Beggars on Horseback

ok the letter to her refuge on the wall and sat for a while unable to read it, the old nausea upon her. Then she took a firm grip of herself and opened the envelop

athy and passion? I feel I am caught up in the old life again and something seems to have gone snap in me. Write to me-for you will write-to my club." The assurance of his tone jarred Sophia, but what hurt her cruelly was his brevity. The fact that she had want

s still so ignorant she thought mere companionship and the spiritual force of her feeling had been a continuous giving. The knowledge that from a man's point of view she had given nothing at all was spared her. Since the parting she had repeated over and over to herself two sentences from his letters-"Virgin Mother, friend and lover and comforter" and "Home means where you are." If he could still mean those things she would be perfectly content that he should never again express them; if he were to mean them less as the old life and the old allegiance gripped him, then they would cease to be true and she could not live on them in memory. Few men are strong enough to leave the past alone, many are so afraid of its re-appearance that they try to bury it alive-was he going

. . ." against the stones. It upheld her when, towards dawn, she paced the garden, pausing every now and then to lean her cheek against the dew-wet lilac leaves; or when she tangled her hands in the grass till the damp blades whimpered as she pulled her fingers up them. Sound was a help to her, and when she roused the grass t

might have been had circumstances been different-them she could bear. Now thought narrowed and gained in meaning: one baby surged towards her, cried to her, smiled at her, lay in air always just away from her breast-one baby that was what might have been even as things were. How would it matter what other women he loved better if she had only given him what no other w

last days at Sant' Ambrogio were come, that the influences at work upon her ever since her arriv

ting on to the whitewashed walls so that the room seemed a pool of green dusk. Sophia read a little old Latin

what I know of-things. And yet, they say that in religion there is every experience. . . . I wonder if the babies she might have borne if she'd married some fellow-peasant ever

g was a little soothed, the taut fibres of her relaxed and her mind slid into receptivity. Then a more positive

ed too. The towers were more numerous, and from some of them flags fluttered out, and not till long after did Sophia remember that there had been no breeze that evening. Looking for the house over the t

dreamer knows who he is and that he will soon wake up, and yet does and says the most incongruous things; with this difference-Sophia had a curious feeling that

hia's own consciousness was left only enough to know that she was still herself, hearing, seeing, and feeling what some one else had heard and seen and felt before her in that place. She knew, too, that the drama played in her soul ever since she came to San

ity. Then with a shock, as sudden as a plunge into cold water, her mind slid on to what seemed another though not an alien plane. Her mind's eye saw all the old points of view, the accepted angles of vision, as though torn up and scattered like flung wreckage over the shining shore of the world that swung below her; things which had seemed big wer

itable influence of contraction: the whole sphere of air was a medley of pattern, always rhythmic and interchanging. She felt how this elasticity was brought into play over the surface of the spiritual world, how actions, sins, pains of mind and body, rack this way and that as they would, were always enveloped by the divine Breath, even as o

ncentrated, not on her soul, but on the soul which had felt long ago, pr

Powerless to help, Sophia saw the thought turn in the other's mind, and with that they both entered into the last phase of the vision. Here Sophia, who had not trained herself, like Beata, to prolonged sustaining of the will, flagged and began to fail. A brightness that was too strong for her, a sense as of great Shapes, a looming Presence, swept on to her, wrapped her round, overweighted her. She struggled to keep up with the Beata consciousness, for she knew if only she could succeed in that she would find the answer to her own sor

resh. She knew that to those to whom the joy of making a living body with its corresponding soul is denied, creation is not stil

sion lost keenness as her own blurred sight swam back to her; and, worn out, hardly consc

d always by her bedside when she awakened. She was to find that for the friendship she could have made so exquisite he had no gift; she was to feel the many hurts his lack of thoughtfulness inflicted; she was to bear the unhappiness of seeing him unworthy of all

herself after a few weeks of comparative calm when she hoped she was "getting over it"-of "How I love him." She had no high-flown theories of love; she knew he was not what is tritely called "the right man," he was more-he was the one

meaningless to her in the actuality of her love and pain, but of the knowledge that she had had it she was never bereft. Also, it was her

WITH T

WITH T

even the swollen fingers of the marsh samphire, that all seemed to point at the girl as she passed, each bore a tremulous drop at the tip. At the end of the little beach the girl paused, and then turned to look out to sea, balancing herself on a s

To her dismay she saw that with every heave his legs must be catching against some rocks, for his head began to sink away from the supporting ratlines, and when at last she caught one end of the spar she only succeeded in drawing it away from him. His head disappeared; for a moment the dark hole in the midst of the foam-circle held, then broke, and was overrun as the whiteness closed upon it. The next minute a surge of undercurrent brought him knocking against her legs; she just managed to hold on with one hand while with the other she plunged down at him. Her fingers met the cold sleekness of his face, then caught in his tangled hair, and, drawing herself up backwards against the rock-ledges, she pulled him with her, step by step. A few moments more and she had staggered up the narrow strip of beach with her burden dragging from her arms. Tumbling him along the drier sand at the cliff's foot, she knelt beside him, and with hands trembling from the strain that had been put upon the muscles, she pulled apart the clinging shirt that was so sodden it seemed to peel from off him. She felt at his heart, then laid her ear to the pale glistening chest where the dark hair was matted to a point between the breasts; she beat that pale chest with her hand, and at last saw the faint red respond to the blows of her fingers. On that much of hope she desisted, seemed

his armpits like a cape, then down the serried ribs that she could knead the supple flesh around, past the curve-in of the whole body beneath them, to the gracious slimness of the flanks and the nervous indentation of the groins between the trunk and the springing arches of the thighs. So Thomasin knelt in the gloom of the cave, and all the time that his life was coming painfully and reluctantly back to him under her strong, glowing hands, she felt as though some presage of new life were flowing into herself. The old saw has it that the saving of a drowning man brings ill-luck

