The Sailor

XVII

Early in November "The Adventures of Dick Smith on the High Seas" was published by a firm with which Mr. Ambrose was connected. It was clear from the first that it was going to succeed. The progress of the story through the chaste pages of Brown's had brought many new readers to that old and respected periodical. The editor made no secret of the fact that it was the best serial story the magazine had had for years, and as soon as "Dick Smith" appeared as a book it had many friends.

The notices in the papers, which Mr. Ambrose took the trouble to send to Henry Harper from time to time, were kind to the verge of indiscretion. Almost without exception they summed up the modest and unpretending story in the same way: it was a thing entirely new. The writer saw and felt life with extraordinary intensity, and he had the power of painting it with a vivid force that was astonishing. The effect was heightened by a quaintness of style which seemed to give the impression of a foreigner of great perception using a tongue with which he was unfamiliar. Yet, allowing for every defect, there was a wonderful power of narrative, not unworthy of a Bunyan or a Defoe. A spell was cast upon the reader's mind, which made it very difficult for those who began the book to lay it down until the last page had been read.

Henry Harper was quite unconscious of the stir he had begun to make in literary circles. One aspect only of a literary success had anything to say to him at first, and that was purely monetary. Moreover, Edward Ambrose, unaffectedly proud of being the sponsor of "the new Stevenson" – a generalization so crude as to be very wide of the mark – was wise enough to stand between the personality of this half formed but rapidly developing man of genius and the curiosity of his admirers.

The young man was more than content that Edward Ambrose should take charge of his literary affairs and "dry nurse him" through these early and in some ways very critical months of his fame. And child of nature as the Sailor was, it was a task that could only have been carried through by a man of tact and liberality of mind.

One day, at the beginning of December, when Henry Harper had been married nearly six weeks – the visit to the Registrar round the corner in the Circus had coincided almost exactly with the book publication of the "Adventures of Dick Smith on the High Seas" – he received a letter from his friend. It said:

Bury Street,

Tuesday.

MY DEAR HARPER,

If you are free, come and dine here on Friday next at eight. There will be two or three men (no ladies!), old friends, and your humble admirers, who would like very much to meet you. Do come if you can.

Yours ever,

EDWARD AMBROSE.

The Sailor's first instinct, in spite of his confidence in Mr. Ambrose and a liking for him that now amounted to affection, was to decline this invitation. He was well aware that he was not fitted by education and by social opportunity to take his place as the equal of Mr. Ambrose and his friends. Therefore, a summons even in these siren terms, worried him a good deal. It seemed disloyal to deny such a friend for such a reason; but he had learned that the genie who now accompanied him day and night wherever he went, had one very sinister quality. It had a power of making him morbidly sensitive in regard to his own deficiencies.

In order to end the state of uncertainty into which the letter had thrown him, he showed it to Cora. She advised him to accept the invitation. This Mr. Ambrose, as she knew, had helped him very much, and it would be wise, she thought, for Harry to meet these friends of his, who no doubt would be literary men like Mr. Ambrose himself.

Cora having made his mind up for him, the young man determined to do his best to lay his timidity aside. After all, there was nothing of which to be ashamed. He was what he was; and it would be the part of loyalty to a true friend to believe that no harm could come of dining with him.

All the same, the evening of Friday, December 13, was in the nature of a great ordeal for Henry Harper. Why he should have had this feeling about it was more than he could say. But having duly written and posted his acceptance, he knew no peace of mind until that ominous day was through.

The evening itself, when it came, began badly. Cora, whom he left at the door of the Roc at a little after half past seven, told him exactly how to get to Bury Street. He would have plenty of time to walk as he had not to be there until eight. But either he did not follow her instructions as carefully as he ought to have done, or he was in a chaotic state of mind, for things went hopelessly awry. He took several wrong turnings, had twice to be put right by a policeman, began to wish miserably, when it was too late, that he had taken a taxi, and in the end arrived nearly twenty minutes after eight at Edward Ambrose's door.

It was a flustered, guilty, generally discomposed Henry Harper who was admitted by Mr. Ambrose's servant, whom he addressed as "Sir." The host and his two other guests were waiting patiently to begin dinner.

