helping them with his hands; his eyeballs turned upward from the agony of cramps in his limbs; then he sank forward on his knees. The craft of desire had turned from fighting to speech. The moon was grey upon his breast and gleamed from his eyes.

“You will listen to a man who is dying. Yes, Bellair, you will listen—who listened to me so much.... Give me drink, so I can talk——”

“It may save you—but not if you take it all at once.”

The creature winced, but his passion moved to its appointed ends. He drew forth the large brown wallet they had often seen; rubbed it in his hands, until his fingers could feel; then opened the leather band. From one receptacle he lifted a thick package of bank-notes.

“I liked you, Bellair—almost as I liked one Belding. I could have done much for you. I hate that man, for he has made my death hard——”

His face turned toward Fleury, but did not meet the preacher’s eyes.

“The Jade brought a sweet cargo to Ameriga, and Stackhouse does not bank in New York.... Bellair, I want to drink—so the talk will come——”

So absurd was the sound of cargo and banking that Bellair thought his mind had wandered again, yet he said:

“You are better. You cannot drink each hour. If this is to help you, you must be sane.”

“I have something to say of imbortance—you will help me, Bellair. It is for you.”

The faces of Fleury and the mother gave him no help. They were kind, but the thing seemed beneath them, as if they were waiting for him to come back from it.

“You have stood by that man, and not by me,” Stackhouse said hoarsely. “So that I meant to toss this in the sea at the last—this and all the papers——”

He lifted the bank-notes and showed him the collection of separately-banded documents.

“I am a rich man, and I have no heir. I had thought of you, but you turned away from me and did not continue to listen. You went to him of the breachings—but you have now what is needful for me and I will bay. I have no heir. I said that before. I dell you now. A dying man does not lie. There are papers to make you rich, for I have other fortunes. Look, I will toss it into the sea—if you do not give me that bottle——”

Bellair laughed at him.

“These are thousand dollar notes—there are fifty of them——”

Bellair turned aside for an instant. Money and papers of more money—these were very far from fanning excitement in his breast. A loaf and a jug of fresh water were real; the moon’s higher appearance each night, and the majestic plan of the night-suns, these were real. Fleury, the woman and the babe, lost in the brimming darkness of earth’s ocean—they were real. Like the stars they had to do with the mighty Conceiver of it all. They were a part of the Conception—and so they were real—but the dollars of men....

“And do you know what I will do—after I have tossed this into the sea?”

The question brought him back quickly.

“No, Stackhouse,” he answered.

“I will come for you and dake that bottle. I am big. I have strength. I will dake it—or you will kill me—and that will be the end——”

Bellair thought of that. There was a pistol in his coat. He did not want to use it. He believed Stackhouse would do as he said.

“For God’s sake, Bellair——”

“If I give it to you—oh, not for that rubbish!” he pointed to the wallet. “If I give it to you—you will die more quickly——”

“That is what I want.”

“But it is not our way——”

Stackhouse tore loose from his shirtpocket the heavy gold watch and its heavier chain, dropped the whole into one of the folds of the wallet to weight it down. “It will sink,” he said.

“To hell with it——”

“For God’s sake, Bellair!” Stackhouse moaned, his arm rising with the wallet and falling again.

At that instant Bellair thought of Bessie Brealt and her career.... He turned to Fleury and the Mother. They were regarding him with kindest concern—as if he were a loved one who could not fail to do well in any event. Then he thought of the work that Fleury might do—the preacher who had finished with talk, and was so eager to act.... And just then, the little child turned to him from the mother’s breast—a puzzled look, but calm, and a flicker of the damp upper lip, as if it would like to smile, but was not sure.

Bellair held out the whiskey. The wallet was thrust in his hands for reception of the bottle—a frenzied transaction.

They begged him to spare it for his own peace. They gave him water, but poor Stackhouse could not live with the stuff in his hands. In fifteen minutes the bottle was drained, and then the monster wept.

5

The night roved on like a night in still mountains. The young moon had sunk behind the sea. Jupiter in meridian glory seemed trying to bring his white fire to the dying red of Antares.... A dark night of stars now, since the upstart moon had left the deeper purple. Most of all, Bellair was fascinated by the great yellow gleam of Canopus. It was a dry, pure dark—no drip in that night—but a thirsty horror in the saline lapping of the ocean against the planks.

Stackhouse was headless in the shadow, his piglike breathing a part of all. Fleury, the mother and the child slept; the preacher’s head close to the knees of the woman. Bellair marked that, and that Fleury loved her. At times the preacher’s whole life seemed an effort to make her eat and drink; and as for Fleury himself it often appeared that he required no better nutriment than that of conferring food and water upon the others. As custodian, he claimed authority for his action.... Bellair thought long of Bessie. He was watching the east at last for Venus to arise ahead of the sun....

... But Bessie became blurred. He did not understand. Either his brain had another picture, or the original of the singing girl was fading.... A New York voice, no passion, but ambition, an excellent voice—and such a beautiful, girlish breast.... Bellair tried to shake this coldness from him. This was not being true. He had a faint suspicion that a man’s woman is more apt to depart from him while he is at her side than when he is away. It is because another has come, if passion for the old dies, when one is away. Alone and apart, man is more ardent, in fact, unless a new picture composes.... He thought of Davy Acton, the office boy at Lot & Company’s, that wistful, sincere face—and then Bellair gave way to the night.

This was a new sensation. It came from the hunger and thirst. He could let go. The purple immensity would then take him. A half-hour, even an hour, would pass. It was not sleep, very different from that. He was not altogether lost. A little drum-beat would come back to him from the mighty revery-space, and his heart would answer the beat. He seemed to be on the borderland of the Ultimate Secret; and invariably afterward he was amazed at what he had been—so sordid and sunken and depraved was the recent life he had known.

“But I was what the days and years seemed to want of me,” he muttered.

