Fate Knocks at the Door Part 5

Then he rose with the remark that he had experienced altogether too much joy for one old man, in a single day--and started for bed in confusion. Bedient sat back laughing softly, but noting the feeble movement of the other's limbs, quickly gave his arm. Up they went together.... In the big room alone, Bedient put on night garments; and unsatisfied, crossed after a time to the Captain's quarters. He found the old man sitting in the dark by the window, the meerschaum glowing.... It may have been the darkness altogether; or that Bedient as a man gave the other an affection that the boy could not; in any event that night, they found each other across the externals.

This was the cue for further grand talks--pajamas and darkness. Often, if it were not too late, they would hear the natives singing in their cabins. The haunting elemental melody of the African curiously blended with the tuneful and cavalierish songs of Spain and fitted into the majestic nights. The darkies sang to the heart of flesh. In such moments, Equatoria was at her loveliest for Bedient--but the clear impersonal meditations did not come to him. In a hundred ways he had been given understanding during the first fortnight, of that something he had missed the first night on the Island. These people were infant souls. They were children, rudimentary in every thought. Theirs were sensations, not emotions; superst.i.tions, not faiths. Their consciousness was never deeper than the skin. And fresh from his s.p.a.cious years in India, where everything is old in spirit, where more often than not the beggar is a sage,--to encounter in this land of beauty, a people who were but babes in the thought of G.o.d--gave to Bedient the painful sense that his inner life was dissipating. There was no Gobind to restore him. It was as if the Spirit had favored the East; that Africa and the Western Isles had been cast apart as unfit for the experiment of the soul.

Moments of poignant sorrow were these when Bedient realized he was not of the West; that he irrevocably missed the great inner _con_tent of India, and would continue to hunger for it, until he returned, or coa.r.s.ened his sensibilities to the Western vibration. This last was as far from him as the commoner treason to a friend. There were moments when he feared Captain Carreras almost understood. That dear old seaman through his solitudes, his natural cleanness and kindness, his real love, and more than all, through those vague visions which come late to men of simple hearts--had seemed, from several startling sayings, to touch the very ache in the young man's breast. These approaches were under the cover of darkness:

"There was something about you then, Andrew," (meaning the long-ago days at sea,) "I haven't been able to forget.... Damme--I haven't done well here--"

Bedient bent forward, perceiving that "here" meant his earthly life, as well as Equatoria.

"I should have stayed over yonder and sat down as you did--before you did. Here"--now the Captain meant Equatoria alone--"I have thought of my stomach and my ease. My stomach has gone back on me--and there is no ease. Over there, I might have--oh, I might have thought more--but I didn't know enough, early enough. And you did--at seventeen, you did!

That's what made you. They're all mad up in The States, and they're just little children down here.... I might have profited in India--"

That was a frequent saying of the Captain's about the States. Twice a year at least, he was accustomed to make the voyage to New York.... The truth was, the old man felt a yearning for something the years and India had given Bedient. He felt much more than he said, and often regarded the young man, as one rapt in meditation.... His interest in Gobind and the Himalayas was insatiable; much more eagerly did he listen regarding the Punjab than about the ports he had known so well--and the changes that had pa.s.sed under the eyes of the young man in Manila and j.a.pan.... When Bedient was relating certain events of days and nights, that had become happy memories through the little things of the soul, Captain Carreras would start to convey the indefinite desires he felt; then suddenly, the deep intimacy of his revelations would appear to his timid nature, and even in the mothering dark, the panic would strike home--and he would swing off with pitiful humor about goats or some other Island affair....

Bedient had an odd way of a.s.sociating men whom he liked with mothers of his own imagining. Happily discovering fine qualities in a man, he would conjure up a mother to fit them.... Often, he saw the little Englishwoman whose boy had taken early to the seas.... She was plump and placid in her cap; inclined to think a great deal for herself, but still she allowed herself to be kept in order mentally and spiritually by her husband, whose orthodoxy was a whip. Perhaps she died thinking her tremulous little departures were sure attractions of h.e.l.l and heresy. Bedient liked to think of her as vastly bigger than her mate, bigger than she dreamed--but alone and afraid.

