Stackhouse would declare that he dined just once a day, meaning this exactly. He breakfasted on a plate of fried fish with many pourings of mellow, golden and august German coffee, eating the hot fishes in his hands like crackers—a very warm and shiny hand when it was done—crisp brown fishes stripped somehow in his beard, the bones tossed overside. He liked full day with this meal. The plates were brought hot and covered to the great cane chair, until he called for them to cease. For his supper he desired outer darkness (English ale and apples, black bread from Rome that comes sewn in painted canvas like hams for the shipping, butter from Belgium packed with the care of costly cheeses, of which he was connoisseur; sauces of India, a cold chicken, perhaps, or terrapin, and an hour or two of nuts). The Japanese woman appeared at none of these services.
It was the dinners, however, which bewildered Bellair most. He had not the heart utterly to condemn them, since the Jade and the noble sea-air, sometimes winy and sometimes of sterile purity, kept him in that fine state of appreciation, which if he had ever known as a boy was utterly forgotten. He had initiation in curries and roasts, piquant relishes of seed and fish and flower, chowders, broiled fish and baked—until he felt the seas and continents serving their best, and learned about each in the characteristic telling of the man who lived for them. For instance when chicken was brought:
“These are the birds for the Chinese to play with—yes, you would think me joking? It is not so. The little chicken-birds are kept for pets. They are not frightened to death. You do not know, berhaps, that fear and anger boisons the little birds? They are kept happy and killed quick—before they know. Many mornings they are fed from the hand and played with, until they love John of the gookeries—and one morning—so, like that—heads off—and no boison from the fear of death in our flavours. Many things you do not know—yes?”
“Yes,” Bellair said.
Stackhouse loved his little facts like these, all matters of preparation of fish and flesh and fowl; the intricate processes of fattening, curing, softening, corking and all the science of the stores.... “There was a certain goose which I found in Hakodate—not from the Japanese, but from a Chino there——”.... “And once upon a time in Mindanao, they baked a fish for me with heated stones in the ground. Wrapped in leaves, it was, and covered first in clay. You should see the scales and skin come off with the clay—and the inner barts a little ball, when it was finished. And the dining of that evening. Ah, the sharb eyes of the little nigger girls—you would believe?”.... Such were the stories in the long feeding—but the stories on deck were the stories of the death of men.
In the usual mess the chat was perfunctory on Bellair’s part, since he granted that the preacher and the Faraway woman (he called her so in his thoughts from her distant-searching on deck) were so well adjusted to each other. He granted this, and much beside concerning the two, from pure fancy. Never once had they disregarded him, or engaged in conversation that would leave him dangling, though many times his own thoughts were apart. The Jade had been three weeks out of Savannah, in the southern Caribbean, a superb mid-afternoon, when Bellair, turning at the rail, found Fleury at his side. He had just been wondering if he had better go below and read awhile by the open port, or start the monologue of Stackhouse for the rest of the day. The latter was enjoyable enough, but Bellair disliked to drink anything so early.... “One must be bolite.”
It happened right for the first conversation with Fleury. He had never known a preacher whose talk touched the core of things. Preachers had always shown a softness of training on the actualities, and left Bellair sceptical of the rest. A minister had once told him: “What force for good we get to be in mid-life, is in spite of our ecclesiastical training, not because of it.” Bellair had often thought of that.
Yet, he had given much secret thought to religious things, not counting himself a specialist, however, seldom opening the subject. Certainly at Lot & Company’s, no one had marked this proclivity. He had the idea that a man must come up through men, and through the real problems of men, if he would become a moving force for good in the world; that no training apart among texts and tracts and tenets would get him power. Very clearly he saw that a man must go apart to fix his ideals, but that he should seek his wilderness after learning the world, not after prolonged second-hand contacts with books.
“The big job ahead is for some one who can show the human family that it’s all of a piece, and that we’re all out after the same thing,” he remarked.
“A Unifier,” Fleury suggested.