That was the gall of it. Days and years are betrayers; all the activities of the world are betrayers. He glimpsed the great patience of the scheme. Only man makes haste. Myriad pressures, subtle and still-voiced, tighten upon a man, bringing just the suggestion that all is not well with him. Then there are the more obvious pressures—fever, desire, the death of a man’s loves—to make him stop and look and listen. But so seldom does he relate these to the restlessness of his soul. Rather he attributes them to the general misery of life. He has been taught to do so—the false teaching.... For general misery is not the plan of life. If children could only be taught that it is all superbly balanced, the plan perfect; that not a momentary stress of suffering comes undeserved; that the burden of all suffering is to make a man change!... A sentence came so clearly to him that even his lips formed it.

“The plan of life is for joy!”

He saw the need of every hundredth man at least, arising to repeat this sentence around the world—arising from his pain and husks like the Younger Son, and returning to the joy of the Father’s House.... Something was singing in him from his thought of children.

“We’re too old,” he thought, meaning the millions of men caught in the world as he had been, “but the children could learn. They could change——”

He had turned to the bow. Fleury was a nearer shadow, sitting, head bowed forward. The Mother’s head lay back against Bellair’s coat, the child across her knees.... That faint grey light was about her. He had not noted this at first; it seemed to have come from the moment of contemplation—something like starlight, something like the earth-shine that Fleury explained. Her lips were parted, and her eyes seemed held shut, not as if she slept but as if she were thinking of something dear to her—her face wasted a little.

He saw it more clearly than the faintness of the light would suggest—and to Bellair’s breast came a sudden sense of her expectancy. It seemed she were awake, but lying back with eyes shut awaiting a lover, her face wasted a little from the burning of expectation. For a moment it was very beautiful to him. Then all was spoiled—for the personal entered. Almost before he had any volition in the matter, his mind had flashed across the interval of space between them—as if he were the one to bring that token to the parted lips.

He shook his head with impatience, and the miseries of the hour rushed home to his mind.

... Fleury was awake and they were whispering, the woman still asleep.

“The plan of the world is for joy,” Bellair said wearily. “We are all taught that it is a vale of tears—that’s the trouble—taught that we must grab what we can.”

“If we won’t learn from joy—we’ve got to take the pain,” said the preacher. “We’ve got to get out of the conception of time and space as the world sees it to catch a glimpse of the joy of the plan. We are in the midst of a superb puzzle. To those who see only the matter and not the meaning, life is an evil country, a country of dragons and monsters. But there’s a soul to it all, and man has a soul. If a man begins to use his soul to see and think with, the puzzle begins to unfold. A man’s soul isn’t of matter. It’s a pilgrim come far, far to go—very eager to get this particular journey through matter ended——”

“But why make the journey?”

“To learn evil.”

“The Younger Son wasted himself afield——”

“Was he not placed afterward above the elder in the Father’s heart?” Fleury asked. “Could he not appreciate the Father’s House better than him who had not left it? Man is greater than angels—that’s hinted at everywhere in the Scriptures. Angels are unalloyed good. The man who has mastered matter becomes a creative force. All the great stories of the world tell the same story—the wanderings of Ulysses, the tasks of Hercules. The soul’s mastery of each task and escape from each peril and illusion is an added lesson—finally the puzzle breaks open. The adventurer sees the long journey of the soul, not this little earth-crossing. He sees that his misery now is but a dip of the valley—that the long way is a steadily rising road—that the plan is for joy.”

It came home to him closer than ever before that night. His soul had tried to express itself and ordain his higher ways these many years, but he had lost his way in the world. He perceived that all men lose their way; that he had suddenly been shaken apart so he could see. It was luck in his case—the misery at Lot & Company’s, the singing of Bessie Brealt, the unparalleled contrasts here in the open boat. But why should he be shown, and not the millions of other imprisoned men? Was this a part of the great patience of the scheme again? Would something happen to each man in due season, some force in good time to help him to rise and be free?

“The man who ties himself to the pilgrim—and not the sick little chattering world creature—suddenly finds that he has but one job,” Fleury said presently. “He’s got to tell about it——”

The world suddenly smote Bellair.

“Why, men would say a man was crazy if he told the things we have thought this night,” he said, leaning forward. “Maybe we are a bit unsound. Perhaps these are illusions we are harbouring—vagaries from drying up and wasting away, similar to the vagaries of alcohol—doubtless——”

It was like waking from a dream—the horrible sounds now from the stern. Bellair heard Fleury’s voice. Turning, he saw Venus before anything else. It was the thought that he had fallen into the revery with, and had to be finished on the way out.

Under that superb vision of morning, Stackhouse was kneeling, his breast against the rail,—bringing up to his mouth great palm-fuls of brine.

6

The things that happened in the open boat on this fourth day are not altogether to be explained. A metaphysician from the East explained a similar visitation—but like many explanations of the East, the foundations of his discussion were off the ground. He did not begin with stuff that weighs-up avoirdupois. The West can weigh the moon and estimate the bulk of Antares’ occulted companion, but in cases where things cease to be weighable, our side of the world sits back with the remark, “It is well enough to hypothecate the immaterial, but what’s the good of it when you can’t see it?” Also when the East gently suggests an opinion, the West rises to declare, “Why, you people haven’t got gas or running water in your houses.”

Now occasionally there comes a time when the Western eye sees something that it can’t touch or smell exactly, and it is easier to disbelieve its own senses than to change its point of view for an Eastern one. Accordingly it says, “I was crazy with the heat,” or as Bellair was prone to explain away the visitation of this day, “The thirst and the hunger had got to me.”

There follows, without further peroration, an unheated narrative of what appeared to take place on that fourth day:

As was expected from drinking the brine, Stackhouse went mad. The look of the great creature, his very identity, changed, went out from him, and something else came in. This happens when a dog goes mad. We have had to reckon with it in our own families. If that which we knew passes, without something foreign taking its place, the result would be a mere inert mass waiting for death. The alienists have given us the word obsession to explain that which comes instead, making an obscenity and violence of that which we knew. In the olden days these Enterers were known as demons. A man named Legion was beset with them, and Another with a strong will came and, according to the story, freed Legion. That which had defiled him entered a herd of swine, the bars of which were somehow down at the time....