SEVENTH CHAPTER

_ANDANTE CON MOTO_--FIFTH

For the first time in his life, Bedient learned what America liked to read.... All the finer expressions of the human mind and hand gave him deep joy. His love and divination for the good and the true were the same that characterized the rarest minds of our ancestors, who had access only to a few n.o.ble books in their formative years. And Bedient's was the expanded and fortified intelligence of one who has grown up with the Bible.

Each ship brought the latest papers, periodicals and certain pickings from the publishers' lists. India had not prepared Bedient for this.

With glad welcome he discovered David Cairns here and there among short-story contributors, but the love of man and woman which the stories in general exploited, struck him of Indian ideals as shifty and pestilential. The woman of fiction was equipped with everything to make her as common as man. She was glib, pert, mundane, her mind a chatter-mill; a creature of fur, paint, hair, and absurdly young. The clink of coins was her most favorable accompaniment; and her giving of self was a sort of disrobing formality. The men who pursued her were forward and solicitous. There was something of sacrilege about it all.

The minds and souls of real women--such were not matters for American story; and yet the Americans wrote with dangerous facility. Bedient, who worshipped the abstraction, Womanhood, felt his intelligence seared, calcined.... Only here and there was a bit of real literature--usually by a woman. The men seemed hung up to dry at twenty-five. There was no manhood of mind.

Bedient's sense of loneliness became pervasive. Apparently he was outside the range of consciousness--for better or worse--with the country to which he had always hoped to give his best years. His ideals of the literary art were founded upon large flexible lines of beauty into which every dimension of life fell according to the reader's vision. He felt himself alone; that he was out of alignment with this young race from which he had sprung, to wander so far and so long.

And yet there was a Woman up there for him to know. This was imbedded in his consciousness. Soon he should go to her.... He should find her.

And as the Hindu poets falteringly called upon the lotos and the nectars; upon the brilliance of midday athwart the plain, and the glory of moonlight upon mountain and glacier and the standing water of foliaged pools; upon the seas at large, and the stars and the bees and the G.o.ds--to express the triune loveliness of woman (which mere man may only venture to appraise, not to know)--so should he, Bedient, envision the reality when the winds of the world brought him home to her heart.

There was much to do at the _hacienda_. The Captain was past riding a great deal, and the large hill and river property--the coffee, cacao, cotton, cane and tobacco industries profited much better with an overseer. Still Bedient slowly realized that the hundreds of natives in touch with Captain Carreras' plantations worked about as well for him as they knew. Single-handed, Carreras had done great things, and was loved as a good doctor is loved. In spite of his huge acc.u.mulation of land, the Captain was the least greedy of men. He had been content to improve slowly. His incalculable riches, as he had early confided to Bedient, were in the river-beds. Only a few of these placer possibilities were operated. There was a big leak in the washings.

Still, the natives were not greedy, either. They were home-keepers, and had no way to dispose of bullion.

Carreras had managed all his affairs so as to keep the government on his side, and his revenues were no little part of the support of the Capitol. This was his largest outlay, but in return he was protected.... Deep disorder brooded in the present political silence; all recalcitrants were gathering under Celestino Rey--but this situation was only beginning to be understood.

At certain times of year, Carreras had in his employ the heads of five hundred families, and had shown himself unique in paying money for labor. This was un-Spanish. It gave him the choice of the natives. He represented therefore a stable and prosperous element of the population. His revenues were becoming enormous. The Hollanders paid him a fortune annually for raw chocolate. This, with tree-planting and culture, would double, for the soil seemed to contain the miraculous properties of _alkahest_. The point of all this is, that Captain Carreras had come to be regarded as the right wing of the government.

