The Savage Gentleman (11 page)

On the third, exhausted, they all slept. Not all at once--but by turns.

"Probably," Stone said, and his first assumption was very close to the truth, "they only fly out to sea once in a great while. Probably they're sending a boat. In a day or two-

-"

Keep the fires going. Make them into smudges by day. Huge columns of smoke--

like the Lord leading the Children of Israel--stiff-standing above the summit of McCobb
and swinging in the little wind over the water.

On the fourth day they were worn by the strain. They sat silent most of the time--

attending to the fires regularly, climbing the mountain until all were footweary--hurrying to the beach with axes.

On the fifth day they remained beside the shore, straining their eyes.

The sixth was like it. The sun came out and it was warm.

Beds in the house went unmade. Weeds gained in the gardens. No one shaved.

A week after the electrical day found them still in good spirits. There were plenty of possibilities.

"Any day, now. Maybe they can't travel in airships or in boats as fast as we'd thought."

"Any day. Of course. I believe that those fellows didn't know within a long way of where they were. Too cloudy to navigate and probably hard in a thing like that anyway.

They've doubtless sent a ship and it may take a long time for that ship to locate us. Maybe even a month."

Henry swallowed his impatience:'"

"A month?"

"Why not? It's a big ocean and the island's a small speck. Keep the fires going."

"Maybe--"

Someone frowned at Henry. Maybe the ocean was too big and the island too small.

Maybe the airship had never reached--land.

Stone sat on the porch, his cane between his knees. Henry lay on his back at his father's feet. Both men seemed weary. There were circles under their eyes and their skins wee haggard and drawn over their cheek bones.

Down on the headland a fire--a small fire in comparison to those which once had raged there--sent a single desultory plume of smoke into the vacant air.

It was a month, that day, since the visitor from the skies had fled overhead.

"It couldn't happen to us twice," Henry said in a strangled voice.

His father did not answer.

McCobb appeared at the door and murmured that it looked like rain.

As if in answer, a string snapped on Jack's banjo, which had been lying mute in the living-room for thirty days.

Stone never rebounded from the catastrophe. He lost all interest in the schemes which the others invented to explain the silence.

Once, when Henry suggested that the men in the air vessel had possibly believed the islanders were there as free men and had merely reported the existence of the island, and that someone sooner or later would come to verify the report, Stone had said:

"Bosh."

It was his last spark. A negative spark. An admission of surrender.

He had borne for a great many years a full knowledge of the awfulness of his misdeed. He had paid a hundred times over for its rashness.

Stone had been a mighty man. New York had called him brilliant and aggressive.

Paris had called him Spartan. In London he was evaluated as shrewd and acquisitive.

He had planned to perfection one of the most audacious human experiments ever made--to perfection if it may be overlooked that he neglected to supply a way for the return of his adventurers.

In the early years of the colonization of Stone Island it had been his brain and his spirit which furnished the driving force. He had led three men from despair to actual joy.

He had founded and energized a new world.

But now his strength was taken away. Remorse and disappointment had shorn him.

The eagle was fallen.

Day after day he sat beside the window in his chair, an old man, a Napoleon on Elba, planning escapes he was impotent to perform, hoping for miracles, and knowing that his doom was to be both certain and slow.

If one ship flew over, another will.

He did not even react to that.

They tried everything to bring him from himself. Their attempts were pitiful--

because in them was the humiliation and misery of their own souls.

McCobb made a special omelet.
Eat, a little, Viking. Eat. You've sat there with no
food and only your wine for days.

Days.

Henry brought a necklace from the ruins.

Look, father, it's beautiful. A word carved on every stone. Handiwork
unparalleled in Egypt or even Greece.

Silence.

They tried mock anger."

Get yourself out of it. This is no behavior for a man.

Words used to children--and he was a child, sitting there and staring at emptiness.

By and by he got up. He shaved. He made his bed. He changed his clothes. He dined with them. He went out in the sun and weeded in the garden.