*

and at dawn the greybird thrust a thirsty beak into the dewy blackthorn blossoms; here the dun-coloured rabbits darted in and out of their burrows with a gleam of white scuts. Here, too, Keast and his daughter herded the moorland ponies that, well-soaped, were loaded with the barrels of spirit and packets of la

him, Thomasin steered the stranger between the buttresses and through the narrow doorway into the living-room. A peat fire glowed on the hearth and against it the figure of a crouching man showed dark. At the noise in the doorway he thrust an armful of furze on to the fire, and the q

chin the reddish beard could not hide the knots of his powerful throat. His eyes, blue and extraordinarily alert, were half-hidden by the purpled lids, and the massive folds of his cheeks that came down in a furrow on either side of his s

n spoke

siness mingled with a readiness for defiance. "He'm most dead wi'

n?" asked Bendigo Ke

co

see a

n to the settle and let his wet brown head fall limply back against it, she went ov

sharply. "I'll see to your supper. He m

, carried him off up the stairs that led from the living-room i

a smells of bra

en." Thomasin spoke quietly, but the sound

a di

well, you d'knaw we'm needing another hand. We must find one somewhere, and there's none o' the chaps to the church-town would come in wi' us, because us have allus stood by oursel' and made our own

sked Bendigo suspiciously. "Tes bad luck

vised Thomasin. "May be the poor chap was too mazed

e none the worse. His looks had strikingly improved, for now that the soft beard, which had never known a razor, was

she became a total wreck. He had clung to the floating spar for several hours before losing consciousness, when the

nded, "was your face, mistress, be

understood him perfectly, and himself became entirely frank. His name, he said, was Robin Start, and that there was mixed blood in him he admitted. A more gracious race showed itself in his quick turns of wrist and ey

n the head by a swing of the boom, he needed some one to take the lad's place. A bottle of smuggled rum sealed the bargain, and then, for the first time in her life, Thomasin was talked to as a woman. To her father a partner; a mere fellow-man to the dark, silent Daniel who now lay in the lap of the tides; shunned by the envious villagers, and looked at askance by the Government men, Thomasin had never known of the sphere which began to be revealed to her that evening. For one thing, she was plain, though in certain lights or effects of wind she looked fine enough in a high-boned, rock-hewn way. She was what is called in that part of the world a "red-headed Dane," and her broad, strongly

n in the long winter evenings the Keasts and Robin would sit by the fire, Bendigo pulling at his clay pipe, and Thomasin knitting a perpetual grey stocking-surely as innocent and law-abiding an interior as could have been found!-while Robin told them tales of all he had seen and done. Bendigo now and then gave a grunt that might have been of dissent, interest, or merely of incipient sleep, but Thomasin sat enthralled by the soft tones that to her mind could have lured a bird from the egg. Robin told of the thick yellow sea towards the north of China, so distinct from the blue sea around that it looked more like a vast shoal of sand, stretchin

uld make opportunities to press against her in the passages. The sheer animal magnetism of the girl allured him, and he found her crude and hitherto fierce aloofness going to his head. Though frequently now he felt a sudden passion of distaste for the physical stren

grass watching for the fish-shoals; when around Robin's turf-pillowed head the rose-specked, flesh-hued cups of the sea-milkwort stood up brimming with the jewelled air as with a divine nectar; when among the cushions of silvery lichen and grey-green moss the scented gorse flung a riot of yellow, and the mating birds answered each other on a note like sec

openly, a thing frequently done when the Preventive men were known to be on the watch. Robin was suffering from one of his nerve-revulsions; he dared show no sign of it, but as he sat in the bows, keeping a look-out through the darkness, he told himself that if this trip were brought off in safety it would be the last as far as he was concerned. H

ted was swelling to storm-fury. The Merrymaid lay right over, the water scolding past her dipping gunwale and the clots of spindrift that whirled over the side gleaming like snowflakes in the darkness, which was of that intense quality which

e what menaced them. A Preventive boat, like themselves with no light save the wretched glimmer over the compass, had been lying to und

ice made answer: "Not till us has to-it might

wered to it like a racehorse to the whip. She quivered all her length, the till

ger stretch of canvas. She was nearly upon them when the sound of breaking surf told that they were nearing the Manacles, and the tide was still fairly low. Sudde

t. The next moment the mast creaked and bent; the almost useless jib slackened as the other sails took all of the wind, and the

nd through all that flurry of rushing, edgeless noise, and it told its own tale to the eager ears on the Merrymaid. She, under the influence of the topsail, was burying her bows at every plunge, and Thomasin knew, by the sudden cessation of the tiller's tug, that the rudder had lifted clear of the racing water, only t

r help; she could only wrestle with the tiller, which, all the wei

he darkness, and even at that

is hands were grinding hers against the tiller, yet that pain sent the first tremor of unadulterated passion through her that she had ever felt, because it was the first time he had hurt her. There was no need for her to call directions to him-he and she were so welded in one at the tiller that the unconscious pull of her arm beneath his told him, in his sta

int and in the calmer water, where they slipped the cargo, and soon after they

leant back against one of them, and the dim light, flickering upwards, softened her marked bones and brightened her eyes. Every defect of skin was hidden; it showed pale, and her mouth velvet dark upon it. Robin's lips fastened on her throat below her ear and stayed there till she stirred and gave a little cry, then his mouth moved on and up till it found hers. The kiss deep

