Fate Knocks at the Door Part 1

Fate Knocks at the Door.

by Will Levington Comfort.

I

ASIA

_Allegro con brio_

FIRST CHAPTER

THE GREAT WIND STRIKES

Andrew Bedient, at the age of seventeen, in a single afternoon,--indeed, in one moment of a single afternoon,--performed an action which brought him financial abundance for his mature years.

Although this narrative less concerns the boy Bedient than the man as he approaches twice seventeen, the action is worthy of account, beyond the riches that it brought, because it seems to draw him into somewhat clearer vision from the shadows of a very strange boyhood.

April, 1895, the _Truxton_, of which Andrew was cook, found herself becalmed in the China Sea, midway between Manila and Hong Kong, her nose to the North. She was a smart clipper of sixty tons burden, with a slightly uptilted stern, and as clever a line forward as a pleasure yacht. She was English, comparatively new, and, properly used by the weather, was as swift and sprightly of service as an affectionate woman. Her master was Captain Carreras, a tubby little man of forty-five, bald, modest, and known among the shipping as "a perfect lady." He wore a skull-cap out of port; and as constantly, except during meals, carried one of a set of rarely-colored meerschaum-bowls, to which were attachable, bamboo-stems, amber-tipped and of various lengths.

The little Captain was fastidious in dress, wearing soft shirts of white silk, fine duck trousers and scented silk handkerchiefs, which he carried in his left hand with the meerschaum-bowl. The Carreras perfume, mingled with fresh tobacco, was never burdensome, and unlike any other. The silk handkerchief was as much a feature of the Captain's appearance as the skull-cap. To it was due the really remarkable polish of the perfect clays so regularly cushioned in his palm. Always for dinner, the Captain's toilet was fresh throughout. Invariably, too, he brought with him an unfolded handkerchief upon which he placed, at the farther end of the table when the weather was fair (and in the socket of the fruit-bowl when the weather-frames were on), a ready-filled pipe. This he took to hand when coffee was brought.

His voice was seldom raised. He found great difficulty in expressing himself, except upon affairs of the ship; yet, queerly enough, there were times when he seemed deeply eager to say the things which came of his endless silences. As unlikely a man as you would find in the Pacific, or any other merchant-service, was this Carreras; a gentleman, if a very bashful one; a deeply-read and kindly man, although it was quite as difficult for him to extend a generous action, directly to be found out,--and his mind was continually furnishing inclinations of this sort,--as it was to express his thoughts. Either brought on a nervous tension which left him shaken and drained. The right woman would have adored Captain Carreras, and doubtless would have called forth from his breast a love of heroic dimension; but she would have been forced to do the winning; to speak and take the initiative in all but the giving of happiness. Temperate for a bachelor, clean throughout, charmingly innocent of the world, and a splendid seaman. To one of fine sensibilities, there was something about the person of Captain Carreras of softly glowing warmth, and rarely tender.

Bedient had been with him as cook for over a year, during which the _Truxton_ had swung down to Australia and New South Wales, and called at half the Asiatic and insular ports from Vladivostok to Bombay. Since he was a little chap (back of which were the New York memories, vague, but strange and persistent), there had always been some ship for Bedient, but the _Truxton_ was by far the happiest.... It was from the _Truxton_ just a few months before that he had gone ash.o.r.e day after day for a fortnight at Adelaide; and a wee woman five years older, and a cycle wiser, had invariably been waiting with new mysteries in her house.... Moreover, on the _Truxton_, he had nothing to do with the forecastle galley--there was a Chinese for that--and Captain Carreras, fancying him from the beginning, had quartered him aft, where, except on days like this, when Mother Earth's pneumatic cushion seemed limp and flattened, there was a breeze to hammock in, and plenty of candles for night reading.

Then the Captain had a box of books, the marvel of which cannot begin to be described. Andrew's books were but five or six, chosen for great quant.i.ty and small bulk; tightly and toughly bound little books of which the Bible was first. This was his book of fairies, his Aesop; his book of wanderings and story, of character and mystery; his revelations, the source of his ideality, the great expander of limitations; his book of love and adventure and war; the book unjudgable and the bed-rock of all literary judgment. He knew the Bible as only one can who has played with it as a child; as only one can who has found it alone available, when an insatiable love of print has swept across the young mind. Nothing could change him now; this was his book of Fate.

