CHAPTER III
1
Zachary, lying in his hammock with his eyes shut and his hands behind his head, could hear the crackle of the fire, see the play of the light upon the brass pans, and Stella’s dark head bent appreciatively over her plate of rabbit pie. He could actually smell the pie, its fragrance rising triumphantly above the loathsome smells of the after-cockpit, and wrinkled his nose appreciatively.
"What are you grinning at, you ass?" growled a surly voice beside him.
Zachary opened his eyes and looked with amusement at the vast mound of bones and rags and ill-temper heaped untidily in the next hammock. This was Mr. Midshipman Michael Burke who had now filled the place in his life left empty by Cobb. Zachary had not the love for him that he would always have for the never-to-be-forgotten Cobb, but he had filled the aching vacuum. In this new friendship, the roles of protector and protégé were reversed; it was Zachary who kept his paternal eye on Mike.
For Mike was born to trouble. Even his virtues, coupled as they were with vices that destroyed their power for peace, did not seem to do him any good. His courage, linked to a flaming temper and great insolence, led only to brawls and disturbances of every kind, and his sense of justice-a fine thing in itself-did not permit him to accept the brutal punishments of the age in a manner calculated to soothe the ruffled feelings of authority. His hatred of any sort of sham was coupled with a tongue both ready and caustic, but not with the ability to put up with fools gladly.
His youth had been hard and bitter, and he had no gladness. Though Zachary’s boyhood had scarcely been a bed of roses either, he had discovered where gladness was to be found. But the permanence of God’s love and nature’s beauty, of man’s unconquerable quest for glory, made no appeal to Mike. He was a townsman born and bred, a roisterer and a hedonist. He loved noise. All the treasures he had collected A in his seafaring life were instruments of noise. The detested bull-roarer which Sol had given to Zachary was the joy of his heart. So totally at variance were their interests that sometimes the two friends marveled at their friendship. But they were both Irish aristocrats. They had the same code.
"At the smell of rabbit pie," said Zachary.
"Can’t smell anything but the usual foul stink."
"The pie I smelt was in Devonshire."
"What a damn fool you are," growled Mike, and composed himself to slumber.
He was a few months older than Zachary. His shambling collection of large bones was meagerly covered with flesh, and when he stood, tall, round shouldered, and awkward, he looked upon the point of falling apart, yet he was immensely strong and powerful and no one relished a fight with him. His bony ugly face with its haphazard features was not without charm, for his green eyes were honest and had a child’s trustfulness. It was his ineradicable trust in man that was the cause of many of his troubles. He was always expecting other people to be as fundamentally decent as he was himself, and when they were not, the temptation to knock them down was not always resisted. Owing to this lack of resistance, his clothes were mostly in rags, but he wore them with a clumsy elegance that was part of his breeding. Zachary had never seen him with a woman, but he imagined that, if put to it, he could be courteous.
"We’re on the Thames, Mike," murmured Zachary. "London tomorrow. Gentian Hill next week."
A snore was the only answer. Mike was asleep, and Zachary was free once more to indulge in the heavenly revelry of his unleashed dreams.
He could picture the summer night outside with the starlight gleaming upon the bent sails. He could see the still figures of the men on watch, the faint glow of lantern light upon their intent faces, hear the lap of the water against the ship’s side, and the persistent vibrant hum in the rigging. He could see upon either side of the gleaming water the dense darkness that was England, and the shore lights slipping by. They were home at last. Home! Next week he would be at Gentian Hill.
They had finished their supper at Weekaborough now, thought Zachary, and were sitting around the table with bent heads, and Father Sprigg, his spectacles perched on his nose, was reading aloud from the Good Book. "There the wicked cease from troubling, and there the weary be at rest. There the prisoners rest together; they hear not the voice of the oppressor. The small and great are there; and the servant is free from his master." As the golden words fell from the air, Stella raised her head and looked at old Sol in the chimney corner. Their eyes met, and Sol smiled. So he had not gone yet to that place of rest. Zachary was glad that he could see him again.