But he never smiled again.

He seldom spoke.

One day his hair turned snow-white. A pompom of white hair above the crag of his brow.

His steps faltered.

"What shall we do?" Henry asked anxiously of McCobb.

"What can we do, son? His fire has burned out. Like the fires down on the point.

With them."

"But--"

"I know. I know."

"We're no worse off than we were before," Henry insisted. "And that makes twice.

The third time--they'll take us back."

"The third time," McCobb repeated huskily and Henry, looking at him, realized that he, also, was old.

They found Stone on the 6th of June.

He was lying beside his wheelbarrow. He had been carrying manure from the goat corral to the garden.

He looked as if he had fallen asleep.

McCobb, who had come upon him first, summoned Jack.

"He's dead, Jack."

"Yes, Mr. McCobb,"

"Where's Henry?"

"On the bay."

"Ring the bell."

"Yes, Mr. McCobb." The Scotchman met Henry on the porch. "Your father died this afternoon. A heart attack. It must have been instantaneous, and there's no sign of any pain."

Henry walked inside the house and sat down beneath the sections of newspaper which had been framed behind glass that once had formed the bridge windows of the
Falcon
.

"We all expected it, didn't we?" he said slowly.

"We did, Henry. He's been failing for a long time."

"He was--fairly old."

"Almost seventy."

"Where is he?"

"I--I haven't moved him yet. He fell under that tree with purple flowers."

"Oh."

They went out together--McCobb with his arm encircling Henry's broad back.

They buried Stephen Stone inside the compound at the foot of the huge tree on which he had first laid his hand--the only tree of any size within the confines of the stockade. His headstone was a boulder and on the face of it McCobb fixed a-plate of solid gold:

STEPHEN STONE

The days were long, after that. The house seemed strangely empty.

That emptiness frightened them.

It was in their eyes when they looked at each other.

Next.

It was in Henry's soul when he went to the edge of the sea and whispered to the water: ''I'll be last. I'll be there alone. Alone with three graves. And I shall go mad."

McCobb came after him that day, as he had done once before.

They sat together.

"Any day, now—"

' I'm thirty-one," Henry answered tonelessly. "And I have been waiting all these years for any day."

"The cities"--McCobb murmured his list--"and women."

"Women!"

"Women--laddie--"

Henry rose.

"Why torture me with it? I shall be last. I'll fish here alone. You will lie there and Jack. And I shall laugh and run on the beach and scream like a parrot. I'll never see a woman. I'll never--never--never--"

"Henry!"

"Oh--right. I'm sorry."

His resignation was worse than his anger.

And in his heart McCobb admitted that all he said was true, all he felt was justified.

Chapter Nine
: THE MIRACLE

MCCOBB watched through the glasses. He knew what was going to happen--it had happened before.

Henry, stark naked, poised on the gunwale of the boat and dove.

His body flashed in the sun and McCobb could see the long knife in his hand.

Jack came out on the porch. He followed the direction of McCobb's glasses.

"What's he doing?"

"Watch."

The ripples which Henry's dive had started ran toward the shore. There was a very brief interval of calm. Then the whole surface of the bay in the neighborhood of the boat was broken by a mighty threshing.

In the foamy melée Henry came to the surface and swam quickly to the boat. He caught the gunwale and climbed aboard. He stuck the knife in the wood of a seat.

"Gor!" Jack murmured. "What is it?"

"Shark." McCobb bit off the word.

The splashing was already lessening. Red flowed in the froth. The motion of a long tail was visible, and the fish twisted round and round.

Henry saw McCobb on the porch and waved to him.

"He dive in and kill a big shark like that?" Jack asked.

"He did?"

"Wiff a knife?"

"With a knife. One just like that weapon you carry around."

"Damn!"

McCobb said nothing.

The shark's motions were feeble now, and Henry was paddling toward it.

"That's dangerous," Jack said tentatively.

