The Savage Gentleman (7 page)

"You get full of energy," Henry said to his father. "And then--you want to work."

"Even on your birthday."

"Of course. What's the difference?"

"I was going to give you a recess from your studies this afternoon."

"I'd like that."

"And you can choose what you want to do."

Henry sat down on the step and considered.

"Well-I'll fix that clock right after lunch. I've had it apart for four days now and every time I put it together there's something left over."

He laughed.

McCobb interrupted him. "He won't let me help."

"I'll get it. Then I want to swim. I swam a hundred and six feet under water yesterday. McCobb measured it. After that--let's go for one of those pumas."

That was when Henry was twelve.

At fourteen or fifteen he sailed the big boat alone in the harbor and sometimes even outside the harbor. He went with his father and helped him build three signal fires--

one on each claw of the land that surrounded the bay and one on the top of the mountain.

He read about the use of the lasso, at that time, too, and the idea enthralled him.

He made a lariat and practiced throwing it with such intensity that it wail difficult to make him study for several weeks. He became proficient in the use of his lasso, and startled his father by announcing that some day he was going to find where the big lemurs lived and rope one of them so that he could bring it home alive.

In those years they had one very long and wet rainy season. They opened a good many of the copper drums which Stone had stored in the cellar. Jack caught a fever which kept him in bed delirious for a long time; and once, while Henry was taking care of him, the Negro raved for an hour and more about a girl named Clara.

In those years they moved the garden from the stockade to the broad pampas where the zebus lived in their corral and they worked the ground by setting the steam winch in the middle of the place selected and pulling in the plow and harrow, so that the patch resembled a huge wheel with furrows for spokes. Henry ran the winch and Jack dragged back the implements after each inpull.

Stone was stung by a scorpion and was incapacitated for many days. McCobb filled his room and the shelves in the living-room with golden ornaments and statues arid vases and bowls which he made in his shop. Henry often helped him work.

In those years Henry's voice broke into sudden bass notes and returned two octaves to its childhood pitch until it finally settled in a rich baritone.

Jack taught him to sing parts. Stone forbade the ballads about women. They made brand-new furniture for the house and they developed Rower gardens inside the stockade.

Henry grew rapidly--too rapidly, for awhile--so that his towering back and spreading shoulders were gaunt and thin. But when he began to fill that frame with sinew it became apparent he would be a majestic man. His boyhood handsomeness took on some of his father's sculptured aquilinity.

They found where the lemurs lived--in the thick, forest--on the other side of the mountain. They found sapphires in a rusty escarpment of one of the lesser hills.

Henry made a dozen maps of the island and it was he who became fatigued with the familiar terms,
The Island
,
The Mountain,
and
The Lake.

He changed them to
Stone Island, McCobb Mountain
and
Jack's Lake.

To him, all the years were divided into happy and fascinating days. The world was his. He was having the romance of a Robinson Crusoe with the equipment that might have been provided by a Jules Verne. He was the modern man and the dawn man.

No better life could have been arranged for a boy. None more exciting, none more healthful, none mbre adventuresome. '

Then, in 1915, a strange cloud passed over them.

It began with the change of the monsoons. This time they blew almost with hurricane violence, but steadily. Day and night the stormracked trees bent and sang. The surf turned the color of canvas and toiled mightily over the reefs beyond the end of Stone Island.

Henry read and studied in his farher's dog-eared library.

He counted the hours of the storm and waited patiently for it to abate. There was nothing else to do.

But, after the seventy-fifth hour, the rain ceased falling and the wind continued.

The vegetation shook itself dry. The sea piled up prodigiously, so that its smash upon the shore could be heard above the gale. The skies cleared a little and illumination came with the hours of dawn.

Henry grew restive. He went finally to his father and shouted that he was going for a walk. His father bade him be careful, and he left.

He went along the more exposed land arm of the bay. He forced his way against the wind-which penetrated even the undergrowth.

