The Sailor

by J. C. Snaith

"'Mary,' he said, 'do you remember your words eleven months ago?'"

"I remember them perfectly."

"Well, there was only one way in which you could help me then, and that was why I went away. And I never intended to return unless I could claim that which you offered me."

"Was it necessary?"

"Mere friendship is no use to you and me. But I couldn't ask you to marry me then, although I knew ... at least I thought I knew ... you'll tell me if I am wrong..."

She couldn't help smiling a little at this rather childlike confusion.

"... that you would marry me if I asked you. But I didn't, because I couldn't. Do you understand that? Do you still look at things in the way you did?"

The soul of a poor mariner might be tempest tossed on all the oceans of the world, but the soul of Mary Pridmore was the fixed star of his faith. The mere thought seemed to brace his courage for the task that honor laid upon him.

He took her hand. It was the only manifestation he would allow himself until he had told her.

"I could not ask you to marry me then," he said, "because I had a wife."

"You had a wife." She repeated the words numbly, incredulously.

"I had a wife," he said, doggedly. "She died two months ago."

"And ... and you never told me!"

"No."

There was an edge to her tone that had struck like a knife.

"Henry!"

"I tried," he said feebly. "God knows I tried."

"You don't mean you deceived me?" Her voice was hardening.

"No." A queer kind of faintness was coming over him. "I don't mean that. You never asked me and ... and I never told you."

"But you knew I took it for granted that you were not married."

The order and precision of her speech began to frighten him. He could give no answer.

"You knew that." Her voice was hurting him terribly.

"I don't say I didn't," he said. He had a sick feeling that he was already in the jaws of a trap. God in heaven, what madness had lured him to tell her when he had no need to do so!

"Then you deceived me." The voice was pitiless.

He looked at her with scared eyes.

"Don't say that," he said.

He saw there was a cold light blazing in her and he began to grow miserably afraid.

"I tried very hard not to deceive you," he said. "God knows I tried. And it was because I couldn't go on with it that I went away and ... and never meant to see you again."

"I don't quite think that is an excuse."

Somehow the words seemed to goad him on to unknown perils. But he was in a quicksand, the ground was moving under his feet.

"You don't know what my life has been," he said desperately. "You don't know what a wife I married, you don't know anything about me, else you wouldn't be so hard."

She realized while he was speaking, realized with a kind of nausea, which came suddenly upon her, that all he said was true. There was a peculiar note creeping into his voice that assailed her fastidious ears like a sudden descent to a subterranean region which she knew to exist, but of which she had never had first-hand knowledge. The subtle change of tone was telling her as nothing else could have done that it was perfectly true that she knew neither what his life had been nor anything about him.

"Mary." In spite of an intense feeling for him it was beginning to make her wince to hear her name on his lips. "If you don't mind I think I'll tell you one or two things about my life and ... and how I came ... to get married."

"I think perhaps I would rather not know." It was not she who said that. Long generations of Pridmores and Colthursts had suddenly taken charge and had answered for her.

It was a tone he had never heard her use, not even at the dinner party at which she had discussed the question of divorce. It was almost as if she had hit him a blow and yet without intending to deal one. By this time he had grown so dazed and frightened that he had begun to lose his head.

"The woman I married was not respectable, and that was why I didn't tell you."

She drew away from him a little. It was quite an involuntary action, but he felt it like a knife in the flesh. In sick desperation he floundered on, suddenly losing touch with all the small amenities of speech and manner he had so painfully imposed upon himself. Moreover, he realized the fact with pangs that were almost murderous. There were notes from the Blackhampton gutter beginning to strike through his voice.

"You don't know what my life has been," he said. "You don't know where I started from."

Again she made that involuntary movement, almost as if she felt that the mere tone was defiling her.

"You must let me tell you ... let me tell you all, if you don't mind. It'll help you understand."

"I would rather you didn't." Again the Pridmores and the Colthursts were speaking.

He looked at her with a wildness that made her shiver. An intense pity for this man had suddenly begun to do battle with the Colthursts and the Pridmores. There was something in those eyes, as there always had been, that was almost beyond her power to meet.

"I never had a chance," he said, holding her in thrall with the voice she no longer recognized as his. "I've been handicapped out of the race. I'm going to tell you, Mary. It's not that I want your pity ... I ask more than that. It's more than pity will bring a sailorman like me into port."

A kind of defiance of himself and of her had entered his tone. His words seemed to open a vein in her heart. She had a great compassion for this man, but with all her strength of soul, with all her independence, she knew and felt that voice had already told her that the facts of his life were going to prove more than she could bear.

