Bellair ordered supper served in the room. They were free and alone. Faith returned to the boy, enough for the hour. Davy was consulted carefully upon the details of the order, a subtle suggestion from Bellair from time to time. Something of the long dinners on the Jade had come to his mind in this rôle. He had learned much about food that voyage, the profundity and emptiness of the subject. Bellair told his story, making it very clear to Davy—this at first:
“The office was doing to me just what it would do to you, Davy. It was breaking me down. The floors of Lot & Company are filled with heart-broken men. They do not know it well; some of them could never know, but there are secrets in the breasts of men there, that you wouldn’t dream of. It is so all over New York. Trade makes it so—offices, the entire city, crowded with heart-broken men.... They say first, ‘Why, every one is out for himself and the dollar—why not I?’ You and I were taught so in our little schooling. Then Lot & Company taught us. They are old masters—generations of teachers. Cramped and bleak, but loyal to the one verb—get. In all the Lot family, Davy, there is not a true life principle such as you brought to the office in the beginning. But if Lot & Company were unique—they would be an interesting study. The city is crowded with such firms—heart-breakers of men, the slow, daily, terrible grind; every movement, every expression, a lie—until to those inside, the lie is reality—and the truth a forbidden and terrible stranger. Every man has his Lot & Company.
“Davy, I breathed a bit of open that Sunday—so that I could see, but the next morning it closed about me again. It was Mr. Prentidd who helped me out. They stole from him and lied to him. Face to face, eye to eye, old Seth Wetherbee, the Quaker, lied to him, taking hundreds of dollars in the lie—millionaires taking hundreds of dollars from a poor inventor. I had the book of the London transaction before me, which showed the truth as they talked, and Mr. Sproxley came and took the book from me, and shut it in the safe.... And then when I left, they knew I had their secrets. You wondered why they called me a thief, when I was not. It was plain, Davy, to spoil anything I might say about their methods. Instantly they discredited me, because I was one of six or seven in the office who knew that they were thieves and liars. And why did they fire you to-day for lunching with me? Because they were afraid of what I might have told you. And why did they send Broadwell to Philadelphia when they knew he was to have lunch with me? For fear of what I might tell Broadwell. Even now they will not tell the different floors that I am exonerated.... But they are afraid, Davy—that’s their hell. That is their life—fear and the lie. Imagine men standing straight up to heaven—spines lifted from the ground, but going back to the ground—who knows but their souls already belly-down?—because they break the hearts of men, and live with fear and the lie.”
He told of Fleury and Stackhouse and the Faraway Woman—of McArliss, of striking the reef, and day by day in the open boat.... Davy’s eyes bulged. The boy saw Stackhouse at one end and quiet manhood in the other. He sat with Bellair, whom he could understand, in the point of balance between these forces. Bellair told of the stars and the child, and the distance from which they viewed the little things of the world and the grand simplicity of God. He pictured the man Fleury had become—the straight-seeing, the fearless, the ignited man, who mastered the lie in his heart and the animal in his abdomen—the man he, Bellair, wanted to be, and wanted Davy to be.... The Formahaut came, with Spika agleam to the northward, and Fleury died—the picture in his mind of a man, rising rather than falling.... Bellair told him of the first moment he heard the real voice of Fleury, as he stood on the tilted deck of the Jade in the dark, while he went back for water.... “I’ll hold a place for you!”
“A real man always says that, Davy. A real man will hold a place for you. And I thought, as I saw Stackhouse die and remembered his life, that he was the saddest and most terrible animal in human form. He was a glutton and a coward, but mainly he broke his own heart and not others. He was a slave to his stomach, but there was life, not creeping death, in his mind. I saw the pictures that moved there, low, vivid pictures, animal dreams, but he was not a destroyer of children or a breaker of the hearts of men. Low Nature was loose in him, but it was not a predatory instinct alone. Having enough, he could give. He could give fifty thousand dollars and a wallet full of valuable papers for a bottle of whiskey—but the Lots and the Wetherbees would have died clutching their money. I learned Stackhouse, Davy—only to understand that there is a depth below his. I think I should have taken you out somehow—if they hadn’t let you go——”
Davy asked questions, and the story came better and better. The thing that held him especially was the last days in the open boat.
“And did you really suffer less when you decided to make it a fast?”
“Yes, that was true in my case. Many have set out to fast ten days, and done with as little as we did. Of course it was harrowing, because we didn’t know when it would end; then the little baby was there, and the mother.”
“And you think he was really as happy as he said?”
“Davy, lad, Fleury was a prince. He would have given you his shirt. He had himself going so strong for us—that the fire of happiness ran through him. I’ll give you some books about that. It’s really a fact. You can’t suffer pain, when you’ve got something really fine up your sleeve for another. Perhaps you’ve felt it at Christmas——”