He left them there in the old cavelike kitchen and went outside. The sheep were asleep beneath the yew tree on Bowerly Hill, and the smell of hay and clover was sweet in the air. He walked up Taffety Hill, went through the gate in the danmonian fence, and down the hill to the village. He went up the short flagged path to the doctor’s door, lifted the latch, and went in. The night had turned a little chilly and there was a small fire burning in the study grate. The doctor looked up from the book he was reading, smiled as a man smiles at his only son, and motioned with his pipe stem to the opposite chair. They sat and talked, recalling the last time they had talked in this room. Zachary said it was well with him now. He had found the knowledge he had gone to seek. He knew what glory was, and how to accept and conquer fear. He knew how to endure horror, and how to escape from it. He had traveled hard and far, and the wind of his going had lit the lantern of his faith. He had learned it all now, and had come home.
"All?" asked the doctor, and the slight sarcasm in the tone did not mask its pity.
Zachary was suddenly wide-eyed in his hammock. All? No, of course not. No man on this earth could ever say that. He had never learned to master his claustrophobia. How did that chapter about the prisoners go on? "For the thing which I greatly feared is come upon me, and that which I was afraid of is come unto me." The confined space of the cockpit was becoming narrower, closing in on him like a prison, the low ceiling was coming down on his head. He was in a cold sweat of fear, his nails digging into the palms of his hands. Then, with a great effort of his will, he mastered his morbid panic, his mind fixed once more upon the thought of going home. What could stop it? England was there, outside, her lights slipping by in the darkness.
He relaxed again, his momentary panic passed. Nothing could stop the return to Weekaborough next week. But all the same, he wished it were not necessary to spend three days with Mike in London first. Mike, in duty bound, had to pay a visit to his detested guardian at Weymouth, and in spite of his hatred of the country, he was considering Zachary’s suggestion that he should later visit Gentian Hill, but he had vowed that he would do neither of these things unless he could have his fling in town first, and Zachary knew that he must keep his eye on him while he did it. It was an obligation of friendship that could not be avoided.
They did not know at Gentian Hill that he was at this moment nearing the shores of England; they thought him. Still in the Mediterranean, where the frigate had returned after the South American service was over. He had told them that he supposed he would be there some time, and then a storm had done such damage to the frigate that she had been ordered home to refit. He smiled, picturing the joy of his unheralded return, and then his mind slipped back over the years that had passed since Trafalgar. They had been his best at sea so far because for the first time there had come to him the sense of belonging where he was. He still hated being a sailor, and yet he had now mysteriously become one; he was occasionally visited by the strange idea that the sea was no longer his enemy, but his friend.
The idea had come to him first one Christmas night, when he had had a very odd dream. He had gone to bed bitterly homesick. It had been a vile night, wet and cold, with the old ship rolling like a porpoise and a dying gale howling through the rigging. He had lain tossing wretchedly for an hour or so, and then feeling his nervous misery getting beyond his control, had exerted all his will power to impose stillness on his body. The physical stillness fought for and gained, there had come a corresponding peace up
on the turmoil of his thoughts. Scenes that were tranquil and still flowed into his memory, scenes that all centered around Stella with her gift of serenity. He saw her as he had seen her first in the warm glow of the lantern lit stable, feeding the cats, and then looking up at him, her hand resting on Hodge’s back, her straight clear glance assuring him of her fidelity. He saw her again sitting beside him on the grass in the moonlight, looking up into his, face and asking him where he came from. "From the moon," he said, and she laughed and called him Zachary Moon. He turned her hand over and put his own against it, palm to palm, as though they were the two halves of a shell. He saw her again saying good-by to him, her chin resting on the top of the gate, a row of small finger tips to either side, the furry countenance of Hodge thrust through the bars below.
