The Sailor Part 59

"Yes, but that's because you were a sailor before you were a writer, isn't it?"

"It's what every writer that's worth his salt has got to be," said the young man, quaintly. "John Milton was a sailor, too. A master mariner."

"Yes, of course," said Silvia. "I see what you mean."

She had decided already that she very much liked this strange, wistful, rather fine-drawn young man. He was quite different from any other young man she had ever met. Somehow, he was exactly like his book.

"It is odd you should have been on the same ship as my brother."

"Yes," said the Sailor. "And yet it isn't. Nothing is really queer if you come to think about it. It seems very much more strange to me that I should be in this beautiful room talking to you ladies, than that I should have been in the port watch with Klond.y.k.e aboard the _Margaret Carey_."

"The sea is more familiar to you than London," said Silvia, completely disarmed by his navete, as Mary had been.

Otto now came in. His general aspect was not unlike Klond.y.k.e's, his air was frank and manly, yet his bearing was more considered than that hero's. All the same he had a full share of the family charm.

"Otto," said Mary, "this is Mr. Harper, who knows Jack."

"What, you know old Fly-up-the-Creek! Heaven help you!"

Mr. Harper had already made the discovery that these people had a language of their own, which he could only follow with difficulty. It was a language which Madame Sadleir didn't teach, a language that Mr.

Ambrose didn't use, although he understood it well enough; in fact, it was a language he had never heard before, and he somehow felt that Lady Pridmore was rather pained by it.

"Mr. Harper," said Mary, "this is our respectable brother. He is true to type."

"For the love of heaven, be quiet!" said Otto, gulping his tea.

"Here's your book on Nietzsche," said Silvia. "Mr. Harper, what do you think of Nietzsche?"

Mr. Harper had never heard of Nietzsche, and he didn't hesitate to say so. Lady Pridmore alone, of the four people present, failed to respect his frankness. To her mind, it was inconceivable that an author by profession and one reputed to be successful should not have heard of Nietzsche. It was almost as if he had not heard of Lord Tennyson.

Yet Mary and Silvia and even the Prince honored this candor. This chap was a queer freak in the eyes of the budding diplomatist, but he had been told by people who knew about such matters that all writing chaps were, if they were at all first rate. All the same, he liked him. One felt he was straight and decent, in spite of his outlandishness.

Somehow this quaint bird did not seem to be following the usual line of country of the soaring eagles of the moment whom his sisters brought to the house from time to time.

The Prince took not unkindly to the sailorman, who had written two very curious books about the sea. They were much overrated, in the Prince's opinion. The style was uncertain, and the colors were laid on too thick for anything, but people who knew Ted Ambrose, for instance, thought a good deal of them. Personally, the Prince believed in style.

Stevenson, for example, wrote like an educated man. This man's writing in its crude force had somehow the air of the lower deck. Ambrose said there was greatness in it, all the same. Personally, the Prince preferred polished mediocrity, and was not ashamed of the fact, not that one could call a chap like Stevenson mediocre. But this man Harper lacked something, although it was to his credit to admit that he had never heard of Nietzsche. But obviously he hadn't.

VIII

Mary's enthusiasm for the sailorman was shared by Silvia, although not perhaps in an equal degree. Lady Pridmore was inclined to be a little distressed by it, in the way that she was inclined to be a little distressed by so many things. The Prince merely thought there was no harm in the chap, but that he was a freak.

Edward Ambrose, who had discovered what Lady Pridmore considered this rather odd young man, had many questions to answer when next he appeared in Queen Street. As a particular friend of the house, he turned the tables by adroitly chaffing Lady Pridmore and the Prince, and by ministering gaily to Mary's and Silvia's tempered ecstasies.

In the meantime, the Sailor was indulging little private ecstasies of his own. The visit to a Mayfair drawing-room had marked one more epoch in a strange career. He had entered another new and wonderful world.

It was a world whose language was a closed book to him at present.

