Fate Knocks at the Door: A Novel

by Will Levington Comfort

FOURTH CHAPTER

THAT ADELAIDE PASSION

Andrew Bedient did not call at all these Asiatic and insular ports and continue to meet only men. Indeed, he did not fail to encounter those white women who follow men to disrupted places, where blood is upon the ground,—nor those native women inevitably present. A man fallen to the dregs usually finds a woman to keep him company, but it is equally true that man never climbs so high that, looking upward, he may not see a woman there.

A little before the Truxton's last voyage, the clipper had remained in port for a fortnight at Adelaide, New South Wales. A woman in that city was destined to mean a great deal to the boy of seventeen…. It would be very easy to say that here was a creature whose way is the way of darkness. The striking thing is that Adelaide (in the thoughts of Bedient afterward, she gradually appropriated the name of her city) did not know she was evil…. Such a woman, it is curious to note, has appeared in the boyhood of many men of power and eminent equipment.

Adelaide was small and fragrant. Though formerly married, she was true to her kind in being childless. All her interests were in senses of her own; or in the senses of men and women who fell beneath her eye; pale, narrow temples were hers, but crowded with what sensational memories! A hundred and a few odd pounds, every ounce vivid with health and rhythmic with desire; every thought a kiss loved, missed, or hoped for; a frail little flame that needed only time to destroy an arena of gladiators. Curving, pearly nails with flecks of white in them, a light low laugh, a sweet low voice! Perhaps this was her charm, a sort of samosen tone—low lilting minors that have to do with dusk and gardens and starlight….

There is not even a laughing pretense here that Adelaide was a real woman; but real women, even in this era of woman, often fail to remember what pure attractions to man, are their silences and their minor tones.

Just a fortnight—but what a tearing it was to leave her! Old Mother Nature must have writhed at this parting—groaned at the sight of the boy staring back from the high stern of the Truxton, at the stars lowering over the city and the woman, Adelaide. Possibly she retained something from the depth of his individuality…. Bedient would not have said so; but there is no doubt that her importance in his life was that of a mannequin upon which to drape his ideals. Had he seen her, in the later years, he would have met the dull misery of disillusionment. Adelaide was a boy's sensational trophy. Her distant beauty and color was the art and pigment of his own mind.

A soul rudiment, a mental bud, and a beautiful prophylactic body—such was her equipment. He dreamed of her as a love flower of inextinguishable sweetness. The mere abstraction of her sex,—colorless enough to most grown men,—was a sort of miracle to the boy. He made it shining with his idealism…. Frail arms held out to him; cool arms that turned electric with fervor. Unashamed, she took him as her own….

Exquisite devourer, yet she had much to do in bringing forth from the latent, one of the rarest gifts a boy can have—lovelier than royalty and fine as genius—the blue flower of fastidiousness. Adelaide, all unconcerned, identified herself with this, and it lived in the foreground of his mind. She became his Southland, his isle of the sea. Winds from the South were her kisses—almost all the kisses he knew for years afterward. Living women were less to him than her memory. Facing the South, through many a hot-breathed night, he saw her—and the little house…. And what a drowsy-head she was! Nothing to do with the morning light, had she, save when it awakened, to shut it out impatiently, and turn over to the dimmest of walls until afternoon. She had never been truly alive until afternoon. How he had laughed at her for that!… A creature of languors; a mere system of inert dejected cells when alone, pure destructive principle, if you like,—yet she held this boy's heart to her, without a letter, possibly with little or no thought of him, across a thousand leagues of sea—and this, through those frequently ungovernable years in which so many men become thick and despicable with excess.

Bedient often questioned himself—why he had not given up his berth on the Truxton and remained longer in Adelaide. There were a dozen ships in the harbor to take him forth when he cared. This thought had not come to him at the time. Quite as remarkable was the formidable something which arose in his brain at the thought of going back. This was not to be fathomed then—nor willed away. The roots of his integrity were shaken at the thought of return. Andrew Bedient at thirty-four understood. His was a soul that could thrive on dreams and denials. Even half-formed, this soul was the source of a strange antagonism, against which the fleshly desire to return was powerless. Poise, indeed, for a cook among sailors and packers.

