She thanked him again.... At the curb, as the driver backed in, Bessie put up her lips to him.
“... Dear singing-girl—I didn’t ask that.”
“It’s because you didn’t, I think. Really that’s it. Oh, thank you. Good-night.”
Bellair beckoned another cab, and sank back into the dark. All the way to the station, and through to the Savannah-Pullman, he was wrenching himself clear from something like a passion to turn about to New York. At the last moment, before the train moved, he recalled the letter to Mr. Nathan, and hailed a station porter from the step.
“Please mail this for me,” he said, bringing up silver with the letter.
PART THREE
THE JADE: II
1
Bellair had to wait less than two days in Savannah, for the Jade had made a pretty passage. Impressions rushed home too swift for his mind to follow, as he stepped aboard from the cotton dock; the number of impressions, he did not know, until he began the inventory in his cabin afterward. Last and first and most compelling, however, was the spectacle of Stackhouse, that David Hume figure of a man, reclining in his cane-chair of similar vast proportions just aft of the main-shrouds. A momentous hammock of canes, that steamer-chair, with gentle giving slopes for the calves and broad containers, polished with wear and tightly woven like armour, for the arms; a sliding basket for the head, suggestive of a guillotine’s grisly complement; the whole adjusted to Stackhouse and no other.
Humid heat in the harbour, a day of soft low clouds. The man who pushed Brooklyn from him, had discarded even more thoroughly the clothing of temperate climes. The vivid black of his hairy chest was uncovered, and there was a shining bar of the same, just above the selvage of white sock. Bellair thought he must be hairy as a collie dog.... But mainly that which weighted and creaked the chair seemed an enormous puddle of faded silks.
The bulky brown head (which arose plumb as a wall from the back of the neck) had slightly bowed as Bellair passed. There was something ox-like in the placidity of the brown eyes, but that was only their first beam, as it were. Much that was within and behind the eyes of Stackhouse, Bellair thought of afterward. Through a deep, queer process, it came to him that even the answer for his coming was in that indescribable background; and restless, too, in the pervading brown, a movement of sleek animals there. The Japanese woman had skuffed forward with drink for her lord.