In a dogged way, with many of the tricks of speech and manner of former phases of his life, which he had sloughed as a snake its skin, and had now reassumed in the stress of overmastering agony, he told her all. He spared her nothing, not even his comparatively recent knowledge that his father had been driven to commit a murder, which in Henry Harper's view accounted for the price the son had had to pay. Nothing was spared her of Auntie, of the police, of the night on the railway, of Mr. Thompson and the Old Man, of the Margaret Carey and the Island of San Pedro, of Ginger and Blackhampton, of the first meeting with Klondyke, of the first meeting with Edward Ambrose, and, finally, an account of his fall into the clutches of Cora Dobbs and how he made the horrible discovery concerning her on the night of their own first memorable meeting at the dinner party in Bury Street.

Some insane demon seemed to urge him on. In spite of the look of horror in her eyes, he told her everything. Somehow he felt it was the only reparation he could make to her for being as he was.

"Klondyke gave me my first start," he said finally. "He knows nearly as much as you—except about that woman—but he's stood to me all through. I don't ask your pity. I admit I deceived you, Mary, an' I done wrong, but it warn't because I didn't want to do right. I got to pay for it, I can see that. I dare say it's right, but I'll only say ... and this is final ... Enry Arper, whatever 'is father done, don't deserve not a half, not a quarter of what's been done to him."

She had to hold on by the table. Something was stifling her. There were things in this elemental soul which the Pridmores and the Colthursts might once have known, but for long generations had forgotten.

She dare not look at him. An abyss had opened. She simply couldn't face it.

Somehow he knew that. It needed no words to tell him. Everything was lost. The mariner could never hope to come into port. Again that horrible sense of rage came on him, which a few hours ago had overthrown him in his interview with Edward Ambrose. It maddened him to think that he had been allowed to get so far along the road and that a subtle trick had defeated him when the goal was actually in sight.

Yet even at the last there was just one thing, and only one, that stood to him: if it was still possible he must be a man, a gentleman. He knew this woman was suffering cruelly, and he owed it to her and to his friends not to profane the God she worshiped. There was no God in heaven after all, it seemed, for Henry Harper, but for her, who had not the stain of a father's crime upon her, it was a different matter.

As he stood not three paces from her, clenched and incoherent, fighting not to strike her with the sudden awful blasphemies that were surging to his lips, he knew nothing of what was passing in her mind. Had he known she would have had his pity. All that her progenitors had stood for in the past had suddenly recoiled upon her. All those entries in Burke it had been her pleasure to deride, all the politicians and the landed proprietors, all the Lady Sophias and the Lady Carolines, all that flunkyfied reverence for concrete things of those generations of the Pridmores and the Colthursts, which had so long affronted her high good sense, were now having their word to say in the matter.

She had pledged her help to this man if ever he asked it, but now she found that help was not hers to give. Said the tart voice of her famous Aunt Caroline, it is not to be expected, my dear, of a sane Christian gentlewoman. Think of your father, my dear! By some strange irony, Mary Pridmore suddenly thought of him, that admired and bewhiskered servant of a generation which allowed his friend Bismarck to steal Schleswig and to murder France, but paid itself the tribute of building the Albert Memorial; the distinguished servant of a generation that had denied reading, writing, and arithmetic to its Henry Harpers and had turned them barefoot into its Blackhampton gutters.

Many things were coming home to the heart of Mary Pridmore in the awful silence of that room. She was no more to blame for the long line of her fathers whose governing abilities were commemorated in the England of the sixties than was their victim, Henry Harper, in whose bruised body and tormented soul had been commemorated his mother's murder. She was numb and dazed now she had heard his story, but she had nothing to give him.

The truth had come to him already. "Now, Enery, you must be a man and bear it," said the voice of Auntie, wheezing in the upper air. Well ... if his flesh and blood would only let him he must be a gentleman as long as he had the honor to converse with a real Hyde Park lady who believed in God ... that was all he knew at the moment. If there was a spark of manhood in him he must hold on to that.

"Miss Pridmore." ... He was able to pull himself together in a way that astonished even himself.... "I see it's all over with me and you. I'll never be able to get through without your help. I'm fair done in. But I don't blame you. An' I just want you to say you don't blame me, an' then I'll quit."

She couldn't speak. Aunt Caroline in a hoop and elastic-sided boots was simply imploring her to behave with dignity.