He arranged all his dealings on a friendly rather than a business basis; his good-will was his best protection.... Bedient had been in Equatoria for several months when Jaffier sent for the Captain.

"I don't feel like it, but I'd better go," the old man said. "Something amiss is in the air. Damme, I've got all delicate to the saddle since you came, sir.... I used to think nothing of the ride down town--and now it's a carriage.... Ah, well, you can try out a new symphony--and tell me what it says when I get back."

As it turned out, Bedient did exactly this thing.... Time could not efface the humor evoked by the sight or sound of the magnificent orchestrelle. During one of the Captain's New York trips, he had heard a famous orchestra. The effect upon him was of something superhuman.

The Captain went again--followed the musicians to Boston and Philadelphia. The result was more or less the same. Soul flew in one direction; mind in another; and, inert before the players--a little fat man, perspiring, weeping, ecstatic. What came of it, he had told Bedient in this way:

"The _Hatteras_ was to sail at night-fall, but on that morning I went into a music-store, not knowing what I wanted exactly,--but a souvenir of some kind, a book about orchestras. It appears, I told a man there how I'd been philanderin' with the musicians; how I had caught them in an off day at Springfield, Ma.s.s., and bought cornucopias of Pilsner until they would have broken down and wept had they not been near their instruments.... It was a big music-store, and he was a very good man.

He sold me the orchestrelle that morning. You think I had an electric plant installed down here to light the house and drive my sugar-mill, don't you? It wasn't that at all, but to run the big music-box yonder.

The man had smoothly attached a current, but he said I could just as well pump it with my feet. Then he called in a church organist--to drive the stops. Between them, they got me where I was all run down from that orchestra crowd. They said a child could learn the stops....

You should have heard my friends on the _Hatteras_--when the orchestrelle was put aboard that afternoon. They never forget that.

Then we had a triple ox-cart made down in Coral City, and four span were goaded up the trail--and there she stands.

"Andrew, they finally left me alone with it and a couple of hundred music-rolls.... It was hours after, that I came forth a sick man to cable for power.... About those music-rolls--I had called for the best.

One does that blind, you know. But the best in music matters, it appears, has nothing to do with retired sea-captains.... It's a pretty piece of furniture. The orchestra had died out of me by the time we had the electric-plant going.... I take it you have to be caught young to deal with those stops.... You go after it, Andrew. It scares me and the natives when it begins to pipe up. I had a time getting my household back that first time. Maybe, I didn't touch the right b.u.t.ton--or I touched too many. You go after it, my boy--it's all there--_appa.s.sionato--oboe--'consharto'--vox humana_ and the whole system--"

... It is hard for one to realize how little music Bedient had heard in his life. Just a few old songs--always unfinished--but they had haunted the depths of him, and made him think powerfully. Certain strains had loosed within him emotions, ancient as world-dawns to his present understanding, but intimate as yesterday to something deeper than mind.

And so he came to ask; "Are not all the landmarks of evolution identified with certain sounds or combinations of sounds? Is there not an answering interpretation in the eternal scroll of man's soul, to all that is true in music?"

Long ago, one night in Korea, he had been wakened by the yammering of a tigress. His terror for a moment had been primal, literally a simian's helpless quaking. Earlier still, he had heard a hoot-owl, and encountered through it, his first realization of phantom horrors; he knew then there _was_ an Unseen, and nether acoustics; here was a key to ghostly doors. A mourning-dove had brought back in a swift pa.s.sage of consciousness the breast of some savage mother. Night-birds everywhere meant to him restless mystery.... Is sound a key to psychology? Is the history of our emotions, from monster to man, sometime to be interpreted through music--as yet the infant among the arts?

