Part 11

Down the dark throat of Angel Alley a man, that night, was doing a singular thing. He was a fisherman, plainly one of the recent arrivals of the anchored fleet; he was a sturdily built fellow with a well-shaped head; he had the naturally open face and attractive bearing often to be found among drinking men; at his best he must have been a handsome, graceful fellow, lovable perhaps, and loving. At his worst, he was a cringing sot. He wore, over his faded dark-red flannel shirt, the gingham jumper favored by his class; and it seemed he had lost his hat. This man was monotonously moving to and fro, covering a given portion of Angel Alley over and again, retracing his unsteady footsteps from point to point, and repeating his course with mysterious regularity. His beat covered the space between the saloon of old Trawl (which stood about midway of the alley) and the scarlet and white transparency, whose strange and sacred heraldry blazed, held straight out, an arm of fire, across the mouth of the street. Angel Alley, as we have explained, had, at the first, inclined to call the mission Christ’s Rest, for reasons of its own; but even that half-godless reminder of a history better forgotten was growing out of date. The people’s name for Emanuel Bayard’s house of worship and of welcome was fast settling into one beautiful word--Christlove.

The fisherman in the jumper wavered to and fro between Christlove and the ancient grogshop. In the dark weather the figure of the man seemed to swing from this to that like a pendulum; at moments he seemed to have no more sense or sentience. He was hurled as if he were forced by invisible machinery; he recoiled as if wound by unseen springs; now his steps quickened into a run, as he wrenched himself away from the saloon, and faced the prayer-room; then they lagged, and he crawled like a crab to the rum-shop door. His hands were clenched together. Long before it began to rain his hatless forehead was wet.

His eyes stared straight before him. He seemed to see nothing but the two open doors between which he was vibrating. No one had happened to notice him, or, if so, his movements were taken for the vagaries of intoxication. A nerve of God knows what, in his diseased will began to throb, and he made a leap away from the saloon, and ran heavily towards the white and scarlet lights of the transparency; at the steps, he fell, and lay groveling; he could hear the singing overhead:--

“Ora pro nobis, We lift our souls to thee.”

He tried to climb up; but something--call it his muscle, call it his will, call it his soul; it does not signify--something refused him, and he did not get beyond the second stair. Slowly, reluctantly, mysteriously, his feet seemed to be dragged back. He put out his hands, as if to push at an invisible foe; he leaned over backwards, planting his great oiled boots firmly in the ground, as if resisting unseen force; but slowly, reluctantly, mysteriously, he was pulled back. At the steps of the saloon, in a blot of darkness, on the shadowed side, he sank; he got to his hands and knees like an animal, and there he crawled. If any one had been listening, the man might have been heard to sob,--

“It’s me and the rum--God and the devil--Now we’ll see!”

He rose more feebly this time, and struggled over toward the prayer-room; he wavered, and turned before he had got there, and made weakly back. Panting heavily, he crawled up the steps of the saloon, and then lurched over, and fell down into the blot whence he had come. There he lay, crying, with the arm of his brown gingham jumper before his eyes.

“Look up, Job!” said a low voice in the shadow at his side. Job Slip lifted his sodden face, swollen, red, and stained with tears. Instinctively he stretched up his hands.

“Oh, sir!” was all he said.

Bayard stood towering above him; he had his grand Saint Michael look, half of scorn and half of pity.

Job had not seen his face before since the night when it suddenly rose on a great wave, like that of another drowning man, making towards him in the undertow off Ragged Rock. Job put up his hands, now, before his own face. He told Mari, long afterwards, that the minister blinded him.

“Get up!” said Bayard, much in the tone in which he had said it the day he knocked Job down.

Job crawled up.

“Come here!” said the preacher sternly. He held out his white hand; Job put his wet and fishy palm into it; Bayard drew that through his own arm, and led him away without another word. Old Trawl came muttering to the door, and stood with his hand over his eyes, shutting out the glare of the bar-room within, to watch them. Ben looked over his shoulder, scowling. Father and son muttered unpleasantly together, as the minister and the drunkard moved off, and melted into the fine, dark rain.

Bayard led his man down towards the wharves. It was dark, there, and still; there was a secluded spot, which he knew of, under a salt-house at the head of a long pier but seldom used at night. The fine rain was uncertain, and took moods. As the two came down the larynx of the Alley, the drizzle had dripped off into a soft mist. Bayard heard Captain Hap across the street giving utterance to his favorite phrase:--

“It’s comin’ on thick; so thick it has stems to it.”

The captain looked after the minister and the drunkard with disapproval in his keen, dark eyes.

“Better look out, Mr. Bayard!” he called, with the freedom of a nurse too recently dismissed not to feel responsible for his patient. “It ain’t no night for you to be settin’ round on the docks. You cough, sir! Him you’ve got in tow ain’t worth it--no, nor twenty like him!”

“That’s a fact,” said Job humbly, stopping short.

“Come on, Job,” Bayard answered decidedly.

So they came under the salt-house, and sat down. Both were silent at first. Job wiped off an old fish-keg with the sleeve of his jumper, and offered this piece of furniture to the minister; the fisherman perched himself on the edge of a big broken pile which reared its gray head above the wharf; the rising tide flapped with a sinister sound under his feet which hung over, recklessly swinging. Job looked down into the black water. He was man enough still to estimate what he had done, and miserable enough to quench the shame and fire in him together by a leap. Men do such things, in crises such as Job had reached, far oftener than we may suppose. Job said nothing. Bayard watched him closely.