"Say you don't blame me, Miss Pridmore, an' then I'll quit. It's not reelly my fault about my father." He laughed a little, but she didn't hear him. "I'm sorry, though, about the Mariner. If we could have brought him into port, you and me, Miss Pridmore, there'd been nothing like him outside the Russians. However ... say I'm not to blame ... and then I'll quit."

She was unable to hear what he was saying.

"Won't you, Miss Pridmore? I can't bear you should think I've played it low down. If I could ha' told you afore I'd ha' done it ... you can lay to that."

It was not a voice that she knew, and she could not answer it.

"Well, I'm sorry."

Suddenly he took her hand, and its coldness startled him.

"I'll say good-by," he said with a sort of laugh.

Aunt Charlotte primly informed her niece that Mr. Harper was taking leave.

"Oh," she said. "Good-by."

Without venturing again to touch the hand she offered, he stumbled headlong out of the room and down the stairs. He took his hat from a table in the hall and let himself out of the front door before the butler could get there. He closed the door after him with a sharp bang—it was a door with a patent catch and could only be closed in that way—and as he did this and the sound re-echoed along Queen Street, the lamp in the right-hand corner of his brain suddenly went out.

By the time he came to the end of the street it had grown very dark. And as he turned a corner and found himself in a street whose name he didn't know he was unable to see anything. And then all at once he realized that Aladdin's lamp was broken in a thousand pieces, and he gave a little wild shriek of dismay. The savage hunted eyes of Mr. Thompson were gazing at him from under the helmet of a passing constable.

The trolls had got him.

Nothing could help him now. It had grown so dark that he couldn't see anything, although it was hardly seven at present of an evening in June. He almost shrieked again as he heard the sniggering voice of Auntie ascend above the gathering noises of the town: "Now, Enery, you must be a man and bear it."

He didn't know where he was now amid the maze of the little-frequented streets of Mayfair. He had lost his way and he couldn't see. He was blind already with an ever growing darkness. He was losing all sense of time and place. But the voice of Auntie was ever in his ears, exhorting him, with that shrill and peculiar snigger of which she never seemed to grow weary, to be a man and bear it, as he stumbled on and on into the night.

II

One afternoon about a week later, Edward Ambrose rang up No. 50, Queen Street, on the telephone to ask if Mary was at home. In reply he was told by Silvia that Mary had gone for a few days to Greylands to the Ellises, but her mother would be very glad if Edward would come and see her as she wished particularly to have a little talk with him. Edward certainly did not wish particularly to have a little talk with Lady Pridmore at that moment, but there was no way out of it. Thus in no very amiable frame of mind he drove to Queen Street.

Lady Pridmore was alone in the drawing-room. She received Edward with the grave cordiality that she reserved for favorites.

"It is very nice of you to come, Edward. Ring for some tea."

That was like her, when she knew quite well he never took tea.

"We are dreadfully worried about Mary."

That was like her again. She was always dreadfully worried about something, although nothing in wide earth or high heaven had the power really to upset her. But Edward for some reason was not feeling very sympathetic towards the Lady Pridmores of the world just now.

"And we blame you."

"Me?"

"Yes, we blame you. It was you who first brought that young man, Mr. Harper, to the house."

This was not quite in accordance with the facts. Still, there would be no point in saying so. Ambrose, therefore, contented himself with asking, "Well, what of him?" with as much politeness as he could muster in order to cover a growing impatience.

"It is not well, Edward, it is very far from well," said Lady Pridmore aggrievedly. "As I say, we are all dreadfully worried. Mr. Harper turned up here again one day last week, the first time for a year. And he saw Mary alone. Silvia and I were out—at—dear me!—but it doesn't matter——"

"Quite so," murmured the courteous Edward.

"Otto met him coming in as he went out."

"Well?"

"Well, as I say, Mary and Mr. Harper were together a long time and somehow—I'm sorry to tell you this—she has seemed quite ill ever since."

Edward expressed regret.

"And Dr. Claughton strongly advised a change."

"I am very sorry," he said gravely.

"She is so overstrung that she has had to have sleeping drafts. It is by Dr. Claughton's advice she has gone down to Woking."

"But what reason have you to connect all this with Mr. Harper?"

"The evening he saw her she didn't come down to dinner. Now I would like you to tell me a little more about—about Mr. Harper. You brought him here, you know. Otto says he is not altogether ... Do you think that?"

"Had I thought for a moment that he was not a desirable acquaintance I should not have brought him here." This was a shameless begging of the question; it was not he who had brought the young man there.

