The Ragged Edge Part 36

She marvelled at his apparent imperviousness to the heat. He worked afternoons, when everybody else went to sleep; he worked at night under a heat-giving light, with insects buzzing and dropping about, with a blue haze of tobacco smoke that tried to get out and could not. With his arms bare, the neckband of his shirt tucked in, he laboured. Frequently he would take up a box of talc and send a shower down his back, or fill his palms with the powder and rub his face and arms and hands. He kept at it even on those nights when the monsoon began to break with heavy storms and he had to weight down with stones everything on his table. Soot was everywhere, for the lamp would not stay trimmed in the gale. But he wrote on.

As the novel grew Ruth was astonished to see herself enter and dominate it: sometimes as she actually was, with all her dreams reviewed--as if he had caught her talking in her sleep. It frightened her to behold her heart and mind thus laid bare; but the chapter following would rea.s.sure her. Here would be a woman perfectly unrecognizable, strong, ruthless but just.

This heroine ruled an island which (in the '80s) was rich with sh.e.l.l--pearl-sh.e.l.l; and she fought pearl thievers and marauding beachcombers, fought them with weapons and with woman's guile. No man knew whence she had come nor why. That there would eventually be a lover Ruth knew; and she waited his appearance upon the scene, waited with an impatience which was both personal and literary. If the creator drew a hero anything like himself, she would accept it as a sign that he did care a little.

Ruth did not resent the use of her mind and body in this tale of adventure. She gloried in it: he needed her. When the hero finally did appear, Ruth became filled with gentle self-mockery. He was no Hoddy, but a tremendous man, with hairy arms and bearded face and drink-shattered intellect. Day by day she followed the spiritual and physical contest between this man and woman. One day a pall of blackness encompa.s.sed the sick mind of the giant; and when he came to his senses, they properly functioned: and he saw his wife by his bedside!

An astonishing idea entered Ruth's head one day--when the novel was complete in the rough--an astonishing idea because it had not developed long ago. A thing which had mystified her since childhood, a smouldering wonder why it should be, and until now she had never felt the urge to investigate. She tucked the mission Bible under her arm, and crooking a finger at Rollo, went forth to the west beach where the sou'-west surge piled up muddily, burdened with broken spars, crates, boxes, and weeds. During the wet monsoon the west beach was always littered. Where the stuff came from was always a mystery.

The Enschede Bible--the one out of which she read--had been strangely mutilated. Sections and pages had been pasted together, and all through both Testaments a word had been blotted out. The open books she knew by heart; aye, they had been ground into her, morning and night. One of her duties, after she had been taught to read, had been to read aloud after breakfast and before going to bed. The same old lines and verses, over and over, until there had come times when shrieking would have relieved her. How she had hated it!... All these mumblings which were never explained, which carried no more sense to her brain than they would have carried to Old Morgan's swearing parrot. Like the parrot, she could memorize the lines, but she could not understand them. Never had her father explained. "Read the first chapter of Job"; beyond that, nothing.

Whenever she came upon the obliterated word and paused, her father would say: "Faith. Go on." So, after a time, encountering the blot, she herself would supply the word Faith. But was it Faith? That is what she was this day going to find out.

She closed her eyes more vividly to recall some line which had carried the blot. And so she came upon the word _Love_. Blotted out--Love! With infinite care, through nearly a thousand pages, her father had obliterated the word _Love_. Why? Love was a word of G.o.d's, and yet her father had denied it--denied it to the Book, denied it to his own flesh and blood. Why? He could preach the Word and deny Love!--tame the savage heart, succour broken white men!--pray with his face strained with religious fervour! The idea made her dizzy because it was so inexplicable. She could accord her father with one grace: he was not in any manner a hypocrite. Tender with the sick, firm with the strong, fearless, with a body that had the resistance of iron, there was nothing of the hypocrite in him.

She recalled him. A gaunt, powerful man: no feature of his face decided, and yet for all that it had the significance of a countenance hewn out of rock. Never had he corrected her with hand or whip, the ring in his voice had always been sufficient to cower her. But never had the hand touched her with a father's caress; never had he taken her into his arms; never had he kissed her. She had never been "My child" or "My dear"; always her name--Ruth.

Love, obliterated, annihilated; out of his heart and out of his Bible. Why? Here was a curtain indeed. No matter. It was ended. She herself had cut the slender tie that had bound them. Ah, but she could remember; and many things there were that she would never forgive. Sometimes--a lonely forlorn child--she had gone to him and put her arms around his neck. Stonily he had disengaged himself. "I forbid you to do that." She had brought home a puppy one day. He had taken it back. He destroyed her clumsily made dolls whenever he found them.

Once she had asked him: "Are you my father?"

He had answered: "I am."

She had no reason to doubt him. Her father, her own father! She remembered now a verse from the Psalms her father had always been quoting; but now she recited it with perfect understanding.

_How long wilt thou forget me, O Lord? for ever? How long wilt thou hide thy face from me?_

She came upon the Song of Songs--which had been pasted down in the Enschede Bible--the burning litany of love; and from time to time she intoned some verse of tender lyric beauty. There was one verse that haunted and mocked her.

_Stay me with flagons, comfort me with apples, for I am sick of love._

Here was Ruth Enschede--sick of love! Love--something the world would always keep hidden from her, at least human love. All she had found was the love of this dog. She threw her arms around Rollo's neck and laid her cheek upon the flea-bitten head.

