Lot & Company

by Will Levington Comfort

Fleury and the Faraway woman had their increasingly fine part in his life. The preacher was always finding some new star, or bidding adieu to some northern constellation.

They had chosen the passage through the Straits because of the settled weather. At least, they called it fair-going—wild and rugged though it was, with huge masses of torn cloud, black or grey-black, hurtling past, often as low as the masthead, and all life managed at sick angles. The Jade bowed often and met the screaming blasts with her poles strangely bare, except, perhaps, for a few feet of extra-heavy canvas straining at the mizzen weather-rig.... Stackhouse nudged him one night and a laugh gurgled up from his chest as he pointed forward where McArliss stood in the waist lighting a cigarette.

“He will not sleep to-night. He will come to me—and you will never hear such talk as from this silent man. He will look for gompany to-night. One must be bolite.”

It was true. McArliss apparently fell into the cigarettes first, or perhaps he had fallen deeper. Bellair did not join them in the cabin, but heard their voices. The next day McArliss hunted him up, an inconceivable action. This was not like timid Spring, but sudden redolent summer after the austerities. The man was on fire, but perfectly in hand. All that he had thought and kept to himself for months appeared to come forth now—books and men, the great oceans of spirit and matter, and the mysteries of life and release. It seemed as if his body and brain had suddenly become transparent. The Captain was happy and kind, without oath or scandal, full of colour and romance; returning with excellent measure all the good thoughts that Bellair had given to him, and showing forth for one rare forenoon the memorable fabric of a man.

There was no repetition to his stages. In the afternoon he passed Bellair brusquely, and drank the night away with Stackhouse. The next day both face and figure had a new burden; the real man was now imprisoned more effectively than even his sobriety could accomplish.... Then the descent day by day—the narrow, woman’s waist and the broad, lean shoulders becoming a hunched unit, face averted, hands thick. Bellair always felt that Stackhouse was in a way responsible—for the old Master had known what would come and lured it on. He had foretold each stage—even to the last of McArliss drinking alone.

On two nights Fleury was with him while he met his devils. He had outraged Bellair at every offer and entrance. Even Stackhouse was surprised that the preacher was permitted to attend. His poor vitality at length began to crawl back into his body with terrible pain and shattered sanity—that old familiar battle, the last of many storms. And now the Jade was sailing up into the summer of the southern ocean. Midwinter in New York and here a strange, spacious sort of June, not without loneliness and wonderment to Bellair for the steady brightness and exceeding length of day.

The new moon had come down, extraordinary in its earth-shine which Fleury explained. The Jade was marking time, just making steerage headway, the breeze too light for good breathing.... To-night (as had happened a dozen times before on the other side of South America before the cold weather) Stackhouse had begun his story with, “It was a night like this——” As of old it was the tale of man and death, of the Stackhouse escape from death, sinuously impressing the Stackhouse courage and cleverness. Not that the story was without art; indeed, as usual, it was such a one as a man seldom leaves until the end; but Bellair had long since reached the moment of sufficiency. He had come to the end of his favourite author; had begun to see the mechanism and inventional methods of the workmanship. Vim was lost for the enactment of Stackhouse’s fiercer strength. The man was a concentrated fume of spirit, every tissue falsely braced, his very life identified with the life and heat of decay....

Alone, Bellair glanced about before going below. A breeze had slightly quickened the ship in the last hour. There may have been a dozen nights of equal mystery but this he appreciated more soundly and was grateful for freedom. His mind answered the beauty of it all ... something of this, he might be able to tell Bessie in a letter. The stars were far and tender; the air heavenly cool and soft, the night high, and the ship’s full white above, had something to do with angels—a dreamy spirit-haunt about it all. He would always see the Jade so, as he would see the Captain in that wonderful forenoon of his emancipation—poor McArliss who had not been on deck for days.

Twenty minutes later, with paper before him in his berth, Bellair was deep in the interpretation of his heart, when the Jade struck the cupola of a coral castle, and hung there shivering for five seconds. It was like a suspension of the law of time.

Bellair thought of Bessie, of every one on the ship, beginning with Fleury and the New Zealand woman, and ending with Captain McArliss and the owner’s Japanese wife. These latter two were strangely rolled into one, as their images came. He thought of the ship’s position somewhere in the great emptiness between the Strait of Magellan and Polynesia. He re-read the last line of the letter before him. It had to do with the real help he hoped to be in Bessie’s cause within the year. He heard the running and the hard-held voices on deck, and one great bellowing cry from Stackhouse. He knew now that all the tales were the low furies of fear; that the movement he had seen first in the eyes of the great animal were the movements of fear....