The voice was rich and mellow. He must have known Teutonic beginnings, or enough association for the mannerisms to get into his blood. Stackhouse was not even without that softness of sentiment, though he was tender only for men. Except for a spellable word here and there, his accent was inimitable. He talked of little other than death, and with indescribable care—as if he had been much with men of another language or with men of slow understanding.... It may have been the drink, or the sunset over distant land; the Spanish Main ahead, or the dryness and pentness of the city-heart and its achievement of long-dreamed desire in a snug, sweet ship under the easy strain of sails with wind in them; in any event Bellair was drawn with exquisite passion—drawn southward as the Jade was drawn in the soft, irresistible strength of nature.
He knew that this would pass, that he could not continue to sense this rapport with the sea-board, but he loved it now, breathed deep, and saw Stackhouse as he was never to be seen again. There was enchantment in the eyes of the great wanderer, and a certain culture of its kind in its stories. Bellair listened and in the gleam of the broad, dark eyes, there seemed a glimpse of burning ships, shadowy caravans on moonlit sands and the flash of arms by night; low-lying lights of island ports, formless rafts, spuming breakers, mourning derelicts—just glimpses, but of all the gloom and garishness of the sea. He began a monologue that night, and though it is not this story, it was not interrupted except by meals and sleeping, for many days; and all the pauses in that story were the dramatic pauses of death:
“... I have travelled more than most travellers and have seen more than is good for one man. In New York I saw Brundage of Frisco, who asked me if I remembered Perry. I said I remembered very well, for Perry was a bartner of mine, before young Brundage came out to the Islands. He told me Perry was six weeks buried. That is the way now. When I was young, my combanions did not die in beds. They were killed. Eight months ago, I saw Emslie—waved at him going up the river to Shanghai. He was outward bound, and came home to us in Adelaide in a sealed box. Old Foster, who is richer than I, has married a little Marie in Manila and may die when he pleases now. The South Seas still run in and yonder among Island shores, but who buys wine for the Japanese girls in Dunedin, since Norcross was conscripted for the service we all shall know?...
“And thus you come to the Jade, and some time you will here them dell of Stackhouse. Who knows but you may dell the story—of a familiar face turned down like an oft-filled glass? And some one will say, ‘He has not laughed these many years.’ They used to say in the Smilax at Hong Kong, when the harbour was raving and the seas were trying to climb the mountain—they used to say that Stackhouse was laughing somewhere off the China coasts. But there are only so many laughs in a man, and they go out with the years. Most of those who said that thing of Stackhouse—yes, most of them, are dead as glacial drift.”
Such was the quality of his perorations, hunched ox-like just aft of the main-shrouds—the Japanese woman coming and going with the ship’s bells, bringing drinks day and night.
“It seared my coppers—that drinking in the States of Ameriga. It will not subdue,” said he. “One has a thirst for weeks after a few days of drinking in Ameriga. For one must be bolite.”
He was never stimulated, seldom depressed, but saturated his great frame twenty hours of the twenty-four, the Japanese woman seeming to understand with few or no words the whims of taste of which he was made. Just once in the small hours, Bellair heard her voice. The cane-chair had not been empty long, and the silence of soft rain was upon the deck. Bellair had opened a package of New York papers purchased on the last day in Savannah.... It was just one scream, but the scream of one not frightened by any human thing.... The roll of papers dropped down behind the bunk. Anyway, Bellair could not have read after that. Early in the morning after hours of torture of dreams, he was awakened as usual by the sluicing of the monster. Two Lascars who travelled with Stackhouse apparently for no other purpose, poured pails of salt water upon him in the early hour when the decks were washed; and often at midday as they neared the Line. It was given to Bellair more than once, as the voyage lengthened, to witness this hippodrome.
2
Her face was continually turned away. Bellair wondered as days passed if he should ever see her face to face—the silent, far-looking young woman with a nursing baby in her arms. On deck she stood at the rail, eyes lost oversea. Her contemplation appeared to have nothing to do with Europe or America, but set to the wind wherever it came from, as the strong are always turned up-stream. Sometimes she wore a little blue jacket, curiously reminding Bellair of school-days, and though she was not far from that in years, she seemed to have passed far into the world. The child cried rarely.
There was a composure about the mother, but he did not know if it were stolidity or poise. Certainly she had known poverty, but health was in her skin, and there was something in that white profile, that the sun had touched with olive rather than tan, that stopped his look. The perfection of it dismayed Bellair. He loved beauty, but did not trust it, did not trust himself with it. The presence of a beautiful face stimulated him as no wine could do, but it also started him to idealising that which belonged to it, and this process had heretofore brought disappointment. Bellair did not want this touch of magnetism now. Beauty was plentiful. He had seen the profiles of Italian girls in New York, that the Greeks would have worshipped, and which the early worship of the Greeks was doubtless responsible for—beauty with little beside but giggle and sham. He disliked the thing in a man’s breast that answers so instantly to the line and colour of a woman’s face; objected to it primarily, because it was one of the first and most obvious tricks of nature for the replenishment of species in man and below. Bellair fancied to answer the captivation, if any at all, of a deeper wonder in woman than the contour of her countenance.