The time came when he heard other women—blessed women—speak of the Adelaide type of sister as the crowning abomination; he watched their eyes harden and glitter as only a mother-bird's can, in the circling shadow of a hawk; he lived to read in the havoc of men's faces that the ways of such women were ways of death; he believed all this—yet preserved something exquisite. Ten years afterward, winds from the South brought him the spirit of fragrance from her shoulders and hair. From his own ideals, he had focussed upon that Emptiness, the beauty and dimension of a Helen.

Other experiences, up to the real romance—and these were surprisingly few—were episodes, brief quickenings of the old flame…When the first American soldiers were being lightered ashore in Manila harbor, in fact, shortly after the cannonading in the harbor, a certain woman came over from the States and took a house in Manila. It was known as the Block-House. Some months afterward, and just before the long trip of the Train in which Cairns featured, Bedient met this woman on the Escolta. It was at dusk, and she was crossing the narrow pavement from the post-office entrance to her carriage-door. Their eyes met frankly. She was wise, under thirty, very slender, perfectly dressed; pretty, of course, but more than that; her little perfections were carried far beyond the appreciation of any but women physically faultless as herself.

Bedient was impressed with something passionate and courageous, possibly dangerous. He could not have told the source of this impression. It was not in the contour, in the white softness of skin, in the full brown eyes, fair brow, nor in the reddened arch of her lips. It was something from the whole, denoted possibly in the quick dilation of her delicate nostrils or in the startling discovery of such a woman in Manila…. She lowered her eyes, started for her carriage—then turned again to the tall figure of Bedient in fresh white clothing. Or it may have been that her deep nature found delight in the excellent boyishness of the tanned face.

"Wouldn't you like to drive with me on the Luneta?" she asked pleasantly, and there was a low tone in her voice which made her instantly different.

"Why, yes, I should like to."

Her carriage was a victoriette, small to match the ponies—black stallions, noteworthy for style and spirit even in Manila, where one's equipage is the measure of fortune…. Bedient found that he could be silent without causing an abatement of her pleasure. And, indeed, she seemed a little embarrassed, too, although he did not accept this. Vaguely he was ruffled by the thought that he had merely been chosen as the principal of a nightly adventure…. This was untrue.

It was before the time of native concerts on the sea-drive, but in the night itself, and in the soft undertone from the sea, there was ardent atmosphere—with this woman beside him. The deeper current of his thoughts rushed with memories, but upon the surface played the adorable present, swift with adjustments as her swiftly-moving arms. The wonder of Womanhood was ever-new to him. Mighty gusts of animation surged through his body. He spoke from queer angles of consciousness, and did not remember. She could laugh charmingly…. To her, the Hour uprose. Here was clear manhood of twenty (and such an unhurt boy he had proved to be)—to make her very own!… She had taught herself to live by the hour; had forfeited the right to be loved long. She knew the time would soon come, when she could not hold nor attract men. It comes always to women who dissipate themselves among the many. Yet she loved the love of an hour; was a connoisseur of the love-tokens of men to her; no material loss was counted in the balance against a winning such as this promised to be. Here was a big intact passion which she called unto herself with every art; her developed senses felt it pouring upon her; this was a drug to die for. It made her brave and filled her mind with dreams—as wine does to some men. Already he was giving her love—of a sort that older men withhold from her kind. She put her hand upon his wrist—and told the native to drive them home.

… They sat in a hammock together on the rear balcony of the Block-House. It had been a dangerous moment passing through the house. There had been embarrassments, the telltale artifices of the establishment, but she would not suffer the work of the ride to be torn down. She held him in enchantment by sheer force of will; and now they were alone, and she was building again. There was wine. Over the balcony rail, they watched the Pasig running wickedly below; and across, stretching away to where the stars lay low in the rim of the horizon, the wet teeming rice-lands brooded in the night-mist…. The piano, which had seemed unstrung from the voyage, as he passed through the house, sounded but faintly now through several shut doors. The fragments were mellifluous….