Except for those vision-times in the big city, Andrew could not remember when he had not read the Bible, nor did he remember learning to read. He seemed to have forgotten how to read before he came to sea at seven, but when an old sailor pointed out on the stern of the jolly-boat, the letters that formed the name of his first ship--it had all come back to the child; and then he found his first Bible. Slowly conceiving its immensity, its fullness _for him_--he was almost lifted from his body with the upward winging of happiness. It was his first great exaltation, and there was a sacredness about it which kept him from telling anybody.... And now all the structures of the great Scripture were tenoned in his brain; so that he knew the frame of every part, but the inner meanings of more and more marvellous dimension seemed inexhaustible. Always excepting the great Messianic Figure--the white tower of his consciousness--he loved Saint Paul and the Forerunner best among the men....

There was also a big book in the Captain's chest--_Life and Death on the Ocean_--quarto-sized and printed in agate. It was filled with mutiny, murder, storm, open-boat cannibalism and agonies of thirst, handspike and cutla.s.s inhumanities. No shark, pirate nor man-killing whale had been missed; no ghastly wreck, derelict nor horrifying phantom of the sea had escaped the nameless, furious compiler. For four days and nights, Andrew glared consumingly into this terrible book, and when he came to the writhing "Finis," involved in a sort of typhoon tailpiece--he was whipped, and never could bring himself to touch the book again. One reading had burned out his entire interest. It was not Life nor Death nor Ocean, as he had seen them in ten solid years at sea. He had given the book his every emotion, and discovered it gave nothing back; but had shaken, terrified, played furious _tarantellas_ upon his feelings--and replenished naught. So he turned for unguent to his Book of Books. Here was the strong steady light in contrast to which the other was an "angled spar." True, here crawled hate, avarice, l.u.s.t, flesh and its myriad forms of death--not in their own elemental darkness--but as scurrying vermin forms suddenly drenched with light.... There were other and really wonderful books in Captain Carreras' chest--a bashful welcome to his cabin, and such eager lending from the Captain himself!

This had become a pleasant feature in the young man's life--the queer kindly heart of the Captain. There were few confidences between them, but a fine unspoken regard, pleasing and permanent like the Carreras perfume. Bedient's desire to show his grat.i.tude and admiration was expressed in ways that could not possibly shock the Captain's delicacy--in the small excellences of his art, for instance. To say that the boy was consummate in the limited way of a ship's cook does not overstate his effectiveness. He did unheard-of things--even fruit and berry-pies, from preserves two years, at least, remote from vine and orchard. The two mates and boatswain, who also messed aft, bolted without speech, but marvelled between meals. To these three, the tension of the Captain's embarra.s.sment became insupportable, beyond four or five minutes; so that Carreras, a discriminating, though not a valiant trencherman, was always the last to leave the table.

And once after a first supper at sea out of Singapore (there had been a green salad, a fish baked whole, a cut of ham with new potatoes, and a peach-preserve tart), the Captain put down his napkin and coffee-cup, drank a _liqueur_, reached for his pipe and handkerchief, and suddenly encountering the eyes of Andrew, who lit a flare for him, jerked up decisively, as one encountering a crisis. His face became hectic, and the desperate sentence he uttered was almost lost in the frantic clearing of his throat:

"You're a very prime and wonderful chap, sir!"

Moreover, Bedient's arm had been pressed for an instant by the softest, plumpest hand seaman ever carried. Coughing alarmingly in the first fragrant cloud from his Latakia and Virginia leaf, the Captain beat forth to recover himself on deck.

The _Truxton_ was now six days out of Manila. For the past thirty-six hours, she might as well have been sunk in pitch, for any progress she made.... The ship's bell had just struck four. Bedient had finished clearing away tiffin things, and stepped on deck. The planking was like the galley-range he had left, and the fresh white paint of the three boats raised in blisters. The sea had an ugly look, yellow-green and dead, save where a shark's fin knifed the surface. The crew was lying forward under the awnings--a fiend-tempered outfit of Laskars and Chinese. Captain Carreras appeared on deck through the companion-way still farther aft and nodded to Bedient. Then both men looked at the sky, which was bra.s.sy above, but thickening in the North. It augmented darkly and streakily--like a tub of water into which bluing is added drop by drop.... A Chinese arose and tossed a handful of joss-tatters into the still air. And now the voice of the Captain brought the rest of the crew to its feet.