"Here you are," said Edward Ambrose, coming forward to greet the young man almost before he was announced. "I know what has happened, so don't apologize. No good Londoner apologizes for being late, my dear fellow." He then introduced Henry Harper to his two friends, and they went in to dinner.

The young man was so much upset at first by the absence of a dinner jacket, that he felt he must take an early opportunity of apologizing for that also. This he accordingly did with the greatest simplicity, and excused himself on the plea that he had no evening clothes at present, but was intending to get some.

Before Edward Ambrose could make any remark, his servant, of whom Henry Harper was really more in awe than of anyone else – he looked so much more imposing than either his master or his master's guests – was asking whether he would have sherry.

"No, thank you, I'm teetotal," he said to the servant in answer to the invitation. "At least, I'm almost teetotal." For he suddenly remembered that since his marriage he had rather fallen away from grace, yet not to any great extent.

"Have just half a glass," said Ambrose. "I'm rather proud of this sherry, although that's not a wise thing to say." The host laughed his rich note, which in the ear of Henry Harper was even finer than Klondyke's, if such an admission was not sacrilege; and his two friends, to whom the latter part of his remark was addressed, echoed his laugh with notes of their own that were almost equally musical.

"A simple beverage, warranted harmless," said the host as he raised his glass, making a rather feeble attempt to secure his line of retreat.

"Plutocrat," said his friend Ellis, who was in the Foreign Office, and who dignified his leisure with writing plays.

"It's very nice indeed, sir," said Henry Harper, speaking as he felt. He was convinced that this was the nicest wine he had ever tasted – to be sure, he had tasted little – and that it called for sincere commendation.

This evening was a landmark in the Sailor's life. Nervously anxious as he had been at the outset, the ease and the simplicity of his three companions, their considered yet not too obviously considered kindness towards him, the discreet pains they took to establish him on a basis of equality, could hardly fail of their effect. Very soon Henry Harper began to respond to this new and subtly delightful atmosphere as a flower responds to the sun.

He had never imagined that any dinner could be so agreeable as this one. He had never dreamed of food so choice or cooked so deliciously, or wines of such an exquisite flavor. He had never seen a room like that, or such beautiful silver, or such flowers as those in the bowl in the center of the table. All these things addressed a clear call to the soul of Henry Harper, a call it had never heard before.

Mr. Ambrose was a delightful host, and not less delightful were his friend Mr. Ellis and his other friend Mr. Barrington, yet perhaps Mr. Portman, the servant, who bore himself with apostolic calm and dignity, was really the most wonderful of all.

Somehow, these three gentlemen, Mr. Ambrose, Mr. Ellis, and Mr. Barrington, continually recalled, by little things they said and the way in which they said them, no less a person than Mr. Esme Horrobin. And to recall that gentleman was to evoke the even more august shade of the immortal Klondyke.

By an odd chance, Mr. Esme Horrobin was to be brought to the mind of Henry Harper in a manner even more direct before dinner was over. By the time they had come to the apples and pears and Mr. Ambrose had persuaded him to have half a glass of port wine, they were all talking freely and frankly together – Henry Harper a little less freely and frankly than the others, no doubt, but yet having settled down to enjoy himself more thoroughly than he could ever have thought to be possible – when the name of Mr. Esme Horrobin was suddenly mentioned. It was either Mr. Ellis or Mr. Barrington who mentioned it. The young man was not sure which; indeed, throughout the evening he was not quite sure which was Mr. Ellis and which was Mr. Barrington. Anyhow, after the host had told an anecdote which made them laugh consumedly, although the Sailor was not quite able to see the point of it, Mr. Ellis-Barrington made the remark, "That story somehow reminds one of Esme Horrobin."

"Alas, poor Esme!" sighed Mr. Ellis-Barrington with mock pathos. "It's odd, but this story of Ned's, which really seems to handle facts rather recklessly, recalls that distinguished shade. Alas, poor Horrobin!"

All three – Mr. Ellis, Mr. Barrington, and their host – laughed at the mention of that name, but to the acute ear of Henry Harper it seemed that their mirth had suddenly taken a new note.