*

ght Robin safely theirs. . . . And Robin had at last done that which had been in his mind ever since the beginning, and had sold the secret of the caves to his Majesty's Government. Nervous of being overheard in the village inn, Robin took the two head men with him over the moor to the headland, safe in the knowledge that Bendigo was drinking heavily in the cottage-the way in which he always rewarded himself for a successful run. Robin showed the men the cunningly hidden entrances to the passages, and then for a few minutes they all three stood making their final arrangements. Robin found it wonderfully simple, the step once taken. It

t would be the most unlikely thing on earth, because neither she nor her father ever ran the unnecessary risk of going there between the cargoes. Robin knew this, and felt reassured-how, after all, could he imagine that Thomasin, sick at the reaction she felt in him, might have gone to re-gather force at the place where she had first felt him hers? . . . He thought over what he had said, and took still more heart when he remembered he had not let fall a word that showed a light holding of Thomasin; and that, he told himself, was the only thing a woman could not forgive. He felt it safe to count on passion as against the habit of a mere business partnership, which was all her relationship with her father had ever been. Dimly Robin was aware that all her spiritual life had gone into that partnership, into the feeling of her family against the world that had become an obsession with her until he had brought another interest into her life; but Robin Start would not have believed an angel from heaven who had told him that the habit of years could be stronger with a woman than a new passion. And, as regarded most women, Robin would probably have been right. Besides, it was impossible that any one could have been there, and Thomasin was his. . . . He gave himself a little shake

to book, all came up over the moor through the darkness. No light showed in the cottage as they neared it, but that was merely because the buttress, sweeping at right angles to the window, obscured it from the approach. The buttress

on the stool beside him. There was nothing alarming in that, yet t

s!" he shrieked. "H

*

ay in the Merrymaid, the rising wind and some other urgent thin

ght effect of the candle eliminated all shadow under his sloping chin, making it seem one with his throat, and that was cut from e

or one distorted moment the edges of the slit throat flickered to the semblance of a smile. Then

NATH M

NATH M

she was cheerfully resigned to its enforced continuance. All the world knew she had been "asked" by Samuel Harvey of the Upper Farm, and t

yearnings for something more romantic than the stolid Sam, but the years fled taking with them the

nath," her mother told her once, "but there, I never was one for driving a maid. There's a ch

very contented laugh, "men's a pack of trouble in the flesh. I would ha' wed sure 'nough ef et hadn'

ant old mother, quoting better than she knew, "th

went to live in a tiny cottage up on the moors with no companions but those thoughts-the thoughts at once crude and va

arden where Senath coaxed some potatoes and beans from out the grudging earth; and two apple trees, in an ecstasy of contortion, supported the clothes-line from

some reason, was of a more vivid green than on the rest of the moor, and against it the stones on the nearer curve showed a pale

on descended on them, as it did on the merry-makers of old when Perseus dangled the Gorgon's head aloft. So the nineteen maidens stand to this day, a huge fairy-ring of stone, like those smaller ones of fragile fungi that also enclose a circle of greener grass in th

e had given each of the stones a name, and every one of them seemed, to her starved fancy, to have a personality of its own. Senath Lear, what with the mixed strains of blood that were her Cornish heritage, and the added influence of isolation, was fast becoming an o

st the field where the Pipers stood in their perpetual penance, and Senath could see them sticking up gaunt against the luminous sky for some t

irst crumpled leaves were just beginning to unfold. The long grass in an orchard shone with the drifted stars of thousands of narcissi, which a faint breeze woke to a tremulous twinkling. The road was thick with velvety white dust, for it was some time since rain had fallen, and the black of Senath's skirt was soon powdered into greyness. As she went, she won

t them, towering above her. Then a whimsical thought struck her. "I'll lave the Maidens be for a while an

mild jest and plod

rket-carts as they drove homewards, and the business of the butter was soon transacted. Yet, for some odd reason, Senath was not anxious to take up her basket and go. Perhaps it was that touch of the unusual in the false hint of summer; perhaps, too, her decision to vary the course of her even

ar," she said. "Tell me, edn that Sam'l

r, long-sighted eyes d

ince Sam's been a widow-man, Upper Farm's too big for he to live in in comfort. He's comin' to live in church-town and look after his inte

rested, as any woman would have been, in

rs et. There's a power of Harveys in this part

g quickly nearer, and now d

'ee blige we weth some stout twine? The off-rein has broken and us have only put

ache distinctly lighter than his weather-beaten face, and since the days when he had courted Senath the whites of his eyes had become yellowish round t

s to be seen in the people of that part of the world who have a strain of Spanish blood in them, dating from the wrecks of th

at the best insecure, and often pernicious, but very occasionally, when the two people concerned are elemental creatures with little perception of those half-shade

icisms, and the surface of it is an elastic tissue setting this way and that, as thoughts ebb and flow from moment to moment, even though far beneath it may remain unperturbed. Yet every now and then come together two of that vanishing race who are

ed in blueness from the shadow her face and neck made against the brightness. Even so, to most people she would have appeared only a wholesome-looking woman in early middle life, who had kept the clear and candid gaze of childhood; a woman rather ungainly and thick-set. Manuel saw her as what, for him, she was-a deep-bosomed creature, cool of head and warm of heart-a woman worth many times over the flimsy girls who would pass her

n progress. "Can't us giv'ee a lift, Senath? I'm sure us wont

are and like a bit of a walk before goin' to the bed.