The China Sea can generate much deviltry to a square mile. The calm of death and the burn of perdition are in its bosom. Cholera, glutted with victims, steals to his couch in the China Sea; and since it is the pool of a thousand unclean rivers, the sins of Asia find a hiding-place there. It has ended for all time the voyages of brave mariners and mighty ships, and become a vault for the cargoes, and a tomb for the bones of men. The China Sea fostered the pirate, aided him in his b.l.o.o.d.y ways, and dragged him down, riches and all. Bed of disease, secret-place of the unclean, and graveyard of the seas; yet, this yellow-breasted fiend, ancient in devil-lore, can smile innocently as a child at the morning sun, and beguile the torrid stars to twinkling.

It was in this black heart that was first conceived the Tai Fung (typhoon), and there the great wind has its being to-day, resting and rising.

The Captain's eyes were deep in the North. Bedient's soul seemed to sense the awful solemnity on the face of the waters. He was unable afterward to describe his varying states of consciousness, from that first moment. He remembered thinking what a fine little man the Captain was; that their sailing together was done.... A sympathetic disorder was brewing deep down on the ocean floor; the water now had a charged appearance, and was foul as the roadstead along the mouths of the G.o.divari--a thick, whipped, yeasty look. The changes were very rapid.

Every few seconds, Bedient glanced at the Captain, and as often followed his gaze into the churning, blackening North.

A chill came into the deathly heat, but it was the cold of caverns, not of the vital open. The heat did not mix with it, but pa.s.sed by in layers--a novel movement of the atmospheres. Had the coolness been clean and normal, the sailors would have sprung to the rigging to breathe it, and to bare their bodies to the rain--after two days of h.e.l.l-pervading calm--but they only murmured now and fell to work.

An unearthly glitter, like the coloring of a dream, wavered in the East and West, while the North thickened and the South lay still in brilliant expectation.... In some hall-way when Bedient was a little boy, he recalled a light like this of the West and East. There had been a long narrow pane of yellow-green gla.s.s over the front door. The light used to come through that in the afternoon and fill the hall and frighten him. It was so on deck now.

The voices of the sailors had that same unearthly quality as the light--ineffectual, remote. Out of the hold of the _Truxton_ came a ghostly sigh. Bedient couldn't explain, unless it was some new and mighty strain upon the keel and ribs.

A moment more and the Destroyer itself was visible in the changing North. It was sharp-lined--a great wedge of absolute night--and from it, the last vestiges of day dropped back affrighted. And Bedient heard the voice of It; all that the human ear could respond to of the awful dissonances of storm; yet he knew there were ranges of sound above and below the human register--for they awed and preyed upon his soul.... He thought of some papers dear to him, and dropped below for them. The ship smelled old--as if the life were gone from her timbers.

Above once more, he saw a hideous turmoil in the black fabric--just wind--an avalanche of wind that gouged the sea, that could have shaken mountains.... The poor little _Truxton_ stared into the End--a puppy cowering on the track of a train.

And then It struck. Bedient was sprawled upon the deck. Blood broke from his nostrils and ears; from the little veins in his eyes and forehead. Parts of his body turned black afterward from the mysterious pressure at this moment. He felt he was being _born again into another world_.... The core of that Thing made of wind smashed the _Truxton_--a smash of air. It was like a thick sodden cushion, large as a battle-ship--hurled out of the North. The men had to breathe it--that seething havoc which tried to twist their souls free. When pa.s.sages to the lungs were opened, the dreadful compression of the air crushed through, tearing the membrane of throat and nostril.

Water now came over the ship in huge tumbling walls. Bedient slid over the deck, like a bar of soap from an overturned pail--clutching, torn loose, clutching again.... Then the Thing eased to a common hurricane such as men know. Gray flicked into the blackness, a corpse-gray sky, and the ocean seemed shaken in a bottle.

Laskars and Chinese, their faces and hands dripping red, were trying to get a boat overside when Bedient regained a sort of consciousness. The _Truxton_ was wallowing underfoot--as one in the saddle feels the tendons of his mount give way after a race. The Captain helped a huge Chinese to hold the wheel. The sea was insane.... They got the boat over and tumbled in--a dozen men. A big sea broke them and the little boat like a basket of eggs against the side of the ship.

