It was wonderful how everything quieted down after that bit of excitement. The old gent imbibed a considerable amount of whisky, told the guilty men that he forgave them, shook their hands across the long benchtable, and drank their health. The humour of it all even struck those seasoned criminals. I saw them grin from ear to ear. It was a sight to see those rows of fierce, bearded faces as they sat there, clad in their red shirts and belted pants, the whole scene dimly lit up by the swinging candles that hung in the empty gin bottles just overhead, every sinful eye alert as the old man shook his finger.
That old gent’s main weakness was whisky and rum. Most probably it was the main cause of his taking the desperate chance that brought him as a fugitive from justice across the seas. He sang a song to those rough men; his voice was strangely mellow and sweet, becoming pathetic as the fumes got thicker in his sinful head—who knows what thoughts flashed through his drunken dreams?
Tanner Bolt, Lively Humper, and Jimmy Scratch played their mouth-organs and banjos as the wild chorus of those men shook the shanty. Then Soogy came in and did a dance on the table. I noticed that even those drunken men seemed to come under the spell of that kid’s song and dance. As for the old gent, he kept taking out his watch, keying it up, and staring with his mouth open as he watched the child’s bright eyes and his wonderful dancing. I think the old man was trying to recall his senses, wondering who he was, what he was doing there with those wild-looking men as they encored that mysterious child. Then his besotted head fell forward and he dropped off asleep. And when I think of all that happened through him, how the innocent were punished for the sins of the guilty, I wish that he had never awakened again. But there, I mustn’t be too hard on him; he never made himself, and he suffered too.
CHAPTER XVIII. RETROSPECT
The Modern Old Man of the Sea—Fifty Pounds!—A Human Octopus—Adrift at Sea—Sorrow—Saved—In Tonga—Our Old Man’s last Hiding-place—Retrospect.
THE perspective of things as seen after a lapse of years seems gifted with a visionary light that has no relation to the normal outlook of the intellect. The most commonplace objects and incidents, when seen and thought over in the pale light of memory, become tinged with that indefinable glamour, that something which men call poetry. A wind-blown ship far at sea with trailing spars and torn sails beating its way into the sunset; a bird travelling silently across a foreign tropic sky; a wild girl singing by a lagoon; a dead tree tossing its arms on a windy hill; an old gentleman with a little clerical hat bashed over his eyes; the remembrance of a tiny, golden-eyed girl, with a bit of blue ribbon in her hair as she sprang into your farewell arms when you said good-bye and went off, a boy, on your first voyage to sea—I say, all these things seem to be the landmarks, the promontories of the shores one has hugged as one sailed across the wild seas of life.
And, in looking back, that old gent of the South Sea Organization seems to stand out, not so much as a wicked, eccentric individual, as he does of a type that represents nine-tenths of the men whom one is doomed to knock up against in one’s pilgrimage along this shore of hope and sudden chills, wrecks, and buffeted dreams.
I know that that old man came to us in the guise of a benefactor who would bestow wealth on O’Hara and on me, whereas he turned out to be a Nemesis wrapt up in the vilest disguise, a Nemesis who seemed to take some vindictive delight in the frailties of youth, and was guilty of unwarrantable cruelty to a child’s innocence. I have sometimes thought that neither he, nor the Organization itself, ever existed in this world as men know things to exist; that I once lived in a phantasmagorial world of ghostly sunlight and shadow that was haunted by an aged man who wore side-whiskers, clung to my back like an Old Man of the Sea, and successfully throttled my faith in supreme goodness. It was our lack of funds and the old man’s abundant wealth that brought the whole business about. And, though I know that the lack of funds on the one side and an abundance of funds on the other side has brought about the direst disasters beneath the sun, still, I feel that the sorrow that came to us through that old fellow is worth recording.
I think it was the very next day that O’Hara and I saw our chance of luring the old gentleman away from the Organization to see if he was really in earnest about that fifty pounds he said he would give to the first one who got him safely away. In the little that we had seen of him we observed that he was weak where native girls and dancing-women were concerned. When O’Hara had acquainted him with the fact that there was a great tribal-dance on down in the village of Takarora, that the chiefs were going to pow-wow and the meke-girls eat fire and dance, he took hold of our hands, and begged us to take him to see the sight.