ch the blood had come wit

ss Lear," h

she turned in towards them through a gap in the hedge. She pushed a way among bracken and clinging brambles, and as she reached them the sun slipped behind the S. Just hills, and in the

twig and leaf. She glanced up at the two dark columns reared

s. "Why shoulden I call they after Sam and his new tenant? That one can be Sam,"-

*

eased to be. They were fated lovers; fated, having met, to love, and, so Senath told herself in the first hours of her bitterness, fated never to grasp their joy. The time had been so short, as far as mere weeks went, so infinitely long in that they had it for ever. After the funeral in the moorland churchyard, Senath went i

ssity would have been current everywhere, and Sam would have had his meed of half-contemptuous pity. As it was, no one knew better than Sam that the other Harvey's wooing had g

th. A strongly spiritual nature leaves its impress on even the most clayey of those with whom it comes in contact, and all knew Senath to be not quite as they were. Yet she married the red-necked Samuel Harvey, and they went to live together at the Upper Farm. And, as to any superior delicacy, Senath showed less than most. A few kin

e, and although she was going in an opposite direction she asked for a lift back in his gig. When they came to the track that led off to her cottage, he tied up the mare and went with her to advise her as to her apple-trees, which were suffering from blight, and by the time he left, half an hour later, they were promised to each other. How it came about, Sam never quite understood; the only thing he was sure about was that i

s and quiet, still mouth, than was Senath. Only now and again, in the first weeks of their life together, she would give a sta

looking after any sickly lamb or calf, she had plenty to do. And yet, in the midst of so much activity, every now and then Sam was struck by a queer little feeling of aloofness in Senath-not any withdrawing physically, but a feeling as though her mind were elsewhere. He might find her sit

on for any additional queerness on the part of Senath became known to him. After she had told him the news, Sam, ever inarticulate, but moved to the rarely felt depths of his nature, went out into a field that was getting its autumn ploughing, and his heart sang as he guided the horses down the furrow. Even as he w

y pallor of the dappled sky; the rooks and screaming gulls that wheeled and dipped behind his plough; the bare swaying elms, where the rooks' nests clu

ood under the shed in all the bravery of its blue body and vermilion wheels. Senath had

r as to the front?" called Sam jovia

ll portent, so slight Sam did not even know it for what it was, and yet something in her look and manner seemed to chill him to the bones of him. Then, and

and the crowing-above all sounds the most melancholy to anyone upon a sleepless pillow-of a triumphant cock. As he heard all these common noises about his own place, he realized how much more dear they had all become to him by reason of what was in the room above. He knew that his wife had what is inadequately called a "bad time," but although the boards over his head had creaked for hours to the anxious

to knaw . .

you," snapped the nurse. "S

t," explained Sam naively, "

ll right," said the nurse, a

athe in the waters of perpetual youth. The great rejuvenation of a new birth had come upon him. For that is what

but made very little impression. The child could not die, because it w

the broad shining, when they told Sam his wife wished to see him, but that he

g against the white of her pillows, he thought they m

he assured her. "'Tes a brave an

Senath. Her voice, th

s wife was at a time when she must be

Then, at his start of

"The cheild's my cheild, not his, an

said Senath, "and e

that his wife was light-headed. It wa

wisht, Sam. I'm in my right mind, and I'm only waiten

you mea

'ee why I wedded you, Sam

a moment and

him. I wanted Manuel as I never thought a woman could want anything but peace, and he was taken from me. So I determined in my heart I'd go to Manuel, and go with somethen to take to en. I married you, Sam, because you had the same name, and was the same height, and when I shut my eyes, I could fancy my head was on his breast, and that et was his heart beaten at my ear. That's why I made folk call me 'Mrs. Harvey': so I could force my

as though gathering energy; the

me I woke up. For et was like waking up every time I had to let the strain of my imagining go for a moment. And each time et left me feelen weaker and more kind of wisht than before. But I was glad of that,

s though to defend it from him. He stared at her, th

your mind, all that. It's

and the boy has no mouth-speech in him to this day? That was only in her mind. And how, in the Book, Jacob put the peeled wands before the eyes of the sheep, and the lambs came all ring-s

le. The next moment, a sudden flash of fear sent him to his feet. He tore up the stai

upon it as she clasped it to her breast. But the baby still lived, and when they had taken it from her,

*

her boy was of nervous make, with black hair that fell into eyes at once more human and more forlorn. He was very dirty, but he had stuck a yellow jonquil through a hole in his jersey. They were playing at moulding little men out of the mud, and setting them a

oor like where father do stand of a Sunday. My man must stand there,

d as he went. He ran into the kitchen, where his mother, stout and comfortable-looki

said et again. He says I'm not like da's

kept the rolling-pin still a moment while her

the rest o' the family," she complained, "the boys would'n

pot he knew of beside the mill-leat. There a robin was building her nest in the alders, and there, too, if he lay very still, with shut eyes, he could imagine all sorts of wonderful things that the brook was saying. How he was really not t

