“I say it welded us, Father. For by your God, she loved as much as I. She had a fashion of taking my cheeks in her hands, pinching them, pulling my face to meet hers, and shaking me to and fro as she did so.... Not even a woman could pretend like that. I say she loved me as I loved her.
“In the beginning, I say, this was so. She came one cruise with me, and the boy Red Pawl was born in a black storm not a hundred miles from here. I was doctor and nurse to her then, Father. She was brave. Aye! She lay in my arms throughout the torment, smiling up at me between the agonies. She was wiser than I in such matters, and she had brought a book that told what I must do, so that when the time came I was able to tend her—and the boy. I was clumsy; and I fumbled; but—the thing was done. It was a sacrament, Father. You see, I believed in your God in those days. It was a holy sacrament. I thought she was like your Christ, giving her flesh and her blood for this baby that was our world. She was holy to me. You say your faith is spiritual; but I say the true faith is physical. There is nothing so holy as the body, Father; for the holiest thing in the world is birth. If it were not holy, it would be unspeakably terrible. If there is a God, then the bringing of one body from another body is God’s work, and man’s work, and there is nothing so important in the world, and nothing so holy as this thing.
“The boy was born. We called him Dan. That is my name, you understand. But there cannot be two Dan Pawls; so he is Red, and I am Black, and there are few men whose memory runs to the contrary. He throve aboard the ship; and he was walking when we came home again.
“After that she would come no more to sea. She stayed at home next voyage, with the boy. And I tell you our love was as much a living thing while we were ten thousand miles apart as when we were each in the other’s arms. And when I came home again, she was waiting for me.
“I was six months at home that time. The boy was past four when I came away; and his mother said he must come along and learn to know his father. To know me! So he came, and slept in my cabin, and learned the ship. He was stout for his age, even then; and before we turned for home that time, he was grown almost beyond his mother’s knowledge. I told him: ‘She will not know you.’ And he laughed with me at that, and we planned to have him slip ashore and find her out, and fling himself upon her to see the tears of surprise that would spring into her eyes.
“All the long way home we planned that matter between us, you understand. And the boy’s eyes would light, and my heart leaped to see him. And when the land lifted out of the sea ahead of us, we took our stand, we two, and watched for hours before we could sight the wharves where I told him she would be.
“I knew our coming would be signaled; she would know we were in the bay. So my glass searched the wharf, and the boy at my side clamored: ‘Where is she, Daddy? Where is she, Daddy? Let me see.’ And he took the glass from me and leveled it and looked. I could not tell him she was not there. So I pointed out a woman’s figure, against a pile of oilbrown casks, and told him that was his mother. And he screamed his greeting to her across a solid mile of water. And I was straining my eyes for her coming along the wharf!”
For a moment Black Pawl paused. When he went on, there was no tremor in his voice. “We made fast,” he said, “and still she had not come. And I saw by the way the others looked at me that something was amiss. I forgot the boy, in wondering; and I dared not question them, and the black fear shut down and clamped my heart. I forgot the boy; and before I knew, he was ashore, and had run to hug that woman I had shown him, and call her mother. And she put him away, and cried. So I thought my wife was dead.
“Even then I did not ask; and no one told me. I thought this was sympathy; I know, now, that it was because they were afraid. It was my brother who told me, in the end. He was not such a man as I am—smaller, and never over-strong. And when he told me, I struck him down, and he did not walk straight again during the two years more that he lived. Was that sin, that I did, in striking him?”
The pulse of the sea stirred the schooner’s deck beneath them; their white wake foamed with silver fire. The moon moved serenely across the purple arch of the sky. The rigging overhead hummed beneath the thrumming fingers of the wind. The missionary looked out across the water, and then up into the eyes of Black Pawl, and beheld the deeps of agony there.