"You bet it is."

"What's he do it for?"

"Fun."

"For fun?"

"Yes, Jack."

"That ain't fun."

"For him it is. He's sick of things--just like you and me, Jack. Only he's young.

We can swallow our feelings and say nothing. He can't. He has to go out and do things.

The more dangerous the better."

"Sure enough?"

"That's the way boys like that are made."

Suddenly McCobb turned and smiled at Jack in a manner almost brotherly. He could smile--now that the shark was lying with its ripped belly toward the sky.

"You ought to know. I remember once Mr. Stone mentioned that you used to raise cane when you were a young buck."

Jack grinned and scratched his woolly head.

"That's a fact." Doubt came in his face. "But I wouldn't of done nuthing like that.

Not me."

McCobb laughed.

Henry made fast his shark and rowed laboriously toward the beach. Even through the glasses McCobb could see the flexing of his muscles.

Half an hour later the shark-killer appeared, bringing a portion of the hide.

"You saw my day's catch?"

McCobb nodded.

"I took this for shoosies and threw the rest back."

"It never occurred to you that you might get hurt doing that, did it, Henry?"

"Oh--no. Never."

"Never thought that three or four of those things might come at you simultaneously?"

Henry stopped and considered with mock seriousness.

"Now that you mention it, Mr. McCobb--"

"Wouldn't mean anything to you if I asked you to take it easy--for Jack's and my sake?"

Henry shook his head up and down rapidly.

"Sure. I'll stop."

"And you might abandon the idea that you can get one of the crocodiles barehanded, too."

"It's abandoned."

McCobb was embarrassed. ''I'm not trying to supplant the place of your father.

But--you see--if anything happened to you I'd feel responsible for cheating you out of your life--up there."

He pointed toward the north.

"It's all right. I was just looking for a little excitement. There isn't much here any more."

"I know."

Both men stared over the porch rail.

Two traveler's-trees spread fans like peacocks' tails in the yard. Beyond them, ebonies and eucalyptus and a member of the banyan family whose numerous gray trunks ran to earth like the probosces of elephants. Over all a redundancy of foliage with caves in it where the sun shot down, and birds whose plumage made them: look like small fragments of a rainbow.

After that came the sea, so blue that the eyes ached in contemplation of it, and the shoals where the water turned to jade green and tan and even, along the coral edges, a pure alabaster white.

A scene indescribably beautiful and to them unutterably tedious. They had grown careless of the garden, and flowers bloomed there in a rank luxury of competition, overwhelming each other and threatening to inundate the house itself.

Days passed again.

Henry settled into an inactivity which to MeCobb was worse than his foolhardy pursuit of stimulating dangers. He did not read, he did not work, he ate and slept and was silent.

Months.

They seldom rallied each other. The flow of life was slowing down and because Henry had ceased to care, the others had somehow lost interest.

When the ship came, they did not see it at all.

Jack was making preparations for lunch. McCobb was in his shop. Henry sat with a book on his knees and his eyes closed.

He heard sounds come over the water of the bay. Oarlocks creaked and there were voices. His stultified subconscious suggested that McCobb had gone fishing.

Then he realized that the voices were not those of his own companions.

With legs like water, he went to the porch.

A lifeboat, rowed by a half dozen sailors, was already halfway into the bay. A man stood in the stern with the tiller in his hands. It was his voice that Henry had heard--

for he was stroking his sailors.

Henry opened his mouth and shouted for McCobb with every ounce of his power-

-and not a sound issued from his throat. Sweat broke out upon him. His tongue clove to the roof of his mouth.

Once again he tried, and a sort of scream was the result.

McCobb at that moment came around the house, and trees prevented him from seeing the bay.

"What ails you, lad? Are you choking?"

Henry's ashen face swung toward the water and McCobb hurried to his side. He remembered later that he thought Henry was seeing a great beast emerging from the ocean. He did not think of men.