They had ceased to hate Stackhouse. The old Master was gone into who knows what long feeding dream? This was merely his body that they watched for an hour or two in the forenoon. In fact, Bellair had studied the departure with some detachment. He was sitting as usual in the centre of the boat, glad that the Stackhouse agony was done. There was a moment in which it appeared that death was stealing in rapidly, and another in which a new kind of life entered the body—as vandals enter to despoil a house after the tenant has moved away.

The hunched body had suddenly reached for him like a great ape. Bellair had felt the crippling force of the touch, and an almost equal force from the thought that flashed in his mind—to use the pistol.... The boat had rocked beneath them. The blackness of much blood was in Bellair’s brain. The struggle was brief. Through it all, Bellair heard the cries of the child. Just as he was ready to fail, the monster sat back, his teeth snapping in his beard—the huge hands feeling for him, as one blinded.

“Change places with me, Bellair.”

This was from Fleury—midforenoon that fourth day. Bellair obeyed because he was afraid of the pistol at hand.

“I don’t want to kill him,” he panted.

“It will not come to that,” Fleury answered.

It was then that the transfer of seats was made. Bellair relied vaguely upon the preacher’s greater strength which was not of limb and shoulder. The monster dropped to his knees to renew the fight.

“Be still,” Fleury commanded. “Be still and rest——”

Stackhouse himself would not have faltered before that voice of Fleury’s, but there was a force in it that prevailed for a moment upon the obsession. The air was full of strain.... They heard the heart in the poor body. The blue-tipped hands were upraised from the bottom of the boat—the face was toward them. Bellair and the Faraway Woman could see only the back of Fleury’s head. The strain was like a vice in the open boat.

Bellair contemplated the mystery: that this force, lower and more destructive than Stackhouse, could be managed and subdued in part by the energy of another’s will-power, when Stackhouse himself would have required brute strength.... He thought he understood what was going on, though he would likely have scouted the same had some one told him. In any event, Fleury was quieting the complicated thing before him.... They heard the heart-beats rise and sink, the hands often lifting from the bottom. The entire passage of the battle was magnified before their eyes. Hours passed. Fleury scarcely turned.

So far there is nothing to call in the Eastern metaphysicians, but the day was not done, nor the dying galvanism of the monster. The afternoon was still bright, when the great hairy head cocked itself up differently—the eyes stretching open and suddenly filled with yellow-green light, the colour of squash-pulp close to the rind, but a transparent light, that gathered the rays of the day in its expiring lucency, and held their own eyes—a lidless horror lifted from its belly. The woman must have seen the change at the same instant, for her cry blended with the voice of Bellair. As one, they understood that this was a different force for Fleury to meet—a wiser, more ancient and terrific force, from the bowels of the world of evil possibly, without relation to Stackhouse, but with a very thrilling relation to them.

The whole face had a different look. It was rising higher. The hands were braced upon the grating, pushing the body up. They were accustomed to the loosed havoc of bestiality which Stackhouse had left upon his features—but this that looked out from his eyes was knit and intent.

Fleury’s hand groped back.

“It will not answer me,” he was saying. “This is different. It will not obey me. Take my hand, Bellair.... Yes, and take hers with the other. We must drive it out.”

Weariness more than death was in the speech. He had struggled for hours. It was the voice of a man who had fought to his soul’s end. Bellair held his hand and the woman’s, but felt himself the betrayer. This had come for him! He was the prophet lying still while the sailors deliberated. They must cast him into the sea, before this thing could be willed into quiescence. Concentration on his part was broken by this conviction.

The body of Stackhouse was lifted to its knees—the different face looking out of the eyes. They sat before it like terrified children; the eyes found them one after another, steadily, with unearthly frigid humour, like some creative force of evil, integrated of the ages, charged with intrepid will, a ruling visitant that would tarry but an instant for the climax.

It was not human, save in the shape and feature for their recognition; its difference from the human was its frank knowing destructiveness. Humanity is mainly unconscious of the processes of evil; this had chosen. This was of the pull of the earth, and knew its power. It seemed known to Bellair as if from some ancient meeting. He could never have remembered, however, without this return. It was devoid of sex, which seemed to bring to him some old deep problem that took its place with his ineffable fear of the presence.

So Bellair sat between them, holding their hands, but powerless to help.... It was higher, looking out of the eyes of the body, in strange solution with the fallen humanity of the face they knew. And Bellair knew he was responsible.

“You must depart. You do not belong here,” a voice said. Bellair could not tell if it were Fleury’s or the woman’s or his own. It may have been merely a thought.

The thing had uprisen now. It lurched in the sway of the boat. Fleury and he were standing to meet the body that hurled itself forward.... Water dashed over them. They were beneath the monster. Bellair felt more than the crush of the weight of flesh, a force kindred to electricity, but not electric, a smothering defiling dynamics, that despoiled him by the low, cold depth of its vibration, rather than by the fierce fury of it. Then he thought of the woman’s child. It came to him like a pure gleam. The child must live. The thought was very real, out of the self, but not for self.... It seemed that he heard the heart of Stackhouse break, and the demon hiss away.

Bellair looked up from the bottom of the boat. The woman’s face was very close, his face between her hands.

“... Yes, come back to us!” she was saying. “Oh, we could not live without you——”

It did not seem real to him for a moment. He turned from her merciful eyes. Fleury was sitting there in the centre, holding the child with hands that trembled. The boat rode lightly, though water lay in the bottom. He turned farther. Yes, the seat in the stern was empty.

“He is dead?” Bellair whispered.

“Yes,” she answered.

“And we did not kill him,” Fleury added.

“But how did he get overside?”

“You helped,” they told him.

He did not remember. “And the child?”

“The little Gleam is all right. All is well with us, Bellair.”

Something of the encounter returned now. “I do not belong here with you,” he said. “The thing—at the last—came for me——”

Then he realised how absurd this would sound—as if some ogre had come. Yet they understood.

“I thought it had come for me,” the woman answered quietly. “I said that, and he——”she turned with a smile to the preacher,“—and he said the same—that it had come for him. We will forget that. Something freed us——”

Bellair turned to the child.

“It was the little Gleam who freed us,” Fleury said.

