The Sailor Part 67

Was she upon the verge of some great tragedy? She did not dare to frame the question.

"Mary." ... She awoke to the sound of the Sailor's voice and of her own name on his lips.... "I've made up my mind to--to go away for a bit."

In the midst of these throes, an inspiration had come to him. It was no more than a miserable subterfuge, but it was all he could do.

"I somehow feel I'm on the rocks. I think I'll go a voyage. I'm losing myself. I'll perhaps be able to..."

A stifling sense of pity kept her silent.

"... to persuade Klond.y.k.e to come along with me."

"I wish I could have helped you." The words were wrung from her.

"You can't," he said, and he spoke with a gust of pa.s.sion as one half maddened. "No one can help me."

She saw his wildness, and somehow her strength went out to him.

"You can't think what I've been through," he said, with something worse than rage entering his voice.

She knew she couldn't even guess, and was too wise to try. But again she was hurt by the sight of a suffering it could never be hers to heal.

"Henry," she said, "I would like you always to feel and always to remember that whatever happens to you, and wherever you are, I am your friend, if only I may be."

To this high and rare simplicity of Athena the G.o.ddess, he could make no response.

"And now I must go," she said, gathering the whole force of her resolution.

"Suppose I walk with you a little of the way?" he said.

She almost guessed that he meant it for their last stroll together.

It was a long step from the scene of the tea party to Mary's door, but no finer evening for a walk could have been desired. Neither knew why they chose to take it. For both it was a mere prolongation of misery.

Perhaps it was that he still hoped, against hope itself, for the moment to return in which it would be possible to tell the secret that locked his lips.

Humiliated as he was, there may still have been that thought in his mind. But it was vain in any case. There could be no real intention now of telling her. By the time they had crossed the park, he had cast it entirely away. And now they fell to talking of other matters.

Unwilling to let her go, cleaving to her in his weakness to the very last second of the very last hour, he persuaded her to sit a few minutes on an empty bench under the trees ... under the trees within whose shade he had sat when he had seen her first. And there he had from her lips a definite expression of her faith.

It was with that they parted--finally, as he believed. He dared not put it to himself in a way so explicit, it was not a thing he could face in such bare, set terms, but in his brain the Aladdin's lamp was burning fitfully, and it was this that flashed the cruel light of truth.

"... If ever you want help!"

Those were the words of their parting, as the pressure of his fingers met the last touch of hers. And then she was gone, and he was gone ...

and then a bleak, dull blindness came over him and he knew that more than life had gone with her.

XVIII

A rudderless ship in mid-ocean, he wandered long and aimlessly about the byways of the city. It was past midnight when he found himself back in Brinkworth Street. Without taking off his clothes, he flung himself face down on his bed.

After a while, he tried very hard to pull himself together. He must be a man, that was the whole substance of his thoughts. As ever, he knew that to be his simple duty. Throughout his overdriven life, he had always had to tell himself, and other people had always made a point of telling him, to be a man. Auntie had been the first to ask it of him when she had dragged him upstairs and tied him to the bed. "Enry Arper"--he had heard that shrill sn.i.g.g.e.r above the roar of Knightsbridge--"what I shall do to you is going to hurt, but you must be a man and bear it." A jolly looking policeman had told him to be a man at the police station. Mr. Thompson had told him to be a man the night he carried him to sea. The Old Man had given him equally sound advice when he had gravely told him of the Island of San Pedro.

All his life, it seemed, he had not lacked good advice, and h.e.l.l only knew he had always done his best to follow it. But as now he lay on his bed in Brinkworth Street in a cold summer dawn, he felt that he was done.

The plain fact was he was coming to believe that he had not had a square deal. Life was tolerable for some, no doubt; for people like the Pridmores, for instance, and his friend Edward Ambrose--he was not envying them meanly, nor was he merely pitying himself--for those who had been born right, who had had a fair start, who had been given a reasonably plumb wicket to play on, as Klond.y.k.e expressed it. But for gutter breeds such as himself, there was not one chance in a million of ever winning through. He had done all it was possible for a man to do, and now with a feeling of more than impotence, he realized that he was out.