Perhaps it always would be; at any rate, it seemed to lie out of the range even of Madame Sadleir, whose instruction he still courted diligently.

It was a world of peculiar grace, of external harmony and beauty. The trained minds marching with the trained movements of these people lent the quality of poetry to all they said and did. And they took what he could only call their refinement so much for granted, that they seemed almost to apologize for the sheer niceness in which they had so completely enveloped themselves. He had not known that such people existed in ma.s.s and bulk, at least that they had a corporate life of their own. The glamour they had for him was extraordinary. It would have been impossible to think without a thrill of his friend Miss Pridmore, even if she had not been the sister of the immortal Klond.y.k.e.

Mary herself found so much in common with the Sailor that she began to show him the sights of the town. She was quite a modern girl in her breadth and independence, happily inoculated against every sort of ism, but at the same time capable of following any line she marked out for herself. The Sailor had soon begun to interest her very much, and instinctively divining something of his handicap, she wished to help him all she could.

About a week after the first visit to Queen Street, she led the young man to the National Gallery to see the Turners. They spent a very profitable morning holding high communion before them. His unstudied comments seemed to give her a juster view not of art merely, but of life as well. The depth of his intoxication as he stood before these seascapes, sensing them, drinking them in, filled her with wonder.

"G.o.d!" he muttered once. She saw his eyes were full of tears, and she felt a stab of pity.

Life had not been kind to this man. A thousand subtle, half apprehended things had already told her that. He had said in his odd way, which was yet so poignant, that he "had started a long way behind scratch." Indeed, it was the sight of these very Turners which had wrung the admission from him.

After this, they went one day to Manchester Square to see the Wallace collection, and to concerts on several Sunday afternoons, but the climax of esthetic delight was reached for Henry Harper when one evening he was taken to the Opera to hear "Tristan." Edward Ambrose, who it seemed numbered the super-rich among his friends, had been lent a box on the grand tier. And nothing would content him save that others should share the blessings which attend acquaintance with plutocracy.

The box was able to accommodate six persons, and those whom Edward Ambrose lured into honoring it and being honored by it were the three ladies, the Prince, Henry Harper, and himself. Lady Pridmore and the Prince were a little bored undoubtedly. She had the lowest opinion of Wagner and thought the Germans overrated generally. The Prince was more discreet in his condemnation, but he certainly thought the Prelude was too long. Edward Ambrose, Mary, and Silvia had heard it so often that it was almost ceasing to be an excitement for them: a frame of mind, it is said, which connotes the amateur. As for Mr. Harper, that was an ever-memorable night.

From this time on he was in a state of growing ecstasy which threatened to become perilous. Existence was now an enchanted thing. A veritable Fairy Princess had come into his life. In speech, in manner, in look, in deed, she was of royal kin. In all the Sailor's wanderings, in all his imaginings, no mortal woman had a.s.sumed the significance of this sister of the immortal Klond.y.k.e.

O G.o.ddess rare and strange! He was already in her thrall. She was gray-eyed Athena of whom his reading had lately been telling him, she was Wisdom herself come to earth in the disciplined splendor of her spirit. Already he was prostrate at the shrine. It was for Her that he had sailed the mult.i.tudinous seas, it was for Her that he had traversed noisome caverns measureless to man.

Aladdin, with a flash of the wonderful lamp, had shown him a reason for many things. Strange and dreadful burdens had been laid upon him, every inch of his endurance had been tested in Fate's crucible, that in the end he might win through to a high destiny. Was it for nothing that, shoeless and stockingless, he had cried, "Orrible Crime on the Igh Seas," in the slush of a Blackhampton gutter? Was it for nothing that he had looked on the Island of San Pedro? No; there was purpose behind it all. At the chosen hour the G.o.ddess Athena was to appear in order that he might be healed with the divine wisdom.

Life was touched to very fine issues for the Sailor now. And yet so swift was the change that he did not realize its peril. The sister of Klond.y.k.e meant much to him already. Sometimes he read his work to her.