“How did you get that name?” Bellair asked.

“You said it.”

“How long have I been lying here?”

“Ten minutes.”

He rested a moment longer.... The woman was sane, the child unhurt. Stackhouse was dead, and they had not murdered him. It was the fourth sunset.... Bellair sat up and turned his eyes to the sea.

The great body was near. It would not sink. They tried to row, but were too weak to pull far. The calm sea would not cover it from their eyes.... Even the birds did not come to it, and there was no tugging from the deep.

The terrible battle of the day had left them whimpering—drained men, in the pervading calm of the sea, under the dry cloudless heat and light of the sky. Fleury and Bellair looked at each other and their eyes said: “We did not murder him.” They looked again and found the woman saner than they. They turned over her shoulder to the blotch upon the sea. It floated high, drifted with them. They could not speak connectedly, but longed for the night.... At last, they heard her voice:

“It is very great to me to know that there are such men in the world. As a little girl in New Zealand I used to picture such heroes—such brothers and heroes. I came to doubt it afterward, and that was evil in me. I see now that the dream was true——”

They listened like two little boys.

“See, the cool is coming!” she added. “The child is glad, too. To-night, we will talk!”

“You will tell us a story?” Fleury said.

“Yes, when it is darker. It is all so safe and quiet now. We are all one.”

That meant something to Bellair. Later when it was dark, and they had supped, he said:

“It’s good—the way you count me in, but you shouldn’t. I don’t belong, much as I’d like to. I misjudged you at first. I misjudged Fleury—and him——” he pointed over her shoulder to the sea.

“It will be gone in the morning,” she whispered, patting his hand. “We are three—and the child.”

“Three, and God bless you,” said Fleury. “Three and the little Gleam——”

“The Gleam,” the woman repeated, holding the child closer. “I love that.”

“We are three and we follow the Gleam.”

7

Fleury took the child. The Faraway Woman sat straight in her seat, so that Bellair wondered at her strength. Her strength came to him. The deeps of his listening were opened to her low voice. The story came to them with all the colour and contour of her thought-pictures—a richness from the unspoken words which cannot be given again:

“It’s about a little girl whom I will call Olga,” she said. “That is really her name, and the story is the little girl’s truly. I shall only tell part of it to-night, for it is long and I would only tell you the happy part—to-night.

“Olga’s father and mother and the other children lived in a low house by the open road that led to Hamilton. He raised sheep for a living on the rolling pasture-lands near the Waikata river, a hundred miles south of Auckland.... Yes, Olga was born in New Zealand—the youngest of a houseful of sisters. They belong more to the latter part of the story which I shall not tell to-night—just the happy part to-night.... The first thing that Olga remembered as belonging to the Great Subject was spoken by her father one evening when they were all together at their supper of bread and milk:

“‘... One never knows. It is best not to turn away any stranger, not even if he is shabby and ill-looking. I heard of a house where a stranger was turned away. They were not bad people, but supper was over, the things put aside, and the woman was very tired. The stranger was taken in at the next house, and in the morning he seemed different to them—not shabby or ill-looking at all, but rested and laughing, with bright lights about his hair. Always afterward, that house was blest, but the other house went on in its misery and labour. One never knows. It is best not to turn any stranger away.’

“Now Olga understood that from beginning to end. Many times before she had tried to follow the talk at the table, but the words would come too fast, and she would fall away to her own manner of seeing things. This talk simplified many matters for her, and seemed greatly to be approved. So in the evenings she began to watch for her guest up the long level road that led to Hamilton. All that summer Olga thought of it and watched, though she was very little and only five. Sometimes when it was not yet dark she would venture forth a few steps and stare up the long road, until the house of their distant but nearest neighbour was all blurred in the night. Just behind her cottage in the other direction, the road dipped into a ravine, and the trees grew up from it, shutting off the distance. No place could be more wonderful than the ravine at midday, for the shades were quickened with birds, bees, flowers and much beside that only Olga saw, but its enchantment was too keen for the evening, and the night came there very quickly.

“Her Guest would never come from the ravineway, but from the long, open road—Olga was sure of this. Yet when stopping to think, she became afraid he would not be allowed to pass the neighbour’s house. Their little Paul was her frequent playmate, and Paul’s father and mother were most good and hospitable people, the last on the Hamilton road to let a stranger go by, without food and shelter. And Paul would be looking, for he was almost always interested in her things.... But perhaps they would be in at supper and not see the stranger; or perhaps he would not want to stop there, but would know that she was watching. She made very certain that he would not get by her house unobserved.

“Spring had come again. The pale blue hepaticas were peeping into bloom. There was one day that ended in Olga’s most wonderful night. The sun had gone down, but not the light. The sky was crowded with rich gold like the breast of the purple martin—flickerings of beautiful light in the air, as if little balls of happiness were bursting of themselves. The shadows were soft on the long road; the tiles of the neighbour’s low house were like beaten gold, and the perfume of the hyacinths flooded everywhere into the silence. All that heaven could ever be was in that broad splendour and sweetness—the ravine a soft purple stillness behind, and a faint mist of red falling in the distant gold.

“He was coming. She knew him for The Guest from afar. The neighbours’ house was already dimmed, but the stranger was clear, so that she knew he had passed their door. She ran forth to meet him, and no one called to her from behind. It seemed all made for her—the evening so sweet and vast and perfect. One of her little loose shoes came off as she hurried, but she did not stop. The single one made her running clumsy, so she kicked that free too. He must not think she was a little lame girl.... He was farther than she thought; she had never come so far alone in the evening. And yet how clearly she could see him....

“He must be very tired, for sometimes he was on one side of the road, and sometimes on the other. He was quite old, and his step unsteady, yet he carried his cane and did not use it.... His head was uncovered. Now she knew why his steps were so unsteady. He was looking upward as he walked—upward and around quite joyously, the glow of the sky upon his white beard and hair—so that he did not see her coming, and her bare feet were silent on the road.

“She felt very little as she touched his cane.

“‘Won’t you come to our house to rest? Oh, please——’

“‘Yes, yes,’ he answered, but did not look down.