"You never met Horrobin," said Mr. Ellis-Barrington to the Sailor. "We were all at Gamaliel with him."

Mr. Ellis-Barrington was wrong to assume that Mr. Harper had never met Mr. Esme Horrobin. Mr. Harper had not been with Mr. Horrobin at Gamaliel, but he had been with him at Bowdon House.

"Oh, yes," said Mr. Harper, feeling honorably glad that he could play this part in the conversation. "I have met a Mr. Horrobin of Gamaliel College, Oxford." Somehow, the young man could not repress a thrill of pride in his excellent memory for names and places.

"Not the great Esme?" cried Mr. Ellis-Barrington with serio-comic incredulity.

"Yes, Mr. Esme Horrobin," said Henry Harper stoutly.

"Do tell us where you met the great man?" The voice of Edward Ambrose was asking the question almost as if it felt that it ought not to do so.

"I met him, sir, when I was staying at Bowdon House. He was staying there, too, and he used to talk to me about the 'Satyricon' of Petronius Arbiter and the Feast of Trimalchio."

For one brief but deadly instant, there was a pause. The odd precision with which the carefully treasured words were spoken was uncanny. But the three friends who had been with the great Esme Horrobin at Gamaliel somehow felt that an abyss had opened under their feet.

Edward Ambrose was the first to speak. But the laugh of gay charm was no longer on his lips. There was a look almost of horror in those honest eyes.

"That's very interesting, my dear fellow," he said, with a change of tone so slight that it was hardly possible to detect it. "Interesting and curious that you should have met Horrobin." And then with a return to carelessness, as though no answer was required to a merely conventional inquiry: "What's he doing now, do you know?"

The Sailor's almost uncanny power of memory was equal even to that question.

"He's bear-leading the aristocracy," said the young man, with a proud exactitude of phrase.

"Oh, really!"

But in spite of the adroitness of the host, the tact of Mr. Ellis, and Mr. Barrington's feeling for the nuances, another pause followed. For one dark instant it was by no means clear to all three of them that their legs were not being pulled rather badly. This rare and strange young sea monster with a primeval simplicity of speech and manner, who had just absentmindedly quenched his thirst from his finger bowl, might not be all that he appeared. It seemed hardly possible to doubt the bona fides of such a curiously charming child of nature, but…

For another brief and deadly moment, silence reigned. But in that moment, Mr. Henry Harper, with his new and rather terrible sensitiveness, was beginning to fear that he had committed a solecism. He remembered with a pang that Marlow's Dictionary had been unable to correlate "bear-leading" and "aristocracy." Clearly he had done wrong to make use of a phrase whose significance he did not fully understand, even though it was the phrase most certainly used by Mr. Esme Horrobin. It was pretending to a knowledge you didn't possess, and these gentlemen who had all been to college and to whom, therefore, pretence of any kind was entirely hateful…

"It's so like him!" The rare laugh of Edward Ambrose had come suddenly to the young man's aid. But the question for gods and men was: did Mr. Ambrose mean it was so like Mr. Esme Horrobin to be bear-leading the aristocracy, or so like Mr. Henry Harper to be using a phrase whose meaning was beyond him?

"Alas, poor Esme!" sighed Mr. Ellis-Barrington.

The Sailor echoed that sigh. His relief was profound that after all a pause so deadly had not been caused by himself.

XVIII

Henry Harper at this period of his life was in the grip of a single passion; the passion to know. Already he had learned that books, wonderful, enchanting as they were, formed only one avenue to the realms of truth. He had now come to realize that there are many secrets in earth and heaven which books, even the wisest of them, are not able to disclose.

Of late, he had begun to reinforce the thousand and one volumes placed at his disposal by Mr. Rudge with the daily and weekly newspapers, and those contemporaries of Brown's which came out once a month. He had been quite confounded by the reception given to "Dick Smith" by the public press. A thing so trivial seemed unrelated to the life of incomprehensible complexity in which he lived. Besides, he was convinced that the merit of the story had been exaggerated, as it no doubt had, in accordance with a generous custom of giving a newcomer a fair chance. Still, the author felt in his own mind that whatever the reviewers found in "Dick Smith" to admire was to be laid to the door of the friend who had made it possible for the story to reach the world.

