CHAPTER XII—THE SERVANTS OP YAHVEH
The Duke of Dorset was mistaken when he imagined that a new land would rid him of these fancies. To remove a passion to the desert, a wise man hath written, is but to raise it to its triumph.
He had gone directly to Quebec, and from there traveled swiftly across Canada to the Pacific Coast. In Vancouver he was soon wearied, restless, overcome with ennui. His rifle and its ammunition lay unpacked in an ordinary traveling box. The lure of the mountains, the rivers, the silent barren places, had somehow departed from before him.
In this mood he met the Captain of His Majesty's gunboat, the Cleavewaive. He had known this man in the East; for a fortnight they had stalked tigers in the mountainous country south of the Amur. The man was by nature a hunter. The forest was in his blood. Life by rote and the narrow discipline of the service irked him. His idea of paradise was not unlike that of the Dakota.
Fourteen days in the wilderness bring men of any station to a certain understanding for life. The talk ran on big game killed here and there, in out-of-the-way places of the earth, and memories of that fortnight in Manchuria. Such conversations are not apt to run for long without touching a little on the future. It came out presently that the gunboat was about to make its annual run, south along the coast of the United States, in the general interest of British shipping, and to show the flag.
The Captain of the Cleavewaive, finding the Duke bored and at leisure, asked him to come on this cruise. He wished the Duke to accept for a certain close and personal reason. A larger importance would attach to the cruise from his presence, and this was to be thought of, but to do the man justice, this was not primarily his object. He was one of those men who, prevented by necessity from living the life that he longed for, sought constantly his experiences of it at second hand. Since he must needs thus follow the sea, he craved, with a consuming hunger, the taste of conversation running on the forest, the plain, the trackless mountain. The Duke of Dorset had lived in all of its richness, the very life which this man, had his destiny been open, would have chosen for himself.
For the hope then of talk running on these delectable experiences, he labored to win over the Duke to this voyage. He was not hopeful that he would succeed, and so he was surprised when the Duke finally accepted his invitation.
The Captain of the Cleaveivaive, having got his guest aboard, at first, took nothing from this fortune. The Duke of Dorset was now, strangely, no longer that mighty hunter with whom he had talked at Vancouver. On the gunboat he was a silent, reserved, impenetrable Englishman, hedged about by distances which no inferior could cross, meeting every advance with courtesy and silence. He talked conventionally, he looked over the gunboat at the Captain's invitation, noticed the structure of it, and made a word or two of comment when it seemed to be expected.
On the first evening of the voyage the Captain labored to draw him into conversation, but the manner of the Duke was now polite and formal, and the Captain, seeking a way inward to the man, was always turned deftly aside, until presently he gave over the effort.
The gunboat was delayed by heavy seas. The second day passed like the evening of the first, to the discomfiture of this ship's Captain. The Duke of Dorset was silent, courteous, and interested only in the sea. He sat in his deck chair watching through the afternoon the long polished swells—black, smooth as ebony, and rhythmic—in the hollows of which the sea birds rode. And at night, watching the uncanny mystery of this iron shell wrestling its way through the sea, shouldered from one side to the other, heaved up and pitched forward, assailed with every trick, and artifice, and cunning, with steady lifting and savage desperate rushes; the sea always failing to throw this black invader fairly on his shoulders, but never for one instant, never for one fraction of an instant, ceasing to assail him. And always, as it failed, growling, snarling, sputtering with a rage immeasurable and hideous. Then, when the moon opened like a red door, skyward out of the world, the sea changed as under some enchantment; a golden river welled up on the horizon and ran down toward that one looking seaward from his chair. On the instant he was in a kingdom of the fairy, and illusions, fantastic, unreal, took on under this magic the very flesh and blood of life.