“‘Our house is near—won’t you come?’ she asked again, and turning, she was surprised how far it was, but not afraid, and no one called to her.

“‘Oh, yes,’ he answered.

“‘But I am down here——’

“‘Bless me—are you?’

“He did not seem to see her very well, but tried to follow her voice, his eyes looking past her, and to the side, his great hands groping for her gently. Olga spoke again and touched his hands. Then he really saw her, and she sighed with relief, because his eyes filled with the gentlest love she had ever seen—seemed to rest upon her and enclose her at the same time. The gladdest smile of welcome had come to his face. Both her hands were in his groping ones, but now she turned and led him. There was silence as they walked, and Olga asked:

“‘But what were you looking for—you were looking up, you know?’

“‘Was I, dear?’

“‘Yes, and what were you looking for?’

“‘I was looking for my mother,’ he said.

“Olga thought how old she must be, and she wanted to cry.... Her mother made the stranger very welcome, and her father stood back against the wall smiling in a way that she always remembered, and without lighting his pipe until after the stranger had finished his meal. There was golden butter and the dark bread that is the life of the peasants, a pitcher of fresh milk and a bite of that cheese which is brought forth only on Sundays or holidays. They pressed him to eat more, saying that he must be in need of food after his journey, but it was very little that he really took. He smiled and looked with peace from face to face, but Olga had pulled her stool back into the shadows, for she did not wish to intrude. He had not seen so much of the others.

“A chair was brought to the hearth, for it was now dark and there was a little fire burning against the damp coolness of evening. They waited in vain for him to speak. It was as if he had come home. To Olga he was intensely memorable sitting there in the firelight. The others would draw near, and he leaned forward and looked into their faces smilingly, but it was not the same.... Now he was looking and looking around the room. He found her, and held out his hands. She heard her mother say, ‘This is Olga’s guest.’

“She had not believed his old arms could be so strong. With one hand he held her, while the other patted her shoulder softly, slowly,—as if he had everything he desired. All about her was the firelight and the strange joyous whiteness of him—his throat and collar and beard all lustrous white. In his arms there was something she had never known, even from her mother—a deep and limitless joy, as if the world were all good, and nothing could possibly happen that would not be the right good thing.

“Then she became afraid her breast would burst, for the happiness was more and more. It had to do with the future, such a far distance of seeing, all rising and increasingly good—until Olga had to slip down from his knees, because the happiness in and through her was more than she could bear.

“‘I will come back,’ she said hoarsely.

“Outdoors she waited until the stars had steadied and were like the stars she knew, for they had been huge and blazing at first; then she returned and he stretched out his hands to her, and she heard her mother say, ‘Surely, this is Olga’s guest.’

“She did not remember how she got into her little bed. She heard the birds in the vines, and it was golden day when she awoke. Suddenly she knew that she had slept too long, that she would find him gone.... She thought of her little brown shoes on the road, but some one must have brought them in, for there they were by the bed.... He was no longer in the house, but she did not weep. There had been so much of wonder and beauty. She looked into her mother’s face, but did not ask. The mother smiled, as if waiting for her to speak. The other children must have been told, for they did not speak.

“A thousand times Olga wished that she had awakened in time; often it came to her that she had not done all she could for her guest, but there was never real misery about it, and she was never quite the same after that perfect night. She thought it out bit by bit every day, but it was long, long afterward before she spoke, and this was to an elder sister, who—it was most strange and pitiful to Olga—seemed to have forgotten it all——”

The Faraway Woman reached for the child, and held it close and strangely. Fleury offered her water, but she took just a sup and bade them finish the cup. “That was the happy part,” she added in a whisper, her back moving slowly to and fro, as she held the child high. “It might all have been happier, but Olga was not quite like the others. They did not tell her what they knew, and Olga never could tell them what she felt. Another time—some happy time—I will tell you, who are so good—you will understand the rest of the story——”

“Would you tell us if Olga’s guest came again?” the preacher asked.

“Yes, he came again,” she said softly.

Bellair sat still for several moments. Then he leaned forward and touched the child’s dress.

8

They made an appearance of drinking (with a cracker in hand) at midnight, but it was for the sake of the woman—a sup of tepid water. The long night sailed by. Slowly the moon sank—that dry moon, brick-red and bulbous, as it entered the western sea. All was still in the little boat. Bellair was ready to meet his suffering. He could not sleep—because the woman was near. That was the night that her quality fixed itself for all time exemplary in his heart.

The little story had revealed to him a new sanctuary. He loved it and the little Gleam; as for that, he loved Fleury, too. It was a strange resolving of all separateness that had come to him from these friends. More than ever thrilling it had come, with Stackhouse out of the boat and since the story had been made his.

She had been frightened by his loss of consciousness at the end of the battle. He had awakened looking into her eyes. He scarcely dared to recall what she had said in her anxiety, but it was an extraordinary matter of value. What a mother she was; and what a little girl lived in that story, and now!... That little girl was still in her heart. The recent days in the open boat had not spoiled her; nor the recent years of loneliness and tragedy. Out of it all had come certain perfect works—the babe in her arms, her own fortitude and fearlessness of death; the little girl still in her eyes and heart. Bellair saw that a man loves the child in a woman, quite as much as a woman loves the boy in a man.... She had said that Fleury and he were brothers and heroes. He knew better in his own case. Still she had said it, adding that the discovery of such men to her was a part of the very bloom of life....

Bellair was not thinking the personal relation now. Fleury and she were mated in his own thoughts. From the beginning, this was so; and yet he did not ask more. He had come to believe from their glorious humanity (so strange to him and unpromising in the beginning)—that the world was crowded with latent values which, once touched and quickened into life, would make it a paradise.

That was the substance of the whole matter. He must never forget it. The human values which he had met in these were secret in thousands, perhaps in millions, of hearts, and needed only breaking open by stress and revelation—to bring the millennium to old Mother Earth, and open her skies for the plan of joy. Bellair impressed this upon his mind again, so he would not forget—then fell asleep.