And then once again he was looking in through the stable window, and wrapped in her red cloak, she was lying sleepily curled up in the hay. She looked up at the window and he thought that she saw him there and smiled. Then she shut her eyes and he saw her long dark lashes lying like curling fans upon her cheeks, and the childish glow of warmth that crept into her cheeks as she slept. Then he had slept, too, and there had followed that strange beautiful dream of the church under the sea. He had stood there pulling the bell and had known that the bell was his own voice calling to her to come to him. And she had come and they had knelt together in the small holy place that was their own special sanctuary in the depth of the sea. And for the first time he had heard the authentic voice of the sea, mighty, reverberating, yet down here in the quiet depths more full of reassurance than of menace, and had known at last that the sea was not his enemy. He had wakened to the sound of the ship’s cock crowing, and the gale had blown itself out. He had sighed and turned over, still intolerably homesick but without bitterness, had smiled, and slept again.
And he smiled now and slept, with the ship sailing on over the smooth estuary of the Thames, and the sky lightening in the east.
2
The next two days passed harmlessly, though for Zachary with far too much noise and a great deal of exasperation. Mike’s idea of pleasure was not his, and he was wildly impatient to be quit of this bedlam of London, and to be on the coach again, homeward bound for Devonshire.
Yet Mike’s whirlwind methods of getting about gave him a bird’s eye view of the London of this period which he never afterward forgot. Whether hurtling over the cobbles in a rocking hackney coach, or fighting his way through the crowds, Mike’s raucous voice and Hailing arms never failed to make their progress so meteoric that houses, shops, men, women, horses, colors, scents, and noise seemed to How past like the sights and sounds and smells of a whirling nightmare, and yet to smite eyes, ears, and nose with such force that Zachary felt himself perpetually reeling from the blow. The gilded coaches, with liveried coachmen on the high draped boxes, and lovely painted ladies and bewigged gentlemen glimpsed inside them, made their way like bright phantoms from another world through the turgid crowd of beggars and pick-pockets, clerks, business men, shoppers, and sightseers that thronged the narrow streets. Pedlers cried their wares, ragged urchins screamed derision at the top-hatted, cravatted, monocled young men swaggering along the pavements as elegant as peacocks. Dogs fought near the winkle stalls and from the open door of every eating house came a roar of conversation and the fumes of porter and roast beef. At night the town became a roaring cavern of darkness lit by flaring smoky lights. The lanterns on the swaying coaches, the torches of the linksman, the Hambeaux lit about the doorways of the great, and the fireworks of Vauxhall could do no more than fitfully illumine the murk. Zachary hated London by night more than by day. He was thankful, when on Saturday night Mike dragged him out for a last evening’s revelry, that it was the last. Tomorrow would be Sunday, and on Monday he’d be on his way home.
Yet from the start of the evening’s entertainment, he was uneasy. For a beginning, Mike insisted upon putting Zachary’s bull-roarer in his pocket. "Let that damn thing alone!" Zachary implored him irritably. "Put it back where you found it, Mike. It’s unlucky. It’s mine, isn’t it? Put it back, I tell you."
But Mike was not in an obliging mood, and merely thundered down the stairs and out into the street with the bull-roarer still in his pocket. Zachary followed in a bad temper, and they walked in silence to the eating house of Mike’s choice. Devouring beefsteak and onions washed down by porter, and assailed already by the pangs of indigestion, home suddenly seemed to Zachary very far away. That world of Weekaborough, where men still ploughed to the music of an age-old chant and kept sheep upon a fairy hill, seemed to have nothing in common with this noisy bedlam where he found himself. There life was all one thing, each activity growing out of another in an orderly manner that made of them all one deeply satisfying whole. Here life was split up.
You had neither .grown nor cooked the food you ate, and you ate it in company with men who were strangers to you. There, every foot of earth that you trod was familiar to you, but outside this hot, noisy, crowded eating house the dark cavern of London was full of pits of even deeper darkness into which a man might fall and never be found again. He had seen a few of them, passing by, slums so appalling that the wretched creatures who came crawling out of them when night fell scarcely seemed human beings at all.