Senath, but as a totally different person altogether, whom, try as she would, she could not connect up. She had long ago given up trying, busy with her man and the boys. The two younger were little trouble enough beyond the ordinary vexatiousness of childhood, but there was something about Manuel which was different, and which often annoyed Sam, who liked to brag about his eldest boy, and tried always

band, came in ruddy and clamorous for his tea, his heavy boot trampled it, all discoloured, into a crac

anuel?" de

bsequious with the information t

ll, so were you, missus, at one time of day. Life'll soon knock et out of hi

by the alders; a thought of vague regret and a faint hope that it might not be with him quite as it had been with her. And whether the thought reached his unknowing self or not, to Manuel's fancy the leat had a finer ta

OFFIN

OFFIN

who had been trained aboard a Yankee clipper, and her captain was a blue-nose who behaved as such. Since, on the outward voyage, the crew generally consisted of men who had made the Islands to

she was one of the earliest steam vessels built, and had started life as a side-wheeler; her paddles having been changed for a single screw

, and indeed she belonged rather to the class of auxiliary steam than that of auxiliary sail, in spite of the motive with which she had conceived. In fact, her trouble was that in a world where steamships, and iron ones at that, were beginning more and more to snatch at trade, and where the great racing clippers still broke records, the Spirito Santo, being neither one thing nor the other, had become a losing proposition. Her owners grudged tar on her sides as sorely as kids of meat to the men, and no shabbier trader than the Spirito Santo nosed her way from Port of Spain to the Golden Gate. Yet she got there all right, bullied and driven, got there on cheap coal and rotten rigging, though her engines seemed as though th

a man struck his officer, he was quite likely to be shot straightway, and on reporting the matter the captain would be praised for his promptness in quelling mutiny at its rising. Floggings with the cat or the yoke-rope, brutal mishandling with knuckle-dusters and belaying-pins, were the quick and common resort on the slightest count, and Captain Joab Elderkin was famous for his technique in all these methods. His ship literally merited the trite description of a floating hell, and one boy aboard her had died of a broken heart. The child had failed in an attempt to get ashore at Frisco, been brought back and flogged at the mizzen rigging, and afterwards turned his face to the dark forecastle wall, refused food and died. The little incident had added to Elderkin's unsavoury reputation, but it was this reputation which made

captain into consultation over the diminishing returns of the Spirito Santo, and prop

rty vulture-ridden Port of Spain of those days. The room was bare, and upon the blotchy whitewash of the wall there hung nothing but a map and a few advertisements. The mosquitoes sang through the unscreened windows; outside, in the dusty strip of bleached earth between the house and the road, a hedge of hibiscus was in bloom. In the glaring sunshine the flaunting back-

a crescent of gold fled across the table, slipping back again when he set the bottle down, as a ripple of reflected l

rhaps attempted the passage round the Horn itself. There would be no difficulty about that, but Captain Elderkin must, of course, not sail from a Peruvian harbour as the authorities there had an unpleasant habit of marking a load-line on every ship that cleared and seeing that she did not go above it. Besides, a cargo was awaiting him in Chili, and the partners were prepared about that too. It was to be a double deal, the actual copper and nitrates, with a small amount of gold, which she would go out to take was, by arrangement with a certain official known to the partners, to be changed for sand and stones. Just a sprinkling of nitrate at the top, perhaps, since nitrate is loaded in bulk. It was risky, but on the other hand it was a thing often carried through with success, and Elderkin, who knew all

oint was reached above which the partners refused to go and below which he would not descend. At that point they came to their agreement, and Joab Elderkin went out of the office having sold his only form of honour on a gamble which stood to put him on the w

*

sh. Also, Lemaire came from Martinique, which, after Haiti, is the headquarters of Obeah, and worse, of voodoo. Even quite good families in decaying Martinique had dealings with the unclean thing, and St. Pierre was known, even among sailors, for a hotbed of strange vices. All this was why Lemaire made such a powerful mate, for the crew, except for the red-headed Danish engineer from St. Thomas, were either half-castes from the Islands and the southern continent, or full-blooded negroes; which was to say that superstition was so part of them that the last vestige of it would only run out with the last drop of blood from their bodies. Elderkin knew better than to penetrate the forecastle, but he was aware of the bottles filled with dead cockroaches, bits of worsted and the rest of the paraphernalia for the casting of spells, which hung there. He himself had found that the only way to keep his steward off his whisky was to decorate his locker with a similar charm, and since he had done so had suffered no more from pilfering. All this was obeah, harmless enough, and if now and then, a white cock was sacrific

. All day the wind-which till then had thrummed through the rigging and held the sails in their stiffened curves so steadily that the Spirito Santo kept a fairly even keel-had been falling on fitfulness. Loaded as she was, the seas that raced past her, almost level with he

ons on the fly-leaf of an old Bible which had been unearthed with a lot of other junk from a locker. Calculations about ships-the varying costs of handling a four-

brass of the ship's fittings gleam out; made the captain's always pale face seem waxen, showed two sallow fla

n on dis, my friend. Sacré nom de Dieu"-on a sudden flash of menace-"did you thin

ching the other man steadily. When he spo

. Lemaire explained that he was talking about the scuttling of the

ess me with proper respect. If you do so I'll discuss business with you. If not, I'll see t

but he spread his dark hands in apology, so that the

nesses that reveal themselves to a cunning mind when something beyond the normal is in progress. Elderkin remembered the night when Lemaire and the successfully bribed official had gone together, as he had th

