Lot & Company

by Will Levington Comfort

The child was well; his imperative founts still flowing. She was pure mother; it was the child that was nourished first, not her own body. She was first in the passion for his preservation. Indeed, she would have told them at once had any change threatened him. But she was the soul of the fasting too; the austerity of it found deep sanction within her; and there were moments in which she bewildered Bellair, for she became bright with the vitality which is above the need of bread.

Fleury talked of God, as Stackhouse had talked of death. Indeed, there was a contrasting intoxication in the days and nights of the preacher, but one without hideous reaction.

“There comes a moment,” he said, “when I am alone—when you two are asleep—that I feel the weakness. I drink and eat—perhaps more than my share. But when we are all together—sitting here as now, talking and sustaining one another—oh, it seems I was never so happy.”

Bellair suspected that this talk of lapses into abandonment while others slept was an effort to make their minds easy on the subject of his share. Both the Mother and Bellair doubted this; it preyed upon them. In the main they were one solution, each separate quality of their individualism cast into a common pool for the sustaining of a trinity.

“It changes the whole order,” Fleury declared. “Why, whole crowds have died of hunger—in half the number of days that holy men and women have fasted as a mere incident of their practice toward self-mastery. This is our consecration.”

Bellair found it true. He had ceased to marvel at himself. Deep reconstruction was advanced within him; and a strange loyalty and endurance prospered from the new foundations. If this were self-hypnosis—very well; if madness—very well, too; at least, it was good to possess, seven, eight, nine days in an open boat, on a one-fifth ration of water and food. To Bellair, who felt himself inferior to the others, it appeared that they already lived what he was thrillingly thinking out. He remembered his first thoughts of them—in the cold worldly manner of a fellow-traveller. It was almost as far as a man’s emotion can swing, from what he thought of them now. Before God, he believed he was right now, and wrong then. Certainly he would test it out, if he lived to move among men again.

He thought often about the child’s voice—at the moment that the heart of Stackhouse broke—as the point of his turning and salvation. This furnished a clue to many things, though he did not miss the fact that the world would smile at his credulity in accepting such a dispensation as real. The world would say that he had been driven to far distances of illusion by thirst and hunger; in fact, that anything which he had seen, other than the original entity in the eyes of Stackhouse, was a part of the illusion. Bellair considered this, and also that in every instance of late in which he had held the world’s point of view he had been proven wrong. He granted the world its rights to think as it chose, but accepted the dispensation.

There had been good and evil within him. The balance had turned in favour of the good, with that cry. It had turned from the self. The purpose of the Enterer had been to keep him in the self. It had come from the unfathomed depths of evil—that purpose and the devil which he saw. Bellair had heard repeatedly that some such dweller appeared to each man who makes an abrupt turn from the life of flesh to the life of the spirit. Each of the three had seen something foreign in the eyes of Stackhouse. It is true they had not talked of it; possibly to each it was different in its deadliness; perhaps theirs was not the demon he saw, since Fleury and the woman were much farther on the way than he, but they had been good enough to share responsibility for the visitation. Indeed, the Faraway Woman could not have been acting, since a cry came from her the instant it appeared.

This he loved to study: that his thought of the child had balanced the whole issue against the intruder; that something within him had brought that saving grace of selflessness out of chaos. It was a squeak, he invariably added, but it had shown him enough, opening the way. There must be such a beginning in every man; in fact, there must come an instant of choice; an instant in which a man consciously chooses his path, weighing all that is past against the hope and intellectual conception of a better life.

Bellair brooded upon this a great deal, especially on the ninth day, and that was the day, Fleury talked—the holiest of their days in the open boat. Bellair found many things clearer afterwards. As soon as he understood fully, he meant to close it all, so far as his own relation was concerned. In its very nature it must be given to others, must be turned to helpfulness. It was a sort of star-dust which did not adhere to self, but sought places of innocence to shine from, and used every pure instrument for its dissemination. The key to the whole matter was the loss of the sense of self. Having accepted this, Bellair knew that he must go up into Nineveh, so to speak. He trembled.