“My McArliss is always a sailor,” said Stackhouse, rocking his head.
Bellair could credit that. McArliss interested him—an abrupt, nervous man, who covered the eager warmth of his friendliness in frosted mannerisms and sentences clipped at each end. He was afraid of himself except in his work, afraid of his opinions, though a great reader of the queer out of the way good things. Bellair found Woolman’s Life in his little library, with narratives of the ocean, tales of Blackbirders and famous Indiamen, Lytton’s “Strange Story” and “Zanoni,” also Hartmann’s “Magic, Black and White.” The latter he read, and found it not at all what he expected, but a book that would go with him as far as he cared at any angle, and then lose him. He was quite astonished. It was a long book, too—the kind you vow you will begin again, from time to time through the last half. He wanted to talk to McArliss about it, but the Captain was embarrassed.
“Crazy, eh?” he would say with a queer, dry laugh.
“I’ve stopped saying that about a book—because I don’t get it all,” Bellair remarked. “This man is right as far as I can go with him.”
“You give him the benefit—eh? That’s pretty good.”
“And you like it?”
“Ha—it passes the time. Good God—we have to pass the time!”
He spoke jerkily, always in this fashion, and the days brought no ease to the tension. McArliss patted his pockets, swore hastily over little things, looked snappily here and there. Bellair would have guessed, without the word from Stackhouse. The Captain was fighting hard. There seemed nothing to be done; the man had grown a spiked hedge around an innocent shyness; all that was real about him he kept shamefacedly to himself. Still Bellair believed more and more in his fine quality. McArliss made a picture for him of one who has come up through steam and returned to canvas bringing a finer appreciation to the beauty and possibilities of natural seamanship; as a man returns to the land, after many wearing years of city life, with a different and deeper instinct of the nature of the soil.
“She’s a slashing sailer,” he would say critically, as he crowded the Jade. “She balances to a hair—eh? Good old girl—they don’t breed her kind any more.”
It was he who balanced her to every wind, meeting all weathers with different cuts of cloth. Having only a distant familiarity with his fellow-officers and not even a speaking acquaintance with the crew, McArliss made her sing her racing song night and day down into the lower latitudes, until one played with the suspicion that he managed the weather, too,—with that same nervous, effective energy. It was all tremendously satisfying to Bellair. He had reacted on the last reaction, and was healed throughout. Worldliness was lost from his mental pictures of Bessie; daily she became more as he wanted her to be. Lot & Company had lost its upstanding and formidable black—was far-off now and dimly pitiable. He had not cared what was ahead; it had been the Jade and the voyage that had called him, but now the Islands and all that watery universe of the Southern Pacific were in prospect, to explore and make his own. Perhaps men were younger there; trade less old and ramified; perhaps they would bring him the new magic of life—so that he could live with zest and be himself.... Always at this part of the dream he would think of Bessie again. She was the cord not yet detached. Sooner or later, he must go back to her. At times he thought that he could not bear to remain very long; sometimes even watching this endless passage of days with strange concern.... But there was a short cut home—straight up the Pacific to San Francisco—and four days across....