"I'm glad to hear you say that," said Lady Pridmore with feeling. "That is exactly what I said to Otto. I wish you would tell me all you know about this Mr. Harper."

"I am afraid I can only tell you one thing about him."

"Yes," said Lady Pridmore encouragingly!

"At the present moment he is very dangerously ill. The doctors take a very grave view of his case."

Lady Pridmore was grieved to hear that, but it fully confirmed what she had surmised.

What had she surmised?

"I am quite sure that something rather dreadful took place here a week ago."

Ambrose felt that was most probable.

"I wish you would tell me, Edward," said Lady Pridmore, "what in your opinion it was that happened."

The retort on the tip of Edward's tongue was, "How the devil should I know!" but fortunately he didn't allow it to pass. He contented himself with silence.

"I want to see Mary most particularly," he said, after a pause. "I think I'll send her a telegram to say that I am coming by the first train tomorrow."

"Do," said Lady Pridmore. "That will cheer her up."

III

He sent a telegram as he returned sadly to his rooms. He was in a miserable frame of mind. Somehow he was hating life, but he was now fully bent upon one thing, and no peace could be his until he had done it.

After dinner came an answer to say Mary would be very glad to see him. He sat smoking endless pipes, until he realized that it would soon be too late to go to bed if he was to catch an early train.

On arrival at Woking, Mary was at the station with her friend's car. She looked ill, he thought, but she seemed very glad to see him. At first they found little to say. Indeed, it was not until they had decided to use a fine morning in walking to Greylands, had sent on the car and taken to the road, that they were able to talk in the way they wished.

"I suppose you don't quite know why I've come?" said Ambrose.

"No, I frankly don't," said Mary, "but at least, Edward, it is always very, very good to see you."

Ever since she could remember, he had ranked as the chief of her friends, and that accounted, perhaps, for a certain attitude of mind towards him. But in all the years they had known each other, in all the hours they had spent in each other's company, never had they seemed so intimate as in this walk together. And there was a very clear reason why this should be so. Never had each felt such a need of the other's perceptiveness.

It was not for him to ask what had happened a week ago at that last interview in Queen Street. But she told him voluntarily.

"I had promised to help him," she said, growing pale at the recollection. "And he came to me and told me all ... all the facts and the circumstances ... things that not I and not you, Edward ... could ever have guessed."

"You were not able to do what he asked?"

"No, I simply was not. I simply couldn't. I meant to help him. I wanted to. Perhaps ... perhaps I ought to have ... but ... but it was an abyss he showed me ... you don't know..."

They walked on in silence a little way.

"... A year ago, I made a pledge. And he counted on it. I think that is why he told me the whole dreadful story. Had I not been a coward, I should never have..."

"You judge yourself too hardly. He asked too much."

"It should not have been too much. I ought to have been able to help him. At least ... I ought not to have sent him away as I did."

"Assuming it were not too late, do you think you could help him now?"

"But it is too late." She was evading the question.

"It is not the view I take myself. I saw both doctors yesterday, and they have very little hope of a recovery. But you and I are not bound to agree with them."

"What can we do ... in the face of such an opinion?"

"We can have faith."

"But the doctors?"

"It is a purely mental case. The mind is the key of the whole matter."

"Yes, I know ... I know."

"No doctor, however expert, can ever say anything positively in regard to the mind, provided the brain is not damaged."

"Isn't it bound to be?"

"They do not say that ... and there is our hope. It is a special case. We must always remember this man is different from other people. It is my firm belief that it is in your power to save him. The view may be entirely mistaken, but it is my own personal conviction."

A new Edward Ambrose was speaking. Here were a strength and a force which until that moment he had not known how to show her. It may have been that the occasion had never arisen, or perhaps the conventional timidity of his kind had never permitted it.

"I—I don't altogether understand," she said, faintly.

"You took away his belief. And I ask you to give it him back again."

She walked dully by his side, striving as well as she could to represent to herself the strange words he had used in a form she could accept.

"You do understand, Mary?"

"Isn't it too late?"

Tormenting fears were again upon her.

"It may be. Certainly the doctors think the balance of probability against it. But I firmly hold that such a view is not for those who know this poor sailorman. I cannot help thinking that no one is allowed to get so far along the road in the face of such paralyzing odds without there being still some hope of putting the thing through."

They stood in the middle of the road, looking at each other.

"I ... I think you are right. You understand him so much better than I."

"That we can neither of us believe." He spoke with a queer laugh. "But if I am asking you to give too much, you mustn't blame me. You have always taught me to ask too much." His voice tailed off in the oddest way. "But this time I don't ask for myself."