He came out on a rocky headland where the sea broke. It moved in lofty, sullen billows. They bent forward, stumbling on their green bases, and wrecked themselves upon the rocks, changing into foam and hurling ragged spray into the wind. The spent waves were sucked back. New waves came.

That spectacle Henry watched with mature composure.

He had an inward desire to throw out his arms and shout back at the surf with all his power, but he controlled it and stood still, watching the unreasoning fury of the sea before and below him.

In a few moments he was drenched with spray. He tossed back his hair and grinned a personal taunt at the water. He felt exalted. He felt strong.

He stayed for an hour, watching the tumult. Then he was joined by McCobb, who picked his way carefully over the slippery headland and shouted something in his ear which could not be understood and which was vaguely explained by signs.

McCobb, too, felt the majesty of the sight. McCobb at heart was an artist. His northland exterior hid a multitude of appreciations and sensitivities.

They were like two men listening to a great orchestra--each delighting in the fact that his companion also heard and comprehended.

Then, suddenly, Henry felt McCobb's fingers bite into his arm. He looked with surprise it the Scotchman and found that his face was chalky and his arm extended.

The boy's eyes followed the arm. Far out at sea, beyond the place where the waves individualized themselves, there was a ship.

Henry froze.

McCobb screamed in his ear:

"Get your father."

Henry ran back. 'He ran like a madman, ignoring the ripping brush and the irregular ground. In his mind's eye was a picture of the ship--a distant, diminutive hulk with bare spars sticking up against the inhospitable horizon.

He burst furiously into the house.

"A ship!"

His voice clove through the tempest's uproar.

His father read assurance on his face. "His father rose gropingly. Into his eyes a fever came and he shook like a leaf. He trotted to the kitchen, plucked Jack's arm, and together they followed Henry.

McCobb was dancing and screaming on the head-land. He whirled his arms.

Stone looked. Then he regarded his son, whose soul was in his eyes.

Jack had kne1tand folded his hands. He stared in· to the clouds that scudded overhead and his lips moved in prayer.

The drama on the rocks was horrible in its intensity. Henry found himself frozen, and he could neither think nor move.

Stone praised God. Here was a ship at the very hour and year when he had hoped a ship would come. His son was ready for the world. He thought that it would be impossible to light the fires. He reckoned with acid determination upon the chances of the vessel.

It was still far away, and yet it must have sighted the island. It was making slowly toward it--and it could not have made in any other direction. A schooner. One of its masts had been hacked down by, the gale.

It wallowed heavily--as if it was partly filled with water.

It approached.

McCobb continued to scream and wave his arms. Henry stood still.

The waves visibly lifted it. They could see water washing over the decks. They could see the laborious rise of the bows and a long rope that had broken loose and stood out horizontally from a mast.

It was two miles away.

One.

They tried to wave it toward the harbor mouth, although all of them knew that direction was impossible.

Stone bruised his son's arms. They saw how far the ship had settled.

Their voices ripped into the air, shrilly. When, at length, they could see the forms of men moving on the bridge, they went mad.

Then a wave came from which the vessel rose only with the utmost difficulty.

They saw a huge hole that had been staved in the hull. Whether the ship had hit a rock, or the mere power of the sea had broken it in, they did not know.

On the next wave the decks were awash.

It was almost near enough so that they could see the expression on the faces of the men.

On the third wave, only the stern rose and the bows were buried. The masts made an angle with the water. The stern stood high. She sank. McCobb beat his fists upon the rocks until they ran red.

Jack rent his clothes.

Henry wept.

And now, only Stone stood still--as if a judgment had come upon him.

There was no sign of the ship--save that by and by they observed pieces of wreckage and, for awhile, what they thought was a man swimming.

Henry ran for his boat. Jack and Stone needed their united efforts to hold him back. Henry's boat would not have been able to--round the harbor mouth in the sea that ran there.