eir cards upon the table. "With our boats we should not stand a chance. . . . A

t our boats to takes us a little way. I must pile h

ide! Who d'you s'pose believe dat? Not unless we first had an a

t be carried thro

or Lemaire was to be kept

r reported. It's a tricky place, the sea don't break true on it, sets in sideways. Beyond it's flat to

s it, di

of coast not a couple of degrees below the fortieth paral

made her unmanageable," went on Elderkin, "we should be driven asho

able to give us de lie . . ." suggested

need

ng a profound disturbance if he violently part from it; and for many years now Elderkin's soul had been one with his ship. She was ugly, cranky, she bore a name as a hell-ship that he had earned for her, but together they had won through much; men had died on her, blood run upon her decks, misery and pride and drunkenness and strange doings permeated her very frame. She was as the flesh of his flesh, and only that dream-ship of his own which floated in a mirage before his

ife, who, in spite of himself, absorbed his consciousness. All the ugliness of his betrayal of her was thrown sharply into notice by the compact with his mate; and, shot by a sharper distaste than ever before, he covered his eyes for a minute, in an attempt to focus his will undistracted. It was successful; Elderkin, little as he knew it, was an idealist, however perverted a one, and idealism was with him in this venture, beckoni

for a stormy sun had penetrated the gloom, and the heavy black letters stood out distinctly on the yellowe

s childish mind had half-feared, half-hoped, that a flood was coming, down which he could float triumphantly in some makeshift ark . . . as to his grandmother, he might rescue her and he might not, but if he did, of course, she would be so overcome with gratitude and admiration that she would never again abase his dignity with a certain limber cane. Then, in a lull of the gale, the gleam had shone out once more, and by its light he read on; read how God had promised there should never come a flood over all the earth again, and had made a rainbow as a sign of it. Rather dull of God, he thought in his disappointment. The storm raged so that he dared not slip back to the house, not because of any fear of the elements, but because his grandmother would notice if his clothes got wet; so he had s

hich I make between me and you, and every living creature that is with you. . . . I do set my bow in the cloud, and it shall be the token of a covenant. . . . And it sh

was the illusion and so sharp the knock on his dormant spiritual sense. His hands, which were trembling oddly, went out to grasp the edge of the table, not for the ph

r all the water shipped-into the confused sea that the dead wind had left. She was travelling badly, her heavy

en the rail and the chart-house. Elderkin climbed the ladder to the top of the chart-house, and then stood there, struck to sudden stillness. He never glanced at the binnacle to see if the man were keeping the course, or

into the sea. So close the opalescent feet of it looked that it seemed as though the ship's bows were heading through the phantom portals of some new world, but high in air the summit of the curve,

it was, of which he was so sure in the back of his mind that he felt it waiting for him to recognize it every moment. . . . All sorts of bewildering little half-memories flitted across his mind, and refused to be captured or placed. Queer, irrational little things they were, incongruous and wildly senseless; he felt dizzy chasing them, but he knew if he gave up concentrating even for an instant, the whole

never seen that especial effect before, that he had most certainly never noted it down; the mere idea that he had now seemed as silly as a dream when the mind has struggled fully awake, though when he had first thought of it and taken the notebook up, it had seemed as possible as the same dream when the sleeper is in the midst of it. He still felt curiously dizzy, though his head was clearing slowly: things seemed commonplace around him once more; he could not even remember distinctly what his sensations had been. He only knew that in that trance-like state, of a moment-of ?ons-earlier, he had known he had seen before that which he then saw, and seen it connected with something he could not catch. Whether he ever had seen it, perhaps on that incompletely remembered day of storm which had flashed back to him on this afternoon; or whether, already worked up by his conscience, by the interview with Lemaire, and, to his sensitized mind, by the words in the Bible, the sudden effect on him of seeing that bow set in the flaming cloud, had produced a brainstorm, he could neve

seology of his Puritan forebears, as he had heard Him praised when a little boy

got religion. He h

read again the passage that had flamed into his ken earlier, he read the promises of the Almighty, he read of how men were called the Sons of God. He saw himself and all his fellow humans not merely calling God Father by a kindly sufferance towards adopted children, but as beings created of the same substance, their souls as much made of the ess

ad counted for his purpose, should have died away in the self-same hour that, as he phrased it, the wind of the spirit blew into his soul. The barometer was falling rapidly, in spite of the stiller air, and he had had the royals and outer jib and gaff-topsail stowed. What with her reduced sail, the influence of her steam, and the lumpy seas, the Spirito Santo was behaving her worst, riding slugglishly with a heavy reluctant motion as though she hardly considered it worth the effort of keeping her blunt nose above water at all. Elderkin felt her sulkiness, and it seemed to him as though, instead of helping to save her, she was possessed of an evil spirit bent on thwarting him. He watched her closely, and spent the day on the poop, and though he said little, every one was aware of something new and stran

wn. It was only for the children's sake that he had stuck to the Spirito Santo, for it suited him to be able to get home as often as he might, and even when the Spirito Santo did not touch St. Thomas he could always pick up with a mail-packet or a sailing ship of some kind. It was his ambition to send both boy and girl to New York for

not reading, but making calculations on the margin. He glance

e here," he ordered, "a

e order. Lemaire came with a mixture of civility and an assumption of confederacy in his manner, but Elderkin