She was first awake in the distance-clearing light. She arose carefully, so as not to awaken the men and the child, and stared long in every quarter. There was no ship, no land, no cloud; and yet a trace of happiness on her thin face, as she sat down. Fleury was rousing. She had expected that; for through their strange sympathy several times before he had awakened with her, or soon after. She bent forward and whispered a good-morning, and added:

“It is gone——”

“Surely?”

“Yes.”

“Thank God.”

The preacher breathed deeply, contemplated their faces one after another. From Bellair lying in the stern, his eyes turned significantly to the woman’s, and his own lit with zeal.... Bellair was on the borderland then, coming up through the fathoms of dream. Already he felt the heat; the sun had imparted its ache to his eyes. The three were half-blinded by the long brilliance of the cloudless days on the sea.... Bellair was trying to speak, but could not because of the parch in his throat. Moreover, no thoughts could hold him—not even Bessie. She came to mind, pink and ineffectual, lost in her childish things. She had failed this way before....

There was a cup to his lips. He smelled the water, and wanted it as he wanted decency and truth—as he wanted to be brave and fit to be one of the three. It almost crazed him, the way he wanted it—but it would be taking it from her. All the violence of one-pointed will was against the cup. He pushed it away.

“Don’t, Bellair,” said Fleury. “You’ll spill it. Drink——”

“I won’t. Take it away.”

“You must drink. It is yours.”

“Yes, he must drink,” said the woman.

Bellair sat up. Fleury was holding the cup to his lips.

“It is gone from behind,” said the preacher. “Drink your water. I have. I will speak to you after you drink.”

He stared at them, and at the open sea behind her. Then it came to him, as if from Fleury’s mind, to obey.... Fleury then served the woman. They ate a cracker together; at least it seemed so. Then Fleury spoke:

“We have the child to serve—that is our first thought; therefore we must think of the child’s mother first. As for her other part, as our companion, she will be one with us, of course. We have been here five full days, and we have not been allowed, by the presence of him who is gone—and may God rest and keep that—we have not been allowed to do the best we could in this great privilege of being together and drawing close to reality. Many have gone without food and drink for ten days—to come close to God. There is food here and water—to keep us in life. This is what I would say: We must change our point of view.”

He paused, and their eyes turned from one to another. The child’s face seemed washed in the magic of morning. The preacher added:

“We must cease to regard ourselves as suffering, as creatures in want, as starving or dying of thirst. Rather, as three souls knit, each to the other, who have entered upon a pilgrimage together—a period of simple austerity to cleanse and purify our bodies the better to meet and sense reality, and to approach with a finer sensitiveness, than we have ever known—the mystery and ministry of God.... So we are not suffering, Bellair. We are not suffering—”

He turned to the woman.

“We are chosen ones. This is our wilderness. When we are ready—God will speak to us. We are very far from the poor needs of the body—for this is the time and period of our consecration. God bless you both—and the Gleam.”

9

It was the seventh evening, the cool coming in. Bellair could not feel his body below his lungs, unless he stopped to think. The child was on his knee, his hands holding it. The little face was browned, but very clear and bright. Bellair’s hands against the child’s dress were clawlike to his own eyes, like the hands of a black man very aged. He could move his fingers when he thought of it, but he did not know if they moved unless he watched. The effort of steadying the child he did not feel in his arms, but in his shoulders. It was like the ache in his eyes. No tears would come, but all the smart of tears’ beginnings; and the least little thing would bring it about. He had to stop between words and wait for his throat to subside—in the simplest saying.

He saw everything clearly. The open boat was like a seat lifted a trifle above the runways of the world. He could see them, as one in the swarming paths beneath could never hope to see. It was all good, but the pain and the pressure of them all!... Bessie Brealt in pain and pressure; Davy Acton in the hard heavy air; Broadwell who was trying to be a man at Lot & Company’s; the old boarding-house woman who had forgotten everything but her rooms—her rooms moving with shadows whom she never saw clearly and never hoped to understand—shadows that flitted, her accounts never in order, her rooms never in order.... There had been people in there whom he never saw—one girlish voice that awakened in the afternoon and sang softly, a most subdued and impossible singing. She worked nights at a telephone switch-board—the night-desires of the great city passing through her—and she sang to the light of noon when it came to the cage.... Sunday afternoons when it was fine, a bearded man emerged from a back-room, emerged with a cane and cigarette case. Always on the front steps he lit the cigarette....

Bellair now couldn’t smoke.... Once there had been moaning in a lower back room, moaning night and morning from a woman. He was not sure if it were the millinery woman, or the one who worked in Kratz’s. The moaning stopped and as he passed through the hall, he heard a doctor say to the landlady:

“King Alcohol.”

Just that.... He saw the millinery woman afterward, so it wasn’t she.... The air in the old halls was of a character all its own. It was stronger than the emanations from any of the rooms. The separate currents lost their identity like streams in the ocean, like souls in Brahma.... How strangely apart he had kept all that five years! A face not seen before in the halls, and he did not know if it were a newcomer or old. So few came to the board to dine—the chorus-woman from the Hippodrome, who came up nightly from the water.... He saw the view from his window—over the roofs and areas. It was a wall of windows—dwellers in the canyon sides; boxes of food hanging out, clothing out to freshen itself in the dingy and sluggish airs—the coloured stockings and the faces that looked out. Everything was monotonous but the faces—faces grim and sharp—faces of kittens and bulls and rabbits and foxes, faces of ferrets, sleek faces, torn faces, red and brutal, white and wasted faces; faces of food and drink, faces of hunger and fear; the drugged look; few tears but much dry yearning, and not a face of joy.