One of the first fruits of this new craving for exact knowledge was to prove bitterly embarrassing. The Sailor had been haunted for several weeks by a report, which he had found among Mr. Rudge's miscellaneous collection, of the royal commission which sat to inquire into the terrible case of Adolf Beck. He became obsessed by the thought that the apparatus of the criminal law in a free country could fasten bonds on an entirely innocent person, could successfully resist all attempts to cast them off, and when finally pinned down and exposed to public censure could easily evoke a second line of defense, which, under juridical forms, freed it of blame in the matter.

To such an extent did the affair react upon the Sailor's mind that when he called one afternoon upon Edward Ambrose in Pall Mall, he had to make a sad confession. He had been so much troubled by it that he had not been able to work.

"Ah, but there we come to the core of official England," said Edward Ambrose. "Such miscarriages of justice happen in every country in the world, but the commission which solemnly justifies them on the ground of indisputable common sense could only have happened in this land of ours."

The young man was grateful for the tone of indignation. It was something to know there was one man in the world who agreed in sum with a certain trite formula which was all he had to work by. It had come to him by accident on the Margaret Carey… Right is right, and wrong is no man's right.

"You should go to the Old Bailey one day and hear a trial," said Edward Ambrose. "All things that are concerned with reality might help you just now. I dare say it will hurt you horribly; but if you are not unlucky in the judge, it may help to restore your faith in your country."

"Yes, sir, I'll go there one day, as you advise me to," said Henry Harper, as a boy in the fourth form who was young for his age might have said it; and then with curious simplicity: "But I won't much fancy going by myself."

"I'll come with you," said Edward Ambrose, "if that is how you feel about it."

Thus it was that one evening, about a fortnight later, Henry Harper received a postcard, which said:

Meet me outside O. B. 10.30 tomorrow. Murder trial: a strange and terrible drama of passion for two students of the human comedy! E. A.

On the following morning, the Sailor had already mingled with the crowd outside the Old Bailey when, punctual to the minute, he was joined by his friend.

"It's brave of you to face it," was his greeting.

Mr. Ambrose little knew the things he had faced in the course of his five and twenty years of life, was the thought that ran in the mind of the Sailor.

They made their way in, and became witnesses of the drama that the law was preparing to unfold.

The judge began the proceedings, or rather the proceedings began themselves, with a kind of grotesque dignity. After the jury had been sworn, the prisoner was brought into the dock. Henry Harper gazed at him with an emotion of dull horror. In an instant, he had recognized Mr. Thompson, the mate of the Margaret Carey.

There could be no doubt it was he. Alexander Thompson was the name given in the indictment; besides, the Sailor would have known anywhere that shaggy and hirsute man who had cast such a shadow across his youth. There he was, that grim figure! He had changed, and yet he had not changed. The long, lean, angular body was the same in every awkward line, but the deadly pallor of the face was horrible to see. It was Mr. Thompson right enough, and yet it was not Mr. Thompson at all.

A surge of memories came upon Henry Harper as he sat in that court. They were so terrible that he could hardly endure them. He did not hear a word that was being spoken by the barrister who, in even and impartial tones, was reciting the details of a savage but not ignoble crime. The Sailor was thousands of miles away in the Pacific; the groves of the Island of San Pedro were rising through the morning mists; he could hear the plop-plop of the sharks in the water; he could hear the Old Man coming up on deck.

"That man looks capable of anything," whispered Edward Ambrose.

The Sailor had always been clear upon that point. There was the drive to the docks in a cab through the rain of the November night in his mind. Again he was a helpless waif of the streets seated opposite Jack the Ripper. He almost wanted to scream.

"Would you rather not stay?" whispered his friend.

"I'm not feeling very well," said Henry Harper; thereupon they left the court and went out into the street.

They walked along Holborn in complete silence. To the Sailor the fellowship, the security, the friendliness of that crowded street were a great relief. His soul was in the grip of awful memories. Even the man at his side could not dispel them. Mr. Ambrose was much farther away just now than the Old Man, the Island of San Pedro, and the savage and brutal murderer to whom he owed his life.