She knew he was a civilian from his dress, and asked his work in Luzon. He told her he was cook of Pack-train Thirteen, just now quartered in the main corral. She laughed, but didn't believe. He was not the first to conceal his office from her. It was unpleasant; apt to be dangerous. She did not ask a second time…. There was just one other perilous moment. They had been together on the balcony but a half-hour, when she turned her face to him, her eyes shut, and said:

"You're a dear boy!… I haven't kissed anyone like that—oh, in long, long!… It makes me feel like a woman—how silly of me!"

Her face and throat looked ghastly white for a moment in the sheltered candles. "Isn't it silly of me—isn't it—isn't it?" she kept repeating, picking at his fingers, and touching his cheeks in frightened fashion…. She was reaching amazing deeps of him. The best of her was his, for she could give greatly. It was wonderful, if momentary. He felt the terrific strength of his hands, as if his fingers must strike sparks when he touched her flesh. The need of her flamed high within him. She was delight in every movement and expression; and so slender and fervent and sweet-voiced…. She had banished the one encroachment of sordidness. The high passion of this moment was builded upon basic attractions, as with children. Some strong intuition had prevailed upon her so to build. They had come to an end of words….

A knock at the door broke the notturno appassionato. She had left word not to be called for any reason. Furiously now she rushed across the room…. Bedient did not see the female servant at the door, but heard the frightened voice uttering the word, "Brigadier——." The answer from the woman who had left his arms was mercifully vague, but the voice at the door whimpered, "Only it was the General——!"…

It was all hideously clear. Bedient was left sterile, polar. The door slammed shut; the woman faced him—and understood. There was no restoring this ruin…. She now damned military rank and her establishment in a slow, dreadful voice. Her knuckles seemed driven into her temples. She wanted to weep, to be soothed and petted—to have her Hour brought back, but she saw that her beauty was gone from him—and all the mystery which had been in their relation a minute before…. Her rebellion, so far hard-held, now became fiendish. It was not against him, but herself. So vivid and terrible was her concentration of hatred upon the cause, that Bedient caught the picture of the Brigadier in her mind. He saw the man afterward—a fat and famous soldier…. She spat upon the floor. Her lower lip was drawn in and the small white teeth snapped upon it.

There was nothing in the Block-House ever to bring him back. Her last vestige of attraction for him had disintegrated. Bedient had nothing to say; he caught up her clenched hand and kissed it…. And in the street he heard feminine voices rising to the pitch of hysteria. A servant rushed forth for a surgeon. The woman had fallen into "one of her seizures."…

Pack-train Thirteen took the field a day or two afterward. Bedient was not at all himself…. In all the months that followed meeting David Cairns in Alphonso, the Block-House incident was too close and horrible for words—though Bedient spoke of Adelaide and the great wind and a hundred other matters.

There was another slight Manila experience, which took place after the first parting with David Cairns, the latter being called to China by rumors of uprising. Pack-train Thirteen had rubbed itself out in service—was just a name. Bedient was delighting in the thought of hunting up Cairns in China…. It was dusk again, that redolent hour. Bedient had just dined. So sensitive were his veins—that coffee roused him as brandy might another. His health was brought to such perfection, that its very processes were a subtle joy, which sharpened the mind and senses. Bedient had been so long in the field, that the sight of even a Filipino woman was novel. Strange, forbidding woman of the river-banks—yet in the twilight, and with the inspired eyes of young manhood, that dusk-softened line from the lobe of the ear to the point of the shoulder—a passing maid with a tray of fruit upon her head—was enough to startle him with the richness of romance. It was not desire—but the great rousing abstraction, Woman, which descends upon full-powered young men at certain times with the power of a psychic visitation. His heart poured out in a greeting that girdled the world, to find the Woman—somewhere.