There was no joyousness and peace in the lower runways, but pain and heavy pressures.... Bellair saw himself moving among those halls again, not a stranger, but with a hand, a smile, a dollar. No one would moan for days without his knowing. He would find day-work for the little telephone miss, and send orders for hats to the milliner. He would awaken that shadow of all the shadows, the landlady, with kindness and healing. He would call across the windowed cavern.... They would say, “Come over and help us,” and he would rush down stairs, and around into other streets, and faces there would be ready to show him. He saw it all clearly, such as it was, but no facts. They would not call to him. They would not be healed. They would take a dollar, but say he was cracked. He could move about passing forth a dollar here and there—that was all. They would welcome him at Lot & Company’s if he passed it out quietly enough. The dollar would go into the Sproxley system and emerge unbroken to the firm itself, there to be had and held and marked down in the house of Lot—Jabez, Nathan, Eben, Seth, each a part, the jovial Mr. Rawter a small but visible part—one hundred Sproxley-measured cents.... Davy Acton wouldn’t get one, nor Broadwell, nor the girls upstairs. The firm would not encourage him passing beyond the cage of Mr. Sproxley.... There were many who wanted food and drink and hats—hats——”

He was with Bessie Brealt now ... that night and the kiss. It was another life.... He went back to those who needed food—New York so full of food. Then he felt the heavy wallet against his breast—one paper in there would fill the open boat with food....

“My God,” he said.

He didn’t try to explain.... Sometimes he fell into a little dream as he sat. Once he was drinking at the narrow throat of a green bottle,—a magic bottle whose base was in the sea, and the trickle that passed through was freshened drop by drop. But it was a trick like all else in the world and the drops passed with agonising slowness. He came to, sucking hard upon his brass key, his mouth ulcered from it.... There were times in the long days that he hungered for the stars almost as for drink; times in the night when the stars bored him like some man-pageantry that he had seen too much of; times when the thought of God was less than the thought of water; and times when the faith and the glory of the spirit of the world made thirst a thing to laugh at, and death whimsical and insignificant.... Sometimes in the night, he fancied the woman was Bessie Brealt. It would come like a little suspicion first hardly stirring his faculties; finally it would be real—that the singing girl was there, all but her song. He would sit up rubbing his eyes in rebellion. Once he had spoken to be sure.

“Yes, it is I,” she said huskily, and the voice was not Bessie Brealt’s.

10

They did not speak of ships. Through the wakeful night hours they watched for the lights of ships, but they did not speak of vigils. Their eyes were straining for uncharted shores during the days, but they did not speak of land; nor of rain, though they watched passionately the change and movement of wind and cloud.

It is true that they suffered less in the days that followed the passing of Stackhouse. The underworld was gone from the seat in the stern; sunlight and sea air had cleansed it from the boat. They were weaker, but pangs of thirst were weaker, too. Small pieces of metal in their mouths kept the saliva trickling. The real difference was an exaltation which even Bellair shared at times, and which had come to them the fifth morning with Fleury’s talk, and with refining intensity since.

The child was well; his imperative founts still flowing. She was pure mother; it was the child that was nourished first, not her own body. She was first in the passion for his preservation. Indeed, she would have told them at once had any change threatened him. But she was the soul of the fasting too; the austerity of it found deep sanction within her; and there were moments in which she bewildered Bellair, for she became bright with the vitality which is above the need of bread.

Fleury talked of God, as Stackhouse had talked of death. Indeed, there was a contrasting intoxication in the days and nights of the preacher, but one without hideous reaction.

“There comes a moment,” he said, “when I am alone—when you two are asleep—that I feel the weakness. I drink and eat—perhaps more than my share. But when we are all together—sitting here as now, talking and sustaining one another—oh, it seems I was never so happy.”

Bellair suspected that this talk of lapses into abandonment while others slept was an effort to make their minds easy on the subject of his share. Both the Mother and Bellair doubted this; it preyed upon them. In the main they were one solution, each separate quality of their individualism cast into a common pool for the sustaining of a trinity.

“It changes the whole order,” Fleury declared. “Why, whole crowds have died of hunger—in half the number of days that holy men and women have fasted as a mere incident of their practice toward self-mastery. This is our consecration.”

Bellair found it true. He had ceased to marvel at himself. Deep reconstruction was advanced within him; and a strange loyalty and endurance prospered from the new foundations. If this were self-hypnosis—very well; if madness—very well, too; at least, it was good to possess, seven, eight, nine days in an open boat, on a one-fifth ration of water and food. To Bellair, who felt himself inferior to the others, it appeared that they already lived what he was thrillingly thinking out. He remembered his first thoughts of them—in the cold worldly manner of a fellow-traveller. It was almost as far as a man’s emotion can swing, from what he thought of them now. Before God, he believed he was right now, and wrong then. Certainly he would test it out, if he lived to move among men again.

He thought often about the child’s voice—at the moment that the heart of Stackhouse broke—as the point of his turning and salvation. This furnished a clue to many things, though he did not miss the fact that the world would smile at his credulity in accepting such a dispensation as real. The world would say that he had been driven to far distances of illusion by thirst and hunger; in fact, that anything which he had seen, other than the original entity in the eyes of Stackhouse, was a part of the illusion. Bellair considered this, and also that in every instance of late in which he had held the world’s point of view he had been proven wrong. He granted the world its rights to think as it chose, but accepted the dispensation.

There had been good and evil within him. The balance had turned in favour of the good, with that cry. It had turned from the self. The purpose of the Enterer had been to keep him in the self. It had come from the unfathomed depths of evil—that purpose and the devil which he saw. Bellair had heard repeatedly that some such dweller appeared to each man who makes an abrupt turn from the life of flesh to the life of the spirit. Each of the three had seen something foreign in the eyes of Stackhouse. It is true they had not talked of it; possibly to each it was different in its deadliness; perhaps theirs was not the demon he saw, since Fleury and the woman were much farther on the way than he, but they had been good enough to share responsibility for the visitation. Indeed, the Faraway Woman could not have been acting, since a cry came from her the instant it appeared.

This he loved to study: that his thought of the child had balanced the whole issue against the intruder; that something within him had brought that saving grace of selflessness out of chaos. It was a squeak, he invariably added, but it had shown him enough, opening the way. There must be such a beginning in every man; in fact, there must come an instant of choice; an instant in which a man consciously chooses his path, weighing all that is past against the hope and intellectual conception of a better life.