For days afterwards, the mind of the Sailor was dominated by Mr. Thompson. He learned from the newspapers that the mate of the Margaret Carey was condemned to death, and that he awaited the last office of the law in Dalston Prison. One day, an odd impulse came upon him. He bought some grapes and took them to the prison, and with a boldness far from his character at ordinary times, sought permission to see the condemned man.

As Mr. Thompson had only one day more to live, and not one of his friends had visited him for the simple reason that he had not a friend in the world, the governor of the prison, a humane man, gave the Sailor permission to see the mate of the Margaret Carey.

Behind iron bars and in the presence of a warder, Henry Harper was allowed to look upon Mr. Thompson, to speak to him, and to offer the grapes he had brought him. But a dreadful shock awaited the young man. He saw at once that there was nothing human now in the man who was ranging his cell like a caged beast.

"Don't you know me, Mr. Thompson?" cried Henry Harper feebly, through the bars.

The mate of the Margaret Carey paid no heed to his voice, but still paced up and down.

"Don't you know me, Mr. Thompson? I'm Sailor."

For a fraction of time, the condemned man turned savage, unutterable eyes upon him. They were those of a wild beast at bay.

"There's no God," he said.

He dashed his head against the wall of his cell.

XIX

Henry Harper was now in a universe of infinite complexity. The genie who lived in the wonderful lamp in his brain had taught him already that he knew nothing about whole stellar spaces in this strange cosmos that he, the thing he called himself, inhabited. Moreover, it presented many problems. Of these the most instant and pressing was Cora.

It was no use mincing the matter: Cora and he were not getting on. There was no bond of sympathy between them. His work and all that went with it were far more to him than the woman he had married. And when this fact came home to her, she began to resent it in a contemptuous way. It made it more difficult for both that his work only appealed to her in one aspect, and that the one which least appealed to him. The hard and continuous labor it involved meant nothing to her; the hopes and the fears of an awakening artistic sense were things beyond her power to grasp; if his work had not a definite commercial value, if it could not be rendered in pounds and shillings, it was a waste of time and worse than meaningless. Everything apart from that was a closed book as far as she was concerned. She began to despise his timidity and his ignorance, and the time soon came when she did not hesitate to sneer at him before her friends.

For one thing, she was bitterly resentful. It was useless to disguise that he was not merely indifferent to her physical charms, he positively disliked and even dreaded that aspect of their life together. Within a very short time after their marriage, he made the discovery that she drank.

Even before that knowledge came he had discerned something unwholesome about her. The blackened eyebrows, the rouged cheeks, the dyed hair, the overfine presence, the stealthy, cloying color of scent she exuded, the coarse mouth, the apathetic eyes, had always been things that he dared not let his mind rest upon in detail even before he had taken them unto himself. And now that he had done so at the call of duty, and with even that to sustain him, he foresaw that he must come to dislike them more and more. It hardly needed a pervading reek of brandy in her bedroom to read the future.

Unluckily for Cora, the monotony of a "straight" life with such a humdrum young man was more than she could stand for any length of time. The old fatal habit was soon upon her again. Years of yielding had weakened her will; and now she was beginning to grow contemptuous of her husband – perhaps as a requital of his apathy towards her – she began to assume a defiant carelessness, first of manner and then of conduct.

Disaster was foreshadowed by several quarrels. None of these were serious, but they showed the inevitable end towards which matters had begun to drift. Henry Harper was not the sort of man with whom it was easy to quarrel; he had no aptitude for a form of reflex action quite alien to his nature. All the same, there were times when he was almost tempted to defend himself from Cora's perpetual sneers at his dullness, not only in her company, which was bad enough, but in that of her friends, which was worse.

Her chief complaint was his bearing in restaurants and public places. He had not a word to say for himself; he let "the girls" and "the boys" – Cora included her whole exceedingly numerous acquaintance in these terms – "come it over him"; he took everything lying down; and she couldn't understand why a man who was as clever as he was supposed to be "didn't let himself out a bit now and again."