“I will not tell!”
Nor would Khalil Khayyat tell Salim Awad what must be sought by such as lose at love; but he called to Nageeb Fiani, the greatest player in all the world, to bring the violin, that Salim might hear the music of love and be comforted. And in the little back room of the pastry-shop near the Battery, while the trucks rattled over the cobblestones and the songs of the Irish troubled the soft spring night, Nageeb Fiani played the Song of Love to Lali, which the blind prince had made, long, long ago, before he died of love; and in the sigh and wail and passionate complaint of that dead woe the despair of Salim Awad found voice and spent itself; and he looked up, and gazing deep into the dull old eyes of Khalil Khayyat, new light in his own, he smiled.
“Yet, O Khalil,” he whispered, “will I go upon that quest!”
Now, Salim Awad went north to the bitter coasts—to the shore of rock and gray sea—there to carry a pack from harbor to harbor of a barren land, ever seeking in trade to ease the sorrows of love. Neither sea nor land—neither naked headland nor the unfeeling white expanse—neither sunlit wind nor the sleety gale in the night—helped him to forgetfulness. But, as all the miserable know, the love of children is a vast delight: and the children of that place are blue-eyed and hungry; and it is permitted the stranger to love them.... On he went, from Lobster Tickle to Snook’s Arm, from Dead Man’s Cove to Righteous Harbor, trading laces and trinkets for salt fish; and on he went, sanguine, light of heart, blindly seeking that which the losers at love must seek; for Khalil Khayyat had told him that the mysterious Thing was to be found in that place.
With a jolly wind abeam—a snoring breeze from the southwest—the tight little Bully Boy, fore-and-after, thirty tons, Skipper Josiah Top, was footing it through the moonlight from Tutt’s Tickle to the Labrador: bound down north for the first fishing of that year. She was tearing through the sea—eagerly nosing the slow, black waves; and they heartily slapped her bows, broke, ran hissing down the rail, lay boiling in the broad, white wake, stretching far into the luminous mist astern. Salim Awad, the peddler, picked up at Bread-and-Water Harbor, leaned upon the rail—staring into the mist: wherein, for him, were melancholy visions of the star-eyed maid of Washington Street.... At midnight the wind veered to the east—a swift, ominous change—and rose to the pitch of half a gale, blowing cold and capriciously. It brought fog from the distant open; the night turned clammy and thick; the Bully Boy found herself in a mess of dirty weather. Near dawn, being then close inshore, off the Seven Dogs, which growled to leeward, she ran into the ice—the first of the spring floes: a field of pans, slowly drifting up the land. And when the air was gray she struck on the Devil’s Finger, ripped her keel out, and filled like a sieve; and she sank in sixty seconds, as men say—every strand and splinter of her.
But first she spilled her crew upon the ice.
The men had leaped to port and starboard, fore and aft, in unthinking terror, each desperately concerned with his own life; they were now distributed upon the four pans which had been within leaping distance when the Bully Boy settled: white rafts, floating on a black, slow-heaving sea; lying in a circle of murky fog; creeping shoreward with the wind. If the wind held—and it was a true, freshening wind,—they would be blown upon the coast rocks, within a measurable time, and might walk ashore; if it veered, the ice would drift to sea, where, ultimately, in the uttermost agony of cold and hunger, every man would yield his life. The plight was manifest, familiar to them, every one; but they were wise in weather lore: they had faith in the consistency of the wind that blew; and, in the reaction from bestial terror, they bandied primitive jokes from pan to pan—save the skipper, who had lost all that he had, and was helplessly downcast: caring not a whit whether he lived or died; for he had loved his schooner, the work of his hands, his heart’s child, better than his life.