"What’s the matter with you?" Mike demanded with his mouth full. Zachary pulled himself together. He was here to keep Mike’s flaming temper and abusive tongue from getting him into trouble, and up till now he had been successful. It would be too utterly idiotic if his vigilance were to desert him on the last night of all.
The door swung open to admit half a dozen noisy young revelers, officers on leave, like themselves. They looked around for a moment, saw two of their kind devouring most succulent steak, and bore down upon them with whoops of joy.
Up till the early hours of the morning the night was gloriously rowdy and quite harmless. Between them they had plenty of money, and the amusements of the town were many. All but Zachary had digestions of cast iron and practically unflagging energy; should energy flag for a moment it could be instantly revived by liquid refreshment. In between the visits to Leicester Fields, Haymarket, and Vauxhall Gardens they wrenched a few handles off respectable front doors, yowled like cats, and played leapfrog over the stone posts along the pavements.
It was this last amusement that led to trouble. Leap frogging was the prerogative of the street urchins, not of the gentry, and a row of posts stood conveniently not far from an alley leading to one of the pits of darkness that so haunted Zachary. He saw the posts, he noticed the alley, and felt misgiving even before he saw the flying figure of Mike leading his battalion into action. Some sort of underground message must have conveyed itself from the posts to the slum beyond the alley, for in five minutes a band of young roughs had come surging up out of the darkness, yelling blue murder, and the fight was on.
Battles between privileged youth and the underdogs were of common occurrence in the London streets and attracted little notice, and this one would have fought itself out to the usual conclusion of everyone becoming incapacitated by nothing worse than bleeding noses and blackened eyes, had not Mike suddenly bethought himself of the bull-roarer. Having just knocked out two opponents, and being momentarily at leisure, it struck him that the glorious din of it might do something to scare the enemy and clear the fuddled heads of his own side who were getting distinctly the worst of it at the moment. He produced the treasure from his pocket, twisted the string ’round his linger, and swung it. Nothing for a moment, then the soft whirring, then the roaring rushing wind, louder and louder, rising gloriously above the noises of the battle. The effect upon the enemy was immediate, but not quite what Mike had intended. They were not country boys and none of them had seen or heard a bull-roarer before. They saw the small brown thing whirling at the end of its string, such an instrument of glorious noise as they had never beheld before, and they coveted with a desire that could not be denied. Casting their other opponents from them, they set up
on Mike.
The onslaught was too much even for Mike, he slipped and fell, and a tall ragged scarecrow of a boy leaped upon him and dragged the bull-roarer out of his hand. Just as he turned, the light of a flambeau fell full upon his face, wild and dark, lean with hunger and taut with misery, the dark eyes blazing with fury. Something about his face stabbed Zachary with a sudden memory; it was himself that he saw, himself as he had been on the night when he had climbed up to the stable window at Weekaborough. And not only himself. In that face he saw all the wretched homeless vagabonds who had ever lived, who ever would live, all those who never had and never would be given the ghost of a chance. Then in a Hash the boy was gone, racing off with the bull-roarer down the dark alley; and not only with the bull-roarer; he had Mike’s purse too. In a moment Mike was on his feet again, tearing after, winged with rage, Zachary after Mike, those of the warriors who were not by this time incapacitated by their wounds yelling at their heels like hounds in full cry.
At the first sound of the bull-roarer, Zachary’s heart had sunk like a stone. He had never been able to rid himself of his superstitious feelings about it. The wind, the wind, and evil spirits riding upon the wind. God help them all now, for they had left the streets and plunged headlong into one of those pits of darkness into which a man might fall and never be found again. On and on they went, down and down, deeper into the darkness and the foulness, and the first of the summoned demons leaped and fastened upon Zachary. It was his own familiar demon, the fear he thought he had conquered, twisting itself about him, sucking at him like a leech, draining his limbs of strength and his mind of resolution. Turn back. What has it to do with you? You told Mike to let that damned bull-roarer alone. Whatever happens is his fault, not yours. Go back. Get out of it while there’s time.