As if in satirical compensation the wind died that afternoon and the sun appeared.

With its first rays, the four men who sat on the rocky point were able to salvage the first high-tossed bit of wreckage.

It was an oar.

Then came a box in which were four drowned chickens. A coat. After that, a broken boat, a life preserver that floated high in the subsiding surf, and a chair. They struggled with numb endeavor to reap these precious and yet melancholy items from the waves.

Bits of the ship itself drifted shoreward. Late in the afternoon their heap of debris was augmented by a score of things--wooden bowls from the galley, spars, planks, a straw cover from a bottle of wine, and a pillow.

They saved everything as it came in, and all that time they had not spoken to each other.

At last Stone, wading on the rocks, picked up a cupboard and he perceived that the inside was lined with newspaper, tacked on shelves.

The sight of that newsprint devastated him.

He hugged the box to his person. He pulled the tacks with his nails, heedless of the pain. He rolled the wet paper with the utmost care and, when he saw that his find had not been noticed by the others, he hurried secretly back to the house.

The first words he saw inflamed his mind. He could not help his selfishness and fanatic greed for news.

GERMANS AOVANCE ALONG MARNE SECTOR

That is what he had read.

As he went to the house his mind reeled. Germans advance. There was a war up there in the world. A war that involved Germany.

He locked himself in his room. He spread the wet pages with agonizing care and as he worked his eyes gleaned fragments.

Woodrow Wilson was President of the United States. England was at war with Germany. Also France. The name of Russia appeared as a combatant.

Finally, the papers were spread and he focussed his eyes. He read.

He forgot that salvation had missed them by a terrible margin--a margin at once minute and gigantic.

He forgot his son and McCobb and Jack.

He became for a little while the man he had been--the man of the world, the political power. And he became a student of the new world. They were moving troops through Paris in omnibuses and taxicabs? What were taxicabs? The
Stutram
had radioed for help. What was radioing? The, British line was holding well and Paris would be saved.

Paris.

Ah, God, Paris.

The curves of the Seine and the cold gray of Notre Dame. The wide passage of the Boulevard Montparnasse past the place where he had lived when he studied there.

The still dark places of the Bois and the songs and the wine and the lights and the music.

German guns were belching and French blood was making a red mud of Flanders fields but Paris would be saved.

Paris!

On the headland, wading in the seaweed and sliding on the rocks over which water gushed, three men hunted for souvenirs of their Gethsemane.

Henry rubbed shoulders with McCobb. The Scotchman was holding a shoe.

"Somebody's," he said, in a world where
somebody
was a word seldom used.

The expression was forlorn, so hopeless and woebegone, that Henry's spirit turned in its tracks.

He grinned.

"We can make better shoes than that."

The sentence rallied the Scot. His eyes lighted and on his tough face there came a smile both radiant and calm.

"Let's go back to see your father," he suggested. "There's no virtue--in this salvage and more'll wash up on the sand down the point."

"Right. Come on, Jack."

The Negro flashed his teeth from habit. "Yes, Mr. Henry."

They moved away from the place in slow file, heartened by an emotional chemistry which the indomitability of Henry's eyes had started. Thrice they knocked at the locked door of the bedroom before reluctant motion responded.

Stone came out and never did he look more like the substance of his name. His granite face was fixed. He recognized them as if they were not people, but far-fetched theories.

"There's a war," he whispered.

McCobb had seen madness and he was much frightened, but Henry, who had never seen it, laughed.

"War? What are you talking about, father?"

Vacantly, Stone stared.

"I found a newspaper in that stuff--that floated--ashore. I've been reading it."

"That's fine, father! It must have been great!"

"It was hideous."

"What do you mean?"

"I--"

He walked into the center of the living-room, where the hand-made furniture was arranged between shelves of books and corpulent cupboards, where, McCobb's golden handiwork gleamed and where in the shadows were the stuffed birds and animals Henry had collected. "I--"