Bedient did not know at this time of the heart emptiness of the world's women—a longing so vast, so general, that interstellar space is needed to hold it all. Still, he had so much to give, it seemed that in the creative scheme of things there must be a woman to receive and ignite all these potentials of love…. In this mood his mind reverted to that isle of the sea—the woman, and the room that was her house…. He was sitting in the plaza before the Hotel d'Oriente. A little bamboo-table was before him and a long glass of claret and fruit-juice. The night was still; hanging-lanterns were lit, though the darkness was not yet complete. There was a mingling of mysterious lights and shadows among the palm-foliage that challenged the imagination—like an unfinished picture…. Only a few of the tables were occupied. The native servants were very quiet. Bedient heard a girlish voice out of the precious and perilous South.

… It was not Adelaide. He had only started to turn, when his consciousness told him that. But the voice was much like hers—the same low and lazy loveliness in the formation of certain words. The appeal was swift. Bedient did not turn, though he sat tingling and attentive…. At this time not a few of the American officers had been joined by their wives in Manila, and most of these were quartered at the Oriente…. He knew the man's voice, too, but in such a different way—the voice of a soldier heard afield.

What was said had little or no significance—a man's tolerant, sometimes laughing monosyllables; and silly, cuddling, unquotable nothings from his companion. It was the ardor in her tones—the sort of completion of sensuous happiness—and the strange kinship between her and the woman he had known—these, that brought to Bedient a sudden madness of hunger to hear such words for his own….

The man had but recently come in from field-work. The woman was fresh from a transport voyage from the States. He talked laughingly of the "niggers" his company had met—of small, close fighting and surprises. She wanted to hear more, more,—but alone. She was pressing him, less with words than manner, to come into the hotel and relate his adventures, where they could be quite alone…. She had been so passionately lonely without him—back in Washington … and the long voyage…. Her voice enthralled Bedient.

They were married. The man laughed often. The tropics had enervated him, though he made no such confession. He wanted drink and lights. To him, the present was relishable. Their chairs scraped the tiles before Bedient turned…. They had not risen. She caught his eyes. Hers were not eyes of one who would be lonely in Washington nor during a long transport voyage. She was very young, but a vibrant feminine, her awakening already long-past. There was just a glimpse of light hair, a red-lipped profile and slow, shining dark eyes. She was not even like Adelaide, but a blood sister in temperament. Bedient saw this in her hands, wrists, lips and skin, in the pure elemental passion which came from her every tone and motion. One of the insatiate—yet frail and lovely and scented like a carnation; a white flower, red-tipped—sublimate of earthy perfume.

Bedient had seen the man in the field, a young West Point product, with a queer, rabbit face, lots of men friends, the love of his company, and a remarkable kind of physical courage—a splendid young chap, black from the heats, who was being talked about for his grisly humor under fire. This officer had seen his men down—and stayed with them…. His was a different and deeper love. He did not hurry. It seemed as if she would take his hand, after all, and lead him into the hotel. Just a little girl—little over twenty.

For the first time it struck Bedient that he must leave. He was startled that he had not left. His only palliation for such a venture into two lives—was the memories her voice roused. His lips tightened with scorn of self. And yet the thought became a fury as he walked rapidly through the dark toward the river—what it would mean to have a woman want him that way!…. His thoughts did not violate the soldier's domain. Quite clean, he was, from that; yet she had shown him afresh what was in the world. It was nearing midnight; sentries of the city, still under martial law, ordered him off the streets before he realized passing time…. And the hours did not bring to his mind the woman of the Block-House, nor anyone of those flaming desert-women who love so fiercely and so fruitlessly; whose relations with men do not weave, but only bind the selvage of the human fabric….

* * * * *

Bedient was glad to get away to sea…. David Cairns, overtaken in China, had changed a little. It appears that the very best of young men must change when they begin to wear their reputation. Riding with Thirteen had made easily the best newspaper fodder which the Luzon campaigns furnished, and the sparkling wine of recognition eventually found its own. It must be repeated that only a boy-mind can depict war in a way that fits into popular human interest.