The answer had come--why the unfinished songs had the greater magic for him. So diaphanous and ethereal is this marvellously expressive young medium, music, that the composers could only pin a strain here and there to concrete form--as a bit of lace from a lovely garment is caught by a thorn. So they build around it--as flesh around spirit. But it was the strain of pure spirit that sang in Bedient's mind--and knew no set forms. So an artistic imagination can finish a song or a picture, many times better than the original artist could with tones or pigments. Too much finish binds the spirit, and checks the feeling of those who follow to see or hear.

These, and many thoughts had come to him from the unpretentious things of music.... _Ben Bolt_ brought back the memory of some prolonged and desperate sorrow. The lineaments of the tragedy were effaced, but its effect lived and preyed upon him under the stress of its own melody.

Once he had heard _Caller Herrin'_ grandly sung, and for the time, the circuit was complete between the Andrew Bedient of Now, and another of a bleak land and darker era. In this case the words brought him a clearer picture--gaunt coasts and the thrilling humanity of common fisher folk.... Many times a strain of angelic meaning and sweetness was yoked to a silly effigy of words; but he rejoiced in opposite examples, such as that little lullaby of Tennyson's, _Sweet and Low_, which J. Barnby seemed to have exactly _tono_-graphed.... Once across infantry campfires, _Juanita_ came, with a bleeding pa.s.sion for home--to him who had no home. There was a lyrical Ireland very dear to him--songs and poems which wrung him as if he were an exile; Tom Moore's _Sunflower Song_ incited at first a poignant anguish, as of a sweetheart's dead face; and _Lead Kindly Light_ brought almost the first glimmer of spiritual light across the desolate distances of the world--like a tender smile from a greater being than man. And there were baleful songs that ran red with blood, as the _Carmagnole_; and roused past the sense of physical pain, like the _Ma.r.s.eillaise_. What heroic sins have been committed in their spell! By no means was it all uplift which the songs brought. There was one night when he heard _Mandalay_ sung by some British seaman across the dark of a j.a.panese harbor. They were going out, and he was coming into port....

These were his sole adventures in music, but they had bound his dreams together. He had felt, _if the right person were near_, he could have made music tell things, not to be uttered in mere words; and under the magic of certain songs, that which was creative within him, even dim and chaotic, stirred and warmed for utterance.... So fresh a surface did Bedient bring to the Carreras music-room.

The time had come when his nature hungered for great music. The orchestrelle added to the Island something he needed soulfully.

Experimenting with the rolls, the stops and the power, he found there was nothing he could not do in time. Music answered--trombone, clarionet, horn, ba.s.soon, hautboy, flute, 'cello answered. Volume and tempo were mere lever matters. On the rolls themselves were suggestions. Reaching this point, his exaltation knew no bounds. He looked upon the great array of rolls--symphonies, sonatas, concertos, fantasies, rhapsodies, overtures, prayers, requiems, meditations, minuets--and something of that rising power of grat.i.tude overcame him, as only once before in his life--when he had realized that the Bible was all _words_, and they were for him. From the first studious marvellings, Bedient's mind lifted to adoring gratefulness in which he could have kissed the hands of the toilers who had made this instrument answer their dreams. Then, he fell deeply into misgiving. It seemed almost a sacrilege for him to take music so cheaply; that he had not earned such joy. But he could praise them in his heart, and he did with every sound.

The orchestrelle unfolded to a spirit like this. Doubtless his early renderings of random choice were weird, but more and more as he went on, the great living things righted themselves in his consciousness, for he had ear and soul and love for them. Some great fissure in his nature had long needed thus to be filled. He sent for books about the great composers; descriptions of the cla.s.sics; how the themes were developed through different instruments. Then he wanted the history of all music; and for weeks his receptivity never faltered. No neophyte ever brought a purer devotion to the masters. His first loves--the _Andante in F_, the three movements of the _Kreutzer Sonata_, a prayer from _Otello_, the _Twelfth_ _Rhapsody,_ the _Swan Song_ and the _Evening Star_, and finally _Isolde's Triumph over Death_--these were ascendings, indeed--to the point of wings.