"you were wanting to s

aiting, sir. I tell you plainly my engines will not stand so very much. And

sked Elderki

lsen say is right. It

er," replied Elderkin

demanded, with a lapse into Island patois now and again, what the blank bl

n of God, even as I am. Praise the Lord with me, for He has shown me into what an abyss of sin I had fallen. Do you hear what I

the situation the first. He saw that the skipper was not trying to do them down as Lemaire, when he found his tongue again, accused him: that

urself. I only shipped this voyage because it meant being able to do what I want for them. I've only stuck to this hell-ship for them. There's been things done aboard here that would have sunk the ship i

my eyes have been opened, the Lord be thanked. . . . I have

ace of God to keep my engine

o one, Mr. Elderkin. Remember, sah-if the captain is

oo, that I couldn't hold my own sh

care we will say you are mad, yes, mad. De men have only got to hear religion coming out

go crew yet that I couldn't lick. I'll save this ship against the l

Elderkin? They won't be pleased to see the Spirito Santo come crawling into the roadstead with a faked cargo and

t's coming on to blow now. She can't live through it, I tell you. It's sinking her now an

rkin; "if my repentance is too late the Lord w

nyone else's," cried the mate. "I tell you it's m

th making the blackest of sinners see the true light, which the Lord has done between two dog-watches. Yesterday I was profaning the Book with my calculations of sinful gain made out upon its pages, to-day I ha

marked Olsen, p

he urged in a low voice, his back to the captain, "and then y

een water breaking sounded in a scurrying frequency-he knew what the mate was planning. A rim of something cold on the back of Lemaire's neck made hi

ressing the muzzle in till the dark seamed skin on the mate's neck turned greenish in a circle around the iron.

ll be. I will do the best with my engines. But if ever we see port again, I have done wi

at that time of year, had caught the Spirito Santo in the confusion of the heavy cross seas. That first blow heeled her over, over, over . . . it seemed as though she were dipping swiftly far beyond the angle of safety; further and further. There was nothing to be done for the moment but clutch on to whatever was nearest; cries of terror fr

e Spirito Santo came slowly up again. If that gust of wind had held a minute longer she would have rolled herself, her faked cargo, and her huddled li

waist, while Olsen was on his hands and knees

mself into his oilskins as he spoke, ordered in his movements but speedy, considering the terrible

of the ropes and guys, that were all shrieking and wailing on different notes as though the ship were suddenly endowed with the gift of tongues. The men fought their way up the rigging, and, lying along the slippery yard-arms, wrestled w

tube-the only means of communicating with the engine-room except the still more primitive one of messengers-to stop her. And when it looked as though she could never recover to meet that oncoming mountain, but must dive into it and be smothered, her bows rose once more, up and up, till they raked the swollen clouds, while a wall of whiteness thundered past on either side. As Elderkin called for "full" again, his face was as calm as that of a little child. All that night the storm increased, and wove air and water into one great engine of destruction, and all night Elderkin stayed lashed to the rail of the chart-house, which was momentarily in danger of being washed away l

came Olsen, still phlegmatic, almost as black as one of his dago squad. Gripping the poop-rail with one hand, with the other he laid hol

. stays parting .

t it," he y

ng sea. That was exactly what it looked like, as though it were a body distinct and separate from the rest of the raging water, some great fold pushed up from the Antarctic region and urged across the ocean, on and on. . . . It bore down on the infinitesimal ship and her clinging ants of crew, bore dow

g-drawn seconds when all thought she had gone under, for the rushing sea had climbed level with the chart-house roof, while the air was so thick with spume and spray it would have been difficult to say where the sea left off being

ons vibrated as though some malignant force within her had broken loose; and when Elderkin tried to

" cried Olsen, "s

he trough of the sea; rolled fit to break her heart. Elderkin, on the poop, shouting at the men reefing the topsail, saw something that for the first moment of horror seemed fraught with the supernatural. Years of neglect, of rust, of corrosion from salt, had in reality gone to bring about what he then saw, with dishonesty and money-grubbing meanness behind the rust and corrosion. For, with a scream of ripping iron and the sharp snapping of guys, the Spirito Santo rolled her f

while Olsen, sticking by his caste, and Lemaire, seeing still a faint chance for life, worked with them to cover the jagged hole with the stoutest timbers they could find. What was left of the fires was drawn, the planks over the hole shored up from below with timbers, tarpaulins stretched a-top of all and fastened down by a great batten bolted through the sodden deck; and, during all the hours of

hing to be done but hoist the inner jib when she came up too much into the wind and lower it when she paid off again, a need so recurring it was almost mechanical, he became as much a prey to inner questionings as his ship was to the winds. What tormented him was the thought that if the Spirito Santo had foundered in this south-west gale all hands would have inevitably been lost, whereas had he kept by his agreement to scuttle her earlier all could probably have been saved. Was he then become a murderer by having decided as he had, and would it have been more righteous to keep on his evil course? Elderkin, to whom for the first time the liv

he went out on to the poop and met the crisp but now friendly wind, saw the glitter of sunshine on peacock waves, that still broke into white crests, but without malignance, he knew that the Lord was on his side. How was it possible he had ever thought otherwise? He must indeed be weak in the ways of grace tha

am-jets at the base to maintain the draught to the furnaces. The freakish erection held together well, though it looked oddly stumpy in place of the thin, raking smoke-stack; Olsen secured it by guys of iron chain. At last all was complete, and once again a plume of dirty smoke trailed from between the sticks of the Spirito S