The David Cairns whom Bedient met at the Taku forts, near the mouth of the Pei-ho, had a bit of iron tonic in his veins. His sentences were shorter, less faltering and more frequent. He knew things that he had formerly held tentatively. His conceptions (during night-talks) were called in quickly from the dream-borders, and given the garb and weight of matter. The stamina of decision had hardened. He was eager to call Bedient his finest friend, but he had forgotten for the time the amazing subtleties which at first had deepened and broadened this wanderer's place in his inner life. A touch of success and the steady drive of ambition had gradually moved the abiding place of Cairns' consciousness from his heart to his brain. Few would have detected other than manliness and improvement. Bedient did not trust himself to think much about it, for fear he would do his friend an injustice. The fact that he could not see Cairns differently in the latter's first fame-flush, and observing past doubt, that he was lifted for the world's eyes, helped Bedient to realize that he was a bit weird in judgment. At all events, something was gone from the friendship. He was sore at heart, more than ever alone…. The two separated a second time in Peking after the relief of the Legations. Bedient went to Japan, where he made the acquaintance of an old Buddhist priest—a scabby, long-nailed Zarathustra who roamed the boxwood hills above Nikko, and meditated.

Bedient was farther from such things now, but he could not avoid noting that Japan is an old and easy shoe for the passions. The women of Japan are but finished children, preserving a sense of innocence in their bestowals. Many little Adelaides in fragrance, without will, without high hopes, only momentary and baby hopes—children happy in the little happinesses they give and take. This is the extraordinary feature of an empire of dangerous half-grown men. Moreover, above the delicate charm of sex, these little creatures are so remote and primitive in race and idea, so intrinsically foreign and undeveloped—that one leaves the fairest with a mitigated pang…

Bedient never repeated an action which once had brought home to him the sense of his own evil. The emotions here narrated are but moments in years. He accounted them quite as legitimate in the abstract as the strange visionings of his higher life, as yet untold. These latter have to do with his maturity, as wars and passions have to do with the approach to maturity in the life of men. To Bedient, evil concerned itself with the unclean. Wherever uncleanness (to him a pure destructive principle) revealed itself there was a balance of power in his nature which turned him from it, despite any concomitant attraction. The original Adelaide was a superb answer to the more earthy of his three natures; so utterly confined to her one plane as to be innocent of others. In the two Manila twilights which saw the dominance of his physical being, it was the Adelaide element which roused; and the scars they left behind marked the scorch of memories.

The fact that there were moments in which Bedient smoldered helplessly in a world of possible women is significant in the character of one destined to fare forth on the Supreme Adventure. It is true, he was preserved in comparative purity though he roamed unbridled around the world. Perhaps it was the same instinct which held him apart from men in their lower moments of indulgence. He could linger where there was wine until the dregs of the company were stirred by the stimulus. All delight left him then, and he found himself alone. His leaving was quite as natural as the departure from a stifling room of one who has learned to relish fresh air…. It was during his Japan stay that Bedient pleased himself often with the thought that somewhere in the world was a woman meant for him—a woman with a mind and soul, as well as flesh. If the waiting seemed long—why should he not be content, since she was waiting, too? He would know her instantly. The slightest errant fancy of doubt would be enough to assure him that she was not the One….

Send a boy out on a long journey (even to Circe and Calypso, and past the calling rocks of the sea), but if his mother has loved into his life, the rare flower of fastidiousness, he will come back, with innocence aglow beneath the weathered countenance. It is the sons of strong women who have that fineness which makes them choice, even in their affairs of an hour. A beautiful spirit of race guardianship is behind this fastidiousness…. Miraculously, it seems to appear many times in the sons of women who have failed to find their own knight-errants. Missing happiness, they have taken disillusionment from common man; yet so truly have they held to their dreams, that ever their sons must go on searching for the true bread of life.