She was crying. "I was never the woman that you thought me. Or that I thought myself."

She stood a moment, the tears running down her cheeks.

"You must go to that poor mariner," he said, with odd suddenness, trying now for the first time in all the long years to impose his will upon hers. "He has a very wonderful cargo on board. You and I—we owe it to each other and perhaps to future generations—to see that it comes into port."

Such a tone was startling. She had never heard it before. A new and very potent voice was speaking.

"There is no time to lose." This was Edward Ambrose raised to a higher power. "Every hour is going to count. If it is still possible, go and offer him a refuge from the storm."

She stood irresolute. But already she had begun to waver. A masculine nature in its new and full expression was turning the scale.

"If we go back at once," he said, "there will be time to catch the twelve o'clock train from Woking. You can telegraph to your maid. And Catherine Ellis will understand. Or you can write and explain."

Either the call was stronger than her weakness, or she had underrated the forces within herself. For suddenly she turned round and they began to retrace their steps along the road they had come.

Good walking gave them time for the midday train to Waterloo. Upon arrival at that terminus, shortly before one, they drove to a nursing home in Fitzroy Square.

Permission had already been obtained by Ambrose for Mary Pridmore to see Henry Harper. It was felt that her presence at his bedside could do no harm, although there was very little hope that it could do good. At any rate, the nurse who received them made no difficulties about admitting her. Ambrose took leave of Mary on the doorstep in the casual rather whimsical way he affected in all his dealings with her, and then drove heroically to his club.

IV

The Sailor lay breathing heavily. He was still just able to keep on keeping on. But in spite of the darkened room and the blindness of his eyes, he knew at once that she had come to him ... the incarnation of the good, the beautiful, and the true ... gray-eyed Athena, with the plumes in her helmet.

His prayer had been heard, his faith had been answered. He knew she had come to him, this emanation of the divine justice and the divine mercy, even before her lips had breathed his name ... that name which through eons of time, as it seemed, he had been striving to fix in the chaos that once had been his brain.

V

It was rather less than a year later that Edward Ambrose, seated in his favorite chair in his rooms in Bury Street, knocked out the ashes of a last pipe before turning in. He had already given a startled glance at the clock on the chimney piece, and had found it was a quarter past three in the morning.

The truth was he had been oblivious of the flight of time for a good many hours. And the cause of this lapse was a bulky bundle of manuscript which was still on his knees. It had come to him from abroad with a letter the previous day. And having read the last page and having cleared the debris from his pipe, he yet returned the pipe, empty as it was, to his mouth and then read the letter again.

It said:

MY DEAR EDWARD,

In praying you to accept the dedication of what to you and none other I venture to call an epic of that strange and terrible thing, the unsubduable soul of Man, I make one more demand on your patience. I feel that only a very brave man could father such a thing as this poor mariner. It is not that he has not proved to be a stouter fellow than could ever have been hoped. To say otherwise would be black ingratitude to those who sought him out on the open sea and brought him safely into port. If his book is more than was to have been expected, it is yet less than the future promises now that other new, or shall we say recovered worlds, are continually opening to the gaze of the astonished sailorman as with Athena by his side he roams the shores of his native Ithaca.

Drink deep, O muse, of the Pierian spring,
Unlock the doors of memory.

If this prayer is heard, on a day Ulysses may proclaim in native wood-notes wild the goodness of the living God, and hymn the glories of a universe that man, ill-starred as he may be, is powerless to defile. Even if such power is not granted to the mariner, he will yet have a happiness he had not thought possible for mortal men to know. And she who had Wisdom for her godmother, I hope and pray she is also happy in self-fulfillment. If this is a fatal egotism, I am not afraid to expose it to you. The mariner is not so blind that he does not see that it is a more developed, a far higher form of our species who sits with his old pipe in his favorite chair in Bury Street, St. James', frowning over this ridiculous letter. You and she begin where he leaves off. What virtue both must have inherited! And who shall dare to say how terribly a man may be punished for lack of virtue in his ancestors.

We send you our blessing and our affection.

H.H.

Having reread this letter, Edward Ambrose turned again to the concluding pages of the manuscript still lying upon his knees. The clock on the chimney piece struck four, but no heed was paid to it. The empty pipe was still between his teeth when finally he exclaimed: "Yes, it's wonderful ... very wonderful. It is even more wonderful than I had hoped."

He then took the pipe from his mouth and found the stem was bitten right through.