"It made New York very strange to me," said Bedient.
"You are like an Oriental," Carreras added. "Oh, they are all mad up in The States…. It's very good to have you back. I wonder why it was—that I never doubted you'd come?" Here the Captain swallowed some wine without adequately preparing his throat, and fell to coughing. Then he rose with the remark that he had experienced altogether too much joy for one old man, in a single day—and started for bed in confusion. Bedient sat back laughing softly, but noting the feeble movement of the other's limbs, quickly gave his arm. Up they went together…. In the big room alone, Bedient put on night garments; and unsatisfied, crossed after a time to the Captain's quarters. He found the old man sitting in the dark by the window, the meerschaum glowing…. It may have been the darkness altogether; or that Bedient as a man gave the other an affection that the boy could not; in any event that night, they found each other across the externals.
This was the cue for further grand talks—pajamas and darkness. Often, if it were not too late, they would hear the natives singing in their cabins. The haunting elemental melody of the African curiously blended with the tuneful and cavalierish songs of Spain and fitted into the majestic nights. The darkies sang to the heart of flesh. In such moments, Equatoria was at her loveliest for Bedient—but the clear impersonal meditations did not come to him. In a hundred ways he had been given understanding during the first fortnight, of that something he had missed the first night on the Island. These people were infant souls. They were children, rudimentary in every thought. Theirs were sensations, not emotions; superstitions, not faiths. Their consciousness was never deeper than the skin. And fresh from his spacious years in India, where everything is old in spirit, where more often than not the beggar is a sage,—to encounter in this land of beauty, a people who were but babes in the thought of God—gave to Bedient the painful sense that his inner life was dissipating. There was no Gobind to restore him. It was as if the Spirit had favored the East; that Africa and the Western Isles had been cast apart as unfit for the experiment of the soul.
Moments of poignant sorrow were these when Bedient realized he was not of the West; that he irrevocably missed the great inner _con_tent of India, and would continue to hunger for it, until he returned, or coarsened his sensibilities to the Western vibration. This last was as far from him as the commoner treason to a friend. There were moments when he feared Captain Carreras almost understood. That dear old seaman through his solitudes, his natural cleanness and kindness, his real love, and more than all, through those vague visions which come late to men of simple hearts—had seemed, from several startling sayings, to touch the very ache in the young man's breast. These approaches were under the cover of darkness:
"There was something about you then, Andrew," (meaning the long-ago days at sea,) "I haven't been able to forget…. Damme—I haven't done well here—"
Bedient bent forward, perceiving that "here" meant his earthly life, as well as Equatoria.
"I should have stayed over yonder and sat down as you did—before you did. Here"—now the Captain meant Equatoria alone—"I have thought of my stomach and my ease. My stomach has gone back on me—and there is no ease. Over there, I might have—oh, I might have thought more—but I didn't know enough, early enough. And you did—at seventeen, you did! That's what made you. They're all mad up in The States, and they're just little children down here…. I might have profited in India—"
That was a frequent saying of the Captain's about the States. Twice a year at least, he was accustomed to make the voyage to New York…. The truth was, the old man felt a yearning for something the years and India had given Bedient. He felt much more than he said, and often regarded the young man, as one rapt in meditation…. His interest in Gobind and the Himalayas was insatiable; much more eagerly did he listen regarding the Punjab than about the ports he had known so well—and the changes that had passed under the eyes of the young man in Manila and Japan…. When Bedient was relating certain events of days and nights, that had become happy memories through the little things of the soul, Captain Carreras would start to convey the indefinite desires he felt; then suddenly, the deep intimacy of his revelations would appear to his timid nature, and even in the mothering dark, the panic would strike home—and he would swing off with pitiful humor about goats or some other Island affair….
Bedient had an odd way of associating men whom he liked with mothers of his own imagining. Happily discovering fine qualities in a man, he would conjure up a mother to fit them…. Often, he saw the little Englishwoman whose boy had taken early to the seas…. She was plump and placid in her cap; inclined to think a great deal for herself, but still she allowed herself to be kept in order mentally and spiritually by her husband, whose orthodoxy was a whip. Perhaps she died thinking her tremulous little departures were sure attractions of hell and heresy. Bedient liked to think of her as vastly bigger than her mate, bigger than she dreamed—but alone and afraid.