Beggars on Horseback

by F. Tennyson Jesse

As he stared the little particles of cloud in front of the rainbow slowly dissolved and melted into the ashen pink of the cloud-curtain, from that, too, the glow was fading, and the arch itself began slowly to die into the air. Elderkin found himself in the chart-room again; he sat down and shut his eyes, striving to remember. He could not recollect having dreamt such a thing, and yet the feeling aroused in him was exactly that provoked when, on the day following a very vivid dream, it will keep on intruding in fragments, each time to be shaken off as the mind readjusts itself to the normal after the moment's blurring of edge. Suddenly it occurred to him that he must have seen that effect only a few days before and he opened his diary, in which, his vice being pen and paper, he noted down matters not important enough for the "Remarks" space in the log. He hunted the pages back and forth, and in the midst of his futile search his mind seemed to give a click and he was switched back into the normal again. He sat looking at the book in his hands and realized that he had never seen that especial effect before, that he had most certainly never noted it down; the mere idea that he had now seemed as silly as a dream when the mind has struggled fully awake, though when he had first thought of it and taken the notebook up, it had seemed as possible as the same dream when the sleeper is in the midst of it. He still felt curiously dizzy, though his head was clearing slowly: things seemed commonplace around him once more; he could not even remember distinctly what his sensations had been. He only knew that in that trance-like state, of a moment—of æons—earlier, he had known he had seen before that which he then saw, and seen it connected with something he could not catch. Whether he ever had seen it, perhaps on that incompletely remembered day of storm which had flashed back to him on this afternoon; or whether, already worked up by his conscience, by the interview with Lemaire, and, to his sensitized mind, by the words in the Bible, the sudden effect on him of seeing that bow set in the flaming cloud, had produced a brainstorm, he could never know. He would have thought it blasphemy to wonder whether nothing more spiritual than the driven blood in his skull was responsible for that queer switching off the track; but whatever it was, the effect of it, on his awakened moral sense, was prodigious. He did not doubt that he had received a divine visitation, that for him the heavens had been decked with pomp, that the workings of God, in particular and exquisite relation to himself, were manifest in the ordered sequence of that day. His own stirrings at the violation of his solitary code had gone deeper with him than he knew, preparing him for further troubling, then the pact with Lemaire, driving in all the distasteful side of the business more keenly still, the coincidence of that word "covenant" coming on the heels of his covenant with the mate, that word used in the Bible passage to suggest the eternal pact between man's soul and its creator, the memory it evoked, and, to crown all, the finding of the seal of it set in the heavens themselves—all these things rushed together, fused, and struck into his being.

He fell on his knees in the chart-room and praised God; praised Him in the phraseology of his Puritan forebears, as he had heard Him praised when a little boy, whose heedless ears had not seemed to take in the words battering about them.

Joab Elderkin had got religion. He had been converted.

When he scrambled to his feet he came to, so to speak, on a different sphere from any he had ever known. He seized up the Bible again, his hands shaken by the strongest passion known to civilized man, the only acquired attribute, besides the making of fire, and of intoxicating liquor, which marks him off fundamentally from the other mammals. He read again the passage that had flamed into his ken earlier, he read the promises of the Almighty, he read of how men were called the Sons of God. He saw himself and all his fellow humans not merely calling God Father by a kindly sufferance towards adopted children, but as beings created of the same substance, their souls as much made of the essence of God as their bodies of the essence of their earthly fathers, and the thought mounted to his head like wine. The swift darkness of the tropics had fallen, but full of his new conception of his fellow-creatures—"every living creature that was with him" of the verses—he, when he opened the chart-room door, flared forth into a night of gods.

All the next day the glory held, both in the air and in Elderkin's mind. The Pacific was rainbow-haunted; phantom archways through which the bowsprits seemed about to soar; pillars of prismatic colour that melted into air; broken shafts of it that flashed out in every sunlit burst of spray upon the decks. Even in the two plumes of spray for ever winging from either side of her cutwater, a curve of burnished colours hung, as though piercing down into the translucent green, through whose depths the drowning surf was driven in paler clouds. The wind still held on and the Spirito Santo made what way she could under steam and canvas, through the confused seas that slopped aboard her and buffeted her from all sides at once. It was of supreme significance to Elderkin that the north-westerly wind on which he had counted for his purpose, should have died away in the self-same hour that, as he phrased it, the wind of the spirit blew into his soul. The barometer was falling rapidly, in spite of the stiller air, and he had had the royals and outer jib and gaff-topsail stowed. What with her reduced sail, the influence of her steam, and the lumpy seas, the Spirito Santo was behaving her worst, riding slugglishly with a heavy reluctant motion as though she hardly considered it worth the effort of keeping her blunt nose above water at all. Elderkin felt her sulkiness, and it seemed to him as though, instead of helping to save her, she was possessed of an evil spirit bent on thwarting him. He watched her closely, and spent the day on the poop, and though he said little, every one was aware of something new and strange about him. The crew commented among themselves on his abstraction and the poverty of his abuse; Lemaire thought he held the key to it, but Olsen, the freckled Dane, grew uneasy. He was having trouble with his engines, which should have been overhauled long ago, and would inevitably have been renovated this trip had it been undertaken with a normal objective. If the voyage were unduly prolonged he would be hard put to it for fuel; it would not take very much to send his boilers crashing from the rusty stays that held them; added to which every degree further south, now they were in the forties, diminished their chances of safety. As there was no longer any wind to contend with, Olsen was all for steaming towards shore at once, for his sea-sense combined with the barometer to tell him of trouble ahead.

Olsen was a taciturn creature, who cared for no one in the world but his half-caste children—bright, large-stomached little creatures, whom he had left playing in the dust in front of his gaily painted wooden house in St. Thomas. For their sakes he put up with his fat, slovenly wife and her swarms of relations of various shades of brown. It was only for the children's sake that he had stuck to the Spirito Santo, for it suited him to be able to get home as often as he might, and even when the Spirito Santo did not touch St. Thomas he could always pick up with a mail-packet or a sailing ship of some kind. It was his ambition to send both boy and girl to New York for their education, now that the Civil War had made it possible for anyone with a touch of colour to make good. Therefore he nursed his crazy engines as though he loved them, but he decided that the sooner the accident occurred the better. In the second dog-watch, he, as Lemaire had done the day before, went to Elderkin in the chart-room.

He found the captain with an open book in front of him: he was not reading, but making calculations on the margin. He glanced up at Olsen and his tired eyes brightened for a moment. Then:

"Ask Mr. Lemaire to come here," he ordered, "and come back yourself."

Olsen made his way to the top of the chart-house, where Lemaire was pacing, full of anxiety, and delivered the order. Lemaire came with a mixture of civility and an assumption of confederacy in his manner, but Elderkin took no more notice of it than of Olsen's waiting stolidity. He closed the Bible and confronted the two men.

"Well, Olsen," he said, "you were wanting to see me about something?"