They begged him to spare it for his own peace. They gave him water, but poor Stackhouse could not live with the stuff in his hands. In fifteen minutes the bottle was drained, and then the monster wept.
5
The night roved on like a night in still mountains. The young moon had sunk behind the sea. Jupiter in meridian glory seemed trying to bring his white fire to the dying red of Antares.... A dark night of stars now, since the upstart moon had left the deeper purple. Most of all, Bellair was fascinated by the great yellow gleam of Canopus. It was a dry, pure dark—no drip in that night—but a thirsty horror in the saline lapping of the ocean against the planks.
Stackhouse was headless in the shadow, his piglike breathing a part of all. Fleury, the mother and the child slept; the preacher’s head close to the knees of the woman. Bellair marked that, and that Fleury loved her. At times the preacher’s whole life seemed an effort to make her eat and drink; and as for Fleury himself it often appeared that he required no better nutriment than that of conferring food and water upon the others. As custodian, he claimed authority for his action.... Bellair thought long of Bessie. He was watching the east at last for Venus to arise ahead of the sun....
... But Bessie became blurred. He did not understand. Either his brain had another picture, or the original of the singing girl was fading.... A New York voice, no passion, but ambition, an excellent voice—and such a beautiful, girlish breast.... Bellair tried to shake this coldness from him. This was not being true. He had a faint suspicion that a man’s woman is more apt to depart from him while he is at her side than when he is away. It is because another has come, if passion for the old dies, when one is away. Alone and apart, man is more ardent, in fact, unless a new picture composes.... He thought of Davy Acton, the office boy at Lot & Company’s, that wistful, sincere face—and then Bellair gave way to the night.
This was a new sensation. It came from the hunger and thirst. He could let go. The purple immensity would then take him. A half-hour, even an hour, would pass. It was not sleep, very different from that. He was not altogether lost. A little drum-beat would come back to him from the mighty revery-space, and his heart would answer the beat. He seemed to be on the borderland of the Ultimate Secret; and invariably afterward he was amazed at what he had been—so sordid and sunken and depraved was the recent life he had known.
“But I was what the days and years seemed to want of me,” he muttered.
That was the gall of it. Days and years are betrayers; all the activities of the world are betrayers. He glimpsed the great patience of the scheme. Only man makes haste. Myriad pressures, subtle and still-voiced, tighten upon a man, bringing just the suggestion that all is not well with him. Then there are the more obvious pressures—fever, desire, the death of a man’s loves—to make him stop and look and listen. But so seldom does he relate these to the restlessness of his soul. Rather he attributes them to the general misery of life. He has been taught to do so—the false teaching.... For general misery is not the plan of life. If children could only be taught that it is all superbly balanced, the plan perfect; that not a momentary stress of suffering comes undeserved; that the burden of all suffering is to make a man change!... A sentence came so clearly to him that even his lips formed it.
“The plan of life is for joy!”
He saw the need of every hundredth man at least, arising to repeat this sentence around the world—arising from his pain and husks like the Younger Son, and returning to the joy of the Father’s House.... Something was singing in him from his thought of children.