The stops so formidable at first became as stars in the dark.... Little loves, little fears and sins and hopes were all he had known before; and now he entered into the torrential temperaments of the masters--magnificent and terrifying souls who dared to sin against G.o.d, or die defying man; whose pa.s.sions stormed the world; whose dirges were wrung from heaven. Why, these men levelled emperors and aspired to angels, violated themselves, went mad with music, played with h.e.l.l's own dissonances, and dared to transcribe their baptisms, illuminations, temptations, Gethsemanes, even their revilings and stigmata.

The dirges lifted him to immensity from which the abysses of the world spread themselves below. Two marches of Chopin, and the death-march of Siegfried, the haunting suggestion of a soul's preparation for departure in Schubert's _Unfinished_; the _Death of Aase_, the _Pilgrim's Chorus_, one of Mozart's requiems, and that Napoleonic _funebre_ from the _Eroica_--these, with others, grouped themselves into an unearthly archipelago--towering cliffs of glorious gloom, white birds silently sweeping the gray solitudes above the breakers....

It was during the four days while Captain Carreras remained in Coral City with Jaffier, that Bedient entered into the mysterious enchantment of the _Andante_ movement of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony. He had played it all, forgetting almost to breathe, and then returned to the second movement which opens with the 'celli:

[Ill.u.s.tration: Musical notation]

Again and again it unfolded for him, but not its full message. There was a meaning in it _for him_! He heard it in the night; three voices in it--a man, a woman and a soul.... The l.u.s.trous third Presence was an angel--there for the sake of the woman. She was in the depths, but great enough to summon the angel to her tragedy. The man's figure was obscure, disintegrate.... Bedient realized in part at least that this was destined to prove his greatest musical experience....

Captain Carreras found much to do in the city, but he did not tell Bedient that the real reason for his remaining four days was that he couldn't sooner summon courage for the long ride home. He spoke but little regarding the reasons Jaffier had called him.

"He's afraid of Celestino Rey, and likely has good reason," said the Captain wearily. "The old pirate is half-dead below the knees, but his ugly ambition still burns bright. He thinks he ought to be drawing all the Island tributes, instead of the government. Jaffier expects a.s.sa.s.sination. On this point, it would be well to watch for the death of Rey. These two old h.e.l.l-weathered Spaniards are worth watching--each tossing spies over the other's fences, and openly conducting affairs with melting courtesy toward each other--but I don't seem to have much appet.i.te for the game. There was a time when I would have stopped work and helped Jaffier whip this fellow. But I hardly think he'll take our harvests and the river-beds just yet--"

They talked late. The Captain alternated from his bed to a chair, seemed unwilling for Bedient to leave and unable to sleep or find ease anywhere. He was over-tired, he explained, and hearing about Bedient's experience with the _Andante con moto_, insisted upon it being played that night....

"It's very soothing," Carreras said, when Andrew returned to the upper apartment. "I think I can sleep now. Off to bed with you, lad."

So lightly did Bedient sleep, however,--for the music haunted his brain,--that he was aroused by the bare feet of a servant in the hall-way, before the latter touched his door to call him. Captain Carreras had asked for him. The glow of dawn was in the old man's quarters, and he smiled in a queer, complacent way from his bed, as if a long-looked-for solution to some grave problem had come in the night, and he wanted his friend to guess. A hand lifted from the coverlet, and Bedient's sped to it; yet he saw that something more was wanted. The Captain's shoulder nudged a little, and the smile had become wistful.

He did not fail to understand the need, but other realizations were pressing into his brain. So the Captain nudged his shoulder again bashfully. Bedient bent and took him in his arms.

It was death. Bedient had known it from the first instant of entering, but he was not prepared. He could not speak--only look into the tender, glowing smile. Captain Carreras finally turned his eyes into the morning:

"You know it was very foolish of me--very--to think I could make you happy, Andrew, with all these riches," he said at last, not thickly, but very low, as if he had saved strength for what he wished to say....