He had learned a trick of praying this last year or two, but in this cold summer dawn he had no longer a use for it. What was the good?

Somebody--it was not for him to say Who--had not played fair. Henry Harper, you must be a man and bear it! A sudden gust of rage swept through him as he lay. The voice of Auntie was coming back to him out of the years. And she was exhorting him to an inhuman stoicism in order that she might serve her private ends.

Some time between six and seven, in a state of awful dejection, he undressed and got into bed. He did not want Mr. Paley to find him like that when he brought the water for his bath at eight o'clock. It would not be right to wound the feelings of a good man. But if Henry Harper had had the courage to take a razor, well.... Mr. Paley would not have found him in bed. Since that night on the railway, now many years ago, he had lost the nerve for anything of that kind. He had always thought that on that night something had snapped in the center of himself.

At eight o'clock, when the punctual Mr. Paley came with the water can, Henry Harper told him that he was not going to get up at present, and that he would not be in need of breakfast.

"Aren't you well, sir?" asked Mr. Paley, in his discreet voice.

"No, I'm not very well."

"I'm sorry, sir." Mr. Paley had the gift of expressing true sympathy in his tone and bearing. "You have been a little run down some days now, have you not, sir?"

"Longer than that," said the Sailor. "Ever since I've been born, I've been a poor sort of brute."

"Robust health is an untold blessing. I'm glad to say I've always enjoyed it myself, and so has Mrs. Paley. Would you like to see a doctor, sir? I'll go along at once to Dr. Gibb at the end of the street."

"A doctor is no use for my complaint."

Mr. Paley was grieved, but he wisely withdrew without further comment.

The Sailor turned his face to the wall with a vague sort of prayer that he might be allowed to die. But it was not to heaven; the deadly pressure of events had forced him in spite of a lifetime's hard and bitter fighting to accept Mr. Thompson's theory. The troll of Auntie, who was exuding gin and wickedness around his pillow, had been now reinforced by the mate of the _Margaret Carey_.

A pleasant pair they made, these trolls from his youth. And there were others. If only that delicate spring had not snapped, he must have jumped out of bed and settled the business out of hand. "Be a man,"

said the voice of Auntie. "There's the case on the dressing table straight before your eyes. Be a man, Enry Arper, and set about it."

Auntie was right. He got out of bed. He took up the case and stood an instant holding it in his hand.

"Lay holt on it, bye." That was Mr. Thompson's gruff tone, and it was followed immediately by Auntie's shrill and peculiar sn.i.g.g.e.r.

There was one other thing, however, on the dressing table: a comfortable, green-backed edition of the "Poems of John Milton." The Sailor didn't know why, but he took up the now familiar volume with his unoccupied hand. It may have been mere blind chance, it may have been one last cunning effort on the part of the genie, for by some means the book came open at a certain place in the middle. Suddenly the brown case fell to the carpet with a thud.

In spite of the trolls besieging him, the Sailor crept back to his bed with the book in his hands. What wonderful, wonderful worlds were these! And he was little more than twenty-eight. And the sun of Brinkworth Street had entered his chamber to tell him that this was a gorgeous morning of midsummer.

The battle was not over yet, however. Auntie and Mr. Thompson in the hour of their necessity had summoned to their aid the Old Man and Cora Dobbs. It was now all h.e.l.l let loose.

"Chuck it, ducky." It was Cora's voice now. "You are not a man, you know, and never will be. You are no use, anyway. Get out of your little bed, now, and cut off the gas at the meter."

Time went on, but he made no attempt to reckon how much of it. He was too fiercely occupied in fighting the d.a.m.ned. Once or twice it seemed that they must surely down him. Their insane laughter hovered round his pillow continually, even in the broad light of a very glorious day.

Sooner or later, he feared, there could only be one end to it all.