When they discussed it afterwards her comments would reveal a depth of knowledge that astonished him, and raised the whole matter of the argument to a higher plane. Many an enchanted talk they had together.

So miraculously were their minds in tune that it almost seemed they must have conversed through unnumbered ages. Then, too, in the most tactful and delicate way, she was his guide amid the elusive paths of this new and divine world he was entering. Yet she asked so little and gave so much, such a change was wrought in his life by subtle degrees, that he was blind to the terrible danger.

It was in late spring, when they had known each other nearly three months, that the Sailor had a first intimation of coming disaster. By that time he had yielded completely to a state of bliss. Moreover, he was now in the thrall of Athena's counterfeit and epitome as imaged by other sailormen who had held communings with her. She had sent to Brinkworth Street on three successive Mondays, recking nought of her deed, certain magic volumes in which she herself was mirrored by the mind of a poet: "Richard Feverel," "Beauchamp," and "The Egoist." And then as he felt the sorcery of Renee, Clara, Lucy, and other adumbrations of Athena herself, something happened.

It was merely that she went out of town for a fortnight. But that fortnight was enough to tell the Sailor one tragic thing. A glamour had gone from the earth. The gra.s.s of May was no longer green; Chelsea's river was no longer a vindication of Turner; the birds no longer sang in Middles.e.x.

A strange thing had come to pa.s.s. The Sailor had suffered one sea change the more. But at first, had his life depended on it, he could not have said what it was. He only knew that he was losing appet.i.te for the magic food on which he had been waxing lately: it was no longer possible to devour poetry and wisdom in the way he had done. Moreover his pen no longer flew across the paper. It took him a whole week to do that which he now expected to accomplish in a morning, and then the result pleased him so little that he tore it up. He was bitterly disconcerted by this mystery. But one day, the eighth of her absence, the truth came to him, like a ghost in the night. Life was no longer possible without Mary Pridmore.

It was about four o'clock of a morning in June when this fact overtook him. As he lay in bed, facing it as well as he could, it seemed to submerge him. He sprang forth to meet the cold dawn creeping from the Thames, flung up the blind and opened the window. In the grip of the old relentless force he turned his eyes to the east. The faint flecks of orange across the river were the gates of paradise, yet the Sailor hardly knew whether the sinister gloom beyond was a bank of cloud or the trees upon the Island of San Pedro. In an exaltation of the spirit which he had only known once before in his life, he seemed to hear a particular name being twittered by the birds in the eaves. Mary Pridmore! Mary Pridmore!

It was fantastic, it was ridiculous, it was perhaps a form of mania, but there was the fact. And a policeman, pa.s.sing along Brinkworth Street at that moment, seemed to tread out that magic name upon its echoing pavement!

She had given him her address: Miss Pridmore, at Greylands, near Woking. He must write, she had said, but not before he had finished "The Egoist," and had made up his mind about it; thereby revealing, as became a properly conventional Miss Pridmore, that it was not so much the sailorman who was of consequence as his opinion on a highly technical matter!

In the innocence of his heart he had already written and posted a letter. His views were expressed with a navete at the opposite pole from Box Hill on these high epistolary occasions. It was not in this wise that the mage addressed his own particular G.o.ddesses.

No answer had yet come to this letter. Therefore in the half light of dawn he sat down to write a second and more considered one. Vain endeavor! It was not for the pen of mortal to unlock the heart of the true prince, unless the genie willed it. And this morning, alas, the genie was not amenable. For it suddenly addressed the Sailor, not with the voice of a magician, but with rude horse sense.

"Get into bed, you fool," said the genie. "Cease making an idiot of yourself. Athena is as far beyond you as the stars in their courses which have just gone back into heaven."

The Sailor returned to his bed, to dream. He did his best to be rational, but the task was hopeless. "Mary Pridmore! Mary Pridmore!"

twittered the sparrows in the eaves of Chelsea.

IX