Bellair brooded upon this a great deal, especially on the ninth day, and that was the day, Fleury talked—the holiest of their days in the open boat. Bellair found many things clearer afterwards. As soon as he understood fully, he meant to close it all, so far as his own relation was concerned. In its very nature it must be given to others, must be turned to helpfulness. It was a sort of star-dust which did not adhere to self, but sought places of innocence to shine from, and used every pure instrument for its dissemination. The key to the whole matter was the loss of the sense of self. Having accepted this, Bellair knew that he must go up into Nineveh, so to speak. He trembled.

“We learn by austerities apart,” Fleury said, “and then we return to men with the story. We are called up the mountain to witness the transfiguration, and then are sent with the picture down among men. Oh, no, we are not permitted to remain, nor build a temple up there. First we receive; then we must give. We must lose the sense of self in order to receive; and having received, we do not want the sense of self. This is the right and left hand of prayer—pure selfless receptivity, then tireless giving to others. It is the key to the whole scheme of life—mountain and valley, ebb and flow, night and day, winter and summer, the movement of the lungs and the heart and the soul. We cannot receive while our senses are hot with desire; therefore we must become delicate and sensitive. Having received, we must make the gift alive through action. Dreaming is splendid; the dreamer receives. The dreamer starts all things; but the dreamer becomes a hopeless ineffectual if he does not make his dreams come true in matter. That is it. We are here to make matter follow the dream. That’s why the spirit puts on flesh—that’s why we are workmen. Action is the right hand of thought.”

The preacher was ahead of him in these thoughts. So often he said just what Bellair needed, the exact, clearing, helpful thing. For instance, Bellair had followed his own fascinating conviction that the world is full of secret values; that the world is ready to pull together, only it requires a certain stimulus from without—some certain message that would reach and unify all. Fleury tightened the matter by his expression of it:

“The socialists are doing great good. The church is still doing good; the societies that have turned to the East have heard the great message; even in commerce there is a new life; everywhere in the world, the sense of having found some new spirit which works to destroy the sense of self. If one great figure should come now—come saying, ‘You are all good. You are all after the same thing. One way is as good as another—only come.’... What we need is for some one to touch the chord for us—to give us the key, as to an orchestra of different instruments. We are all making different notes; and yet are ready for the harmony—some of us intensely eager for the harmony. The great need is for a Unifier.... It seems that we, here in the small boat, can see America so much clearer, than when we were there——”

Bellair had felt this a thousand times.

“The greatest story in the world is the story of the coming of a Messiah—the one who may chord for us. I think He will come. He will come out of the East, his face like the morning sun turned to the West. Don’t you see—we are all like atoms of steel in a chaos? You know what happens when a voltage of electricity is turned upon a bar of steel? Order comes to the chaos; the atoms sing, all turned the same way. That Voice must come—that tremendous voltage of spiritual electricity—that will set us all in harmony—all with our tails down stream.”

And Fleury finished it all by pointing out what had happened to them in the small boat. They had lost separateness; they were each for the others.

“That’s what must happen in America, in the world,—the pull of each for the whole—the harmony. You have seen an audience in the midst of great message or great music—they weep together. They cry out together. They are all one. That’s the story. That is what must happen. It will happen when the Unifier comes. It is the base of all gospel—that we are all one in spirit. Don’t you see it—every message from the beginning of time has told it? All one—all one—our separateness is our suffering, our evil. To return to the House of Our Father—that is the end of estrangement.”

... And Fleury was the one who had ceased to talk. But he had acted, too.... They saw that he was held by some power of his giving to them. He was like light. He had given the whole material force of his body to hold off that destruction which had come with the dying of Stackhouse. He had not eaten, even as they had eaten. They feared for him, because he was the centre and mainspring of their pilgrimage. Especially this haunt became more grippable in the heart of the ninth night.... There was a small tin of water left, less than three pints, very far from clean; and somewhat less than a pound of crackers. Bellair awoke to find Fleury gone from his place between him and the woman. He was in the stern, in the old seat of Stackhouse, praying. ... Fleury met the tenth day with an exaltation that awed Bellair and the woman; and there came from it a fear to Bellair’s heart that had nothing to do with self, nor with the Mother, nor the Gleam.

They were all weak, and two men utterly weak. Through their will and denial, and the extraordinary force and health of her own nature, the child had not yet been dangerously denied. It had become a sort of natural religion with the three—a readiness to die for the Gleam.

“This is our last day,” said Fleury, before the western horizon was marked clear.... The Faraway Woman told them another story of what the wise old shepherd dog told the puppies—that it was better to begin on crackers and water—and end on cookies and cream....

11

Bellair believed about this being the last day. The authority was quite enough, but there was still something akin to eternity in the possible space of another daylight and distance. The announcement did not bring him an unmixed gladness, for the mysterious fear of the night haunted him—the thing that had come to him under the full and amazing moon while Fleury prayed.... Day revealed no sign. They sat speechless and bowed under the smiting noon—the little boat in the wide, green deep under a fleckless, windless sky, proud of its pure part in infinite space.

That was the day the child moaned, as significantly for the ears of men, as for the mother. He was a waif to look at—the little heart at times like one of them in stoicism—then nestling to the mother-breast and the turning away in astonishment and pain. The Mother’s eyes were harrowing.

“This is our last day,” Fleury repeated.

“I believe you,” she said.

“Then drink and eat——”

“I did—it is—it is—oh, I did!”

“Land or rain or a ship, I do not know—but this is the last day——”

Bellair regarded him, between his own wordless vapourings of consciousness. The preacher was like a guest, not of earth altogether—like one who would come in the evening.... Yes, that was it. He was like the old man who came to Olga, only young and beautiful. It did not occur to Bellair now that he was regarding his friend with a quality of vision that a well-fed man never knows.... That which he had fancied placid and boyish was knit and masterful. The cheeks and temples were hollowed, but the eyes were bright. There is a brightness of hunger, of fever, of certain drugs, but these were as different as separate colours—and had not to do with this man’s eyes. Nothing that Bellair knew but starlight could be likened—and not all starlight. There was one star that rose late and climbed high above and a little toward the north—solitary, remote, not yellow nor red nor green nor white, as we know it—yet of that whiteness which is the source of all. Bellair had forgotten the name, but Fleury’s eyes made him think of it.