Another boat was put over and filled with men. Another sea flattened them out and carried the stains away on the surge. There were only nine men left and a small boat that would hold but seven. Bedient helped to make a rigging to launch this over the stern. He saw that the thing might be done if the small craft were not broken in two against the rudder.

The Captain made no movement, had no thought to join these stragglers.

He was alone at the wheel, which played with his strength. His face was calm, but a little dazed. It did not occur to him other than to go down with his ship--the old tradition. The fatuousness of this appealed suddenly to Bedient. Carreras was his friend--the only other white man left. The two mates and boatswain had tried out the first two boats--eagerly.

Bedient ran to the wheel, tore the Captain from it and carried him in his arms toward the stern. A Chinese tried to knife him, but the man died, _as if_ struck by a flying bit of tackle. Bedient recaptured the Captain, who during the brief struggle had dumbly turned back to the wheel. It was all done in thirty seconds; Carreras was chucked into the stern-seat of the little boat, where he belonged. The body of a Laskar cushioned the craft from being broken against the rudder. And now they were seven.

The _Truxton_ had been broken above and below. She strangled--and was sucked down. Bedient saw her stern fling high like an arm; saw the big "X" in the centre of the name in the whitish light.

He remembered hearing that typhoons always double on their tracks; and that a ship is not done that manages to live through the first charge.

This one never came back. They had five days of thirst and equatorial sun. Two men died; two fell into madness; Captain Carreras, Andrew Bedient and a Chinese made Hong Kong without fatal hurt.

Captain and cook took pa.s.sage for London. The former declared he was through with the sea, except as a pa.s.senger. In twenty-five years he had never encountered serious accident before; he had believed himself accident-proof; and learning differently, did not propose to lose a second ship. He could bring himself to say very little about Bedient's action of the last moment on deck, but he asked the young man to share his fortunes. Captain Carreras intended to stay for a while at his mother's house in Surrey, but realized he could not stand that long....

Bedient told him he was not finished with Asia yet. On the day they parted, the Captain said there would be a letter for Bedient, on or before July first of every year, sent care the "_Marigold, New York_."... The old embarra.s.sment intervened at the last moment--but the younger man did not miss the Captain's heart-break.

SECOND CHAPTER

THE PACK-TRAIN IN LUZON

The first letter from Captain Carreras was a real experience for Bedient. Hours were needed to adjust the memories of his timid old friend to this flowing and affectionate expression. Captain Carreras, shut in a room with pen and white paper, loosed his pent soul in utterance. A fine fragrant soul it was, and all its best poured out to his memorable boy.

The letter had been written in England, of which the Captain was already weary. He must have more s.p.a.ce about, he confessed; and although he did not intend to break his pledge on the matter of navigating, he was soon to book a pa.s.sage for the Americas. He imagined there was the proper sort of island for him somewhere in those waters.

He had always had a weakness for "natives and hot weather." Bedient was asked to make his need known in any case of misfortune or extremity.

This was the point of the first letter, and of all the letters....

At length Captain Carreras settled in Equatoria, a big island well out of travel-lines in the Caribbean. The second and third letters made it even plainer that the old heart valves ached for the young man's coming. A mysterious binding of the two seems to have taken place in the months preceding the day of the great wind; and in that instant of stress and fury the Captain realized his supreme human relationship. It grew strong as only can a bachelor's love for a man. Indeed, Carreras was probably the first to discover in Andrew Bedient a something different, which Bedient himself was yet far from realizing.... The latter wished that the letters from the West Indies would not always revert to the strength of his hands. It brought up a memory of the despoiled face of the Chinese with the knife, and of the inert figure afterward on the planking.... Bedient knew that sometime he would go to find his friend.

Three years after the great wind, the excitement in Manila called Bedient across the China Sea. There had been a _coup_ of the American fleet, and soldiers from the States were on the way to the Islands....

In the following weeks, there was much to do and observe around that low large city of Luzon, the lights of which Andrew had seen many times at night from the harbor and the pa.s.sage--lights which seemed to lie upon still waters. When Pack-train Thirteen finally took the field from the big corral, to carry grub and ammunition to the moving forces and the few outstanding garrisons, Bedient had already been tried out and found excellent as cook of the outfit.