"Oh, Rollo, there are so many things I don't know! But you love me, don't you?"

Rollo wagged his stump violently and tried to lick her face. He understood. When she released him he ran down the beach for a stick which he fetched and laid at her feet. But she was staring seaward and did not notice the offering.

October. The skies became brilliant; the dry monsoon was setting in. Then came the great day. It was at lunch when McClintock announced that in the mail-pouch he had found a letter addressed to Howard Taber, care of Donald McClintock and so-forth.

Spurlock grew cold. All that confidence, born of irony, disappeared; and fear laid hold of him. The envelope might contain only a request as to what he wanted done with the ma.n.u.scripts. In mailing the tales he had not enclosed return postage or the equivalent in money.

"So you're writing under a nom de plume, eh?" said McClintock, holding out the letter.

"You open it, Ruth. I'm in a funk," Spurlock confessed.

McClintock laughed as he gave the letter to Ruth. She, having all the confidence in the world, ripped off an end and drew out the contents--a letter and a check. What the editor had to say none of the three cared just then. Spurlock s.n.a.t.c.hed the check out of Ruth's hands and ran to the window.

"A thousand dollars in British pounds!... A thousand dollars for four short stories!" The tan on Spurlock's face lightened. He was profoundly stirred. He turned to Ruth and McClintock. "You two ...

both of you! But for you I couldn't have done it. If only you knew what this means to me!"

"We do, lad," replied McClintock, gravely. The youth of them! And what was he going to do when they left his island? What would Donald McClintock be doing with himself, when youth left the island, never more to return?

Ruth was thrilling with joy. Every drop of blood in her body glowed and expanded. To go to Hoddy, to smother him with kisses and embraces in this hour of triumph! To save herself from committing the act--the thought of which was positive hypnotism--she began the native dance. Spurlock (himself verging upon the hysterical) welcomed the diversion. He seized a tray, squatted on the floor, and imitated the tom-tom. It was a mad half-hour.

"Well, lad, supposing you read what the editor has to say?" was McClintock's suggestion, when the frolic was over.

"You read it, Ruth. You're luck."

"Aye!" was McClintock's inaudible affirmative. Luck. The boy would never know just how lucky he was. Ruth read:

DEAR SIR:

"We are delighted to accept these four stories, particularly 'The Man Who Could Not Go Home.' We shall be pleased to see more of your work.

"'The Man Who Could Not Go Home.' Why," said Ruth, "you did not read that to us."

"Wanted to see if I could turn out one all on my own," replied Spurlock, looking at McClintock, who nodded slightly. "It was the story of a man, so to speak, who had left his vitals in his native land and wandered strange paths emptily. But never mind that. Come along home, Ruth. I'm burning to get to work."

After all those former bitter failures, this cup was sweet, even if there was the flavour of irony. At least, he would always be able to take care of Ruth. The Dawn Pearl; how well they had named her!

The pearl without price--his and not his!

He took her arm and drew it under his; and together they went down the veranda steps. Ruth's arm trembled and her step faltered, but he was too far away in thought to be observant. He saw rifts in clouds--sunshine. The future was not so black. All the money he earned--serving McClintock and the muse--could be laid away. Then, in a few years, he and Ruth might fare forth in comfort and security. After five or six years it would not be difficult to hide in Italy or in France. No; the future was not so dark; there was a bit of dawn visible. If this success continued, it would be easy to a.s.sume the name of Taber. Ruth could not very well object, since an air of distinction would go with Taber.

Suddenly he felt Ruth swing violently away from him, and he wheeled to learn the cause.

He beheld a tall gaunt man, his brown face corrugated like a winter's road, grim, stony. His gangling body was clothed in rusty twill trousers and a long black seersucker coat, b.u.t.toned to the throat, around which ran a collar which would have marked him the world over as a man of the Word. His hand rested heavily and cruelly upon Ruth's shoulder.

"So, wanton, I have found you!"

"Wanton! Why, you infernal liar!" cried Spurlock, striking at the arm. But the free arm of the stranger hit him a flail-like blow on the chest and sent him sprawling into the yielding sand. Berserker, Spurlock rose, head down, and charged.

"Hoddy, Hoddy!... No, no! This is my father!" warned Ruth.

Spurlock halted in his tracks. "But what does he mean by calling you a wanton?--you, my wife?"

Enschede's hand slipped from his daughter's shoulder. The iron slipped from his face, leaving it blank with astonishment. "Your wife?"

"His lawful wife," said Ruth, with fine dignity.

For a moment none of them stirred; then slowly Enschede turned away. To Spurlock's observing eye, Enschede's wrinkles multiplied and the folds in his clothes. The young man's imagination suddenly pictured the man as a rock, loosed from its ancient bed, crumbling as it fell. But why did he turn away?

"Wait!" Ruth called to her father.

The recollection of all her unhappiness, the loveless years, the unending loneliness, the injustice of it, rolled up to her lips in verbal lava. It is not well that a daughter should talk to her father as Ruth talked to hers that day.

The father, granite; the daughter, fire: Spurlock saw the one and heard the other, his amazement indescribable. Never before had he seen a man like Enschede nor heard a voice like Ruth's. But as the mystery which surrounded Ruth fell away that which enveloped her father thickened.