, yet her foul sides and wicked loading absorbed half her speed. She was a wet ship at the best of times, now she was sodden to her trucks, and the showers of icy rain that blew down on the westerly gale every now and then, wetted in a worse fashion, for rain-water chills to the bone right through oilskins. One day an exhausted Cape pigeon fell on board, and the little bird was eaten raw by the first man who got to it; sometimes a great albatross sailed on level unmoving wings around the labouring ship, and mollymawks screamed and circled, but none fell a victim to the hungry crew. There was a certain amount of salt junk left aboard, but the chief diet was nothing but hard-tack, and that was mould

off Cape Stiff itself, showing unspeakably bleak and gaunt through the driving mist; o

y, and although she rolled till it seemed she would dip her yards, and the water could hardly be pumped out of her as fast as it poured in, yet she pulled through, as she had pulled

passing of the Horn-on the Pacific side the actual physical blows of material damage and storm, on the Atl

better under sail than steam, and also, like every true sailor, Elderkin felt more in harmony with the weather when using only canvas. For a steamer goes independently of the wind, ignores it, shoves her nose in its face

er seconded Elderkin, and he and Olsen bore the burden of nigger-driving alone-and Olsen, although he was loyal, made his discontent apparent. A terrible loneliness of mind fell upon Elderkin. He felt himself accursed of all men, but he still held on; each successive incident of his fight,

Santo had passed into the men's bones, they moved slowly if ordered to do anything, their shrunken flesh was a mass of sea-boils and, since the lime-juice and potatoes were exhausted, scurvy had broken out. Elderkin himself looked like some medi?val picture of the Baptist: he had grown a beard that came to a sparse point, and his sombre eyes glowed from behind the disordered streaks of hair that fell over them, while his skin, so tightly stretched over the bones, had taken o

e skipper quietly. Lemaire s

nd make for the shore, dat's what

. .

ight be picked up sooner. I've told de men; I've told how we was all goin' to be rich an' safe and would

k face was greyed over in patches from disease, "an' we aren't goin' to stand

up a hand which scurvy, on an open wound, had literally rotted so that the tendons hung down like weed. He shook the maimed thing at Elderkin. "Look at this"-"And this

as the thinning veils of sleep drop away from the waking consciousness in the morning. He did not pul

dful for the grinding and creaking of the ship's labour

that's better. Well, I guess I know what you men are saying to yourselves-that I'm one man against the lot of you, and now we're n

he wet deck; their upturned faces had the abrupt fore-shortening that imparts a touch of the ludicrous, but those faces were set in folds which told of hardened determinati

Aren't you? Why d'you think it is you have bloody sacrifices there in the fo'c'sle-oh, yes, I know about it all-why d'you suppose you cringe to that nigger there"-pointing to the mate-"with his black history of murdered children and flesh eaten in secret when the sacred drum beats at the full of the moon? Why d'you suppose you're scared sick of a dirty bug and a bit of wool in an old bottle, or of my Bible that I've set up on a shelf? It's because you know there's something behind-behind your ju-jus and behind my ju-ju. . . . You not fear the Lord! Why, y

Bible out over the rail, threatening them not with its insignificant fabric but with its unknown import. A couple of Jamaican neg

world and judgment comin'. Save us, massa, save us. . . ." And a dago fro

of men, "don't you listen to his talk. Talk won't fill our stom

ood and we'll keep on!" shouted th

derness and He'll provide for us now if we trust in Him. He

taunted Lemaire; and Elderkin, his

nd, and that his sacrifice and conversion were accepted on high. For the image he had had in his mind on that day of revelation in the chart-house had been of one Titanic struggle, not of this succession of conflicts which sometimes rose to crisis point but more often meant fighting against the terrible depression of day after day's inaction, driven half-crazy by the unceasing moaning of the rigging. Sustained bad weather gets on a sailor's nerves not because of any danger but simply by dint of the repetition of noises; there is only one thing more unbearable to mind and temper, and that is to be becalmed. Thought of any such happening was far from those on board

d driven all but the thinnest lines of shadow out of being. The nights were almost as hot as the days and always the false cross gleamed from a cloudless sky, and the true Cross swam up lying on her back and trailing the pointers behind her, slowly righting herself as she rose and driving the pitiless brilliancy of the Milky Way before her. The drinking-water, what there was of it, stank; and the dried mouths of the men could hardly manage the mouldy hard-tack which captain and crew shared alike. And there was nothing to be done, nothing that could be done. The men were past revolt now, they could only shamble dizzily about. There was nothing to be do

out by her successive batterings, the Spirito Santo was literally falling apart. He looked over her s

oached, and this fluid life he now served out to the men. Then he drove them, as before with gun or Bible, but this time with rum; drove them to the task of frapping the leaking ship. Four great chain cables were passed under her and hove tigh

between the patched sails that seemed as though one more puff of wind would tear them from the battered yards, her spewing sides kept together

*

sed the word round that her skipper was to be broken too. He who had been so self-controlled in the old unregenerate days now drank steadily, but it was only when he was very drunk he talked. And even then it was difficult to ma

TNO

original a minute descri

ounced R

Counsel was not allowed to m

NTE

LLANTY

& EDI

riber'

retained as they appear in the orig

ge

water from St.

the water fr

ge

n passage lead

e dim pass

ge

sophiscated e

ore sophist

ge

er clear, long-s

d her clear,

ge

however preverted

st, however p

ge

ned to Osle

turned