“Well, Job?” he said at last; not sternly, as he had spoken at Trawl’s door.

“I haven’t touched it before, sir, not a drop till last night,” said Job with sullen dreariness. “I was countin’ on it how I should see you the fust time since--I thought of it all the way home from Georges’. I was so set to see you I couldn’t wait to get ashore to see you. I took a clean jump from the dory to the landin’. I upsot the dory and two men.... Mr. Bayard, sir, the cap’n’s right. I ain’t wuth it. You’d better let me drownded off the Clara Em.”

“Tell me how it happened,” said Bayard gently. Job shook his head.

“You know’s well’s I, sir. We come ashore, and Trawl, he had one of his ---- runners to the wharf. Ben was there, bossin’ the ---- job.”

The minister listened to this profanity without proffering a rebuke. His teeth were set; he looked as if he would have liked to say as much, himself.

“There was a fellar there had made two hundred dollars to his trip. He treated. So I said I didn’t want any. But I hankered for it till it seemed I’d die there on the spot before ’em. Ben, he sent a bar-boy after me come to say I needn’t drink unless I pleased, but not to be onsocial, and to come along with the crowd. So I said, No, I was a goin’ home to my wife and kid. When the fellar was gone, I see he’d slipped a bottle into my coat pocket. It was a pint bottle XXX. The cork was loose and it leaked. So I put it back, for I swore I wouldn’t touch it, and I got a little on my fingers. I put ’em in my mouth to lick ’em off--and, sir, before God, that’s all I know--till I come to, to-day. The hanker got me, and that’s all I know. I must ha’ ben at it all night. Seems to me I went home an’ licked my wife and come away ag’in, but I ain’t sure. I must ha’ ben on a reg’lar toot. I’m a ---- drunken fool, and the quicker you let me go to ---- the better.”

Job leaned over and gazed at the water quietly. There was a look about his jaw which Bayard did not like. He came out from under the salt-house and moved the keg close beside the broken pile.

“What were you doing when I found you? I’ve been looking for you everywhere--last night, and all day.”

“I was havin’ it out,” said Job doggedly.

“Having?”--

“It lays between me and the rum, God and the devil. I was set to see which would beat.”

“Why didn’t you come straight over to see me?”

“I couldn’t.”

“_Couldn’t_ put your feet up those steps and walk in?”

“No, sir. I couldn’t do it. I come over twenty times. I couldn’t get no further. I _had_ to come back to Trawl’s. I HAD TO DO IT!”

Job brought his clenched hand down heavily on his knee.

“You can’t onderstand, sir,” he said drearily. “You ain’t a drinkin’ man.”

“I sometimes wish I had been,” said the minister unexpectedly. “I must understand these things.”

“God forbid!” said Job solemnly. He stretched his shaking arm out with a beautiful gesture, and put it around Bayard, as if he were shielding from taint a woman or some pure being from an unknown world.

Tears sprang to the minister’s eyes. He took the drunkard’s dirty hand, and clasped it warmly. The two men sat in silence. Job looked at the water. Bayard looked steadily at Job.

“Come,” he said at length, in his usual tone. “It is beginning to rain, in earnest. I’m not _quite_ strong yet. I suppose I must not sit here. Take my arm, and come home to Mari and Joey.”

Job acquiesced hopelessly. He knew that it would happen all over again. They walked on mutely; their steps fell with a hollow sound upon the deserted pier; the water sighed as they passed, like the involuntary witness of irreclaimable tragedy.

Suddenly, Bayard dropped Job’s hand, and spoke in a ringing voice:--

“Job Slip, get down upon your knees--just where you stand!”

Job hesitated.

“Down!” cried Bayard.

Job obeyed, as if he had been a dog.

“Now, lift up your hands--so--to the sky.”

As if the minister had been a cut-throat, Job obeyed again.

“Now pray,” commanded Bayard.

“I don’t know--how to,” stammered Job.

“Pray! Pray!” repeated Bayard.

“I’ve forgot the way you do it, sir!”

“No matter how other people do it! This is your affair. Pray your own way. Pray anyhow. But _pray_!”

“I haven’t done such a thing since I was--since I used to say: ‘Eenty Deenty Donty,’--no, that ain’t it, neither. ‘Now I lay me?’ That’s more like it. But that don’t seem appropriate to the circumstances, sir.”

“Try again, Job.”

“’Tain’t no use, Mr. Bayard. I’m a goner. If I couldn’t keep sober for you, I ain’t ergointer for no Creetur I never see nor spoke to,--nor no man ever see nor spoke to,--a thousand fathoms up overhead.”

Job lifted his trembling arms high and higher towards the dark sky.

“Pray!” reiterated Bayard.

“I can’t do it, sir!”

“_Pray!_” commanded Bayard.

“Oh,--God!” gasped Job.

Bayard took off his hat. Job’s arms fell; his face dropped into them; he shook from head to foot.

“There!” he cried, “I done it.... I’ll do it again. God! God! _God!_”

Bayard bowed his head. Moments passed before he said, solemnly,--

“Job Slip, I saved your life, didn’t I?”

“You committed that mistake, sir.”

“It belongs to me, then. _You_ belong to me. I take you. I give you to God.”

He dropped upon his knees beside the drunkard in the rain.

“Lord,” he said, in a tone of infinite sweetness, “here is a poor perishing man. Save him! He has given himself to Thee.”

“The parson did that, Lord,” sobbed Job. “Don’t give me no credit for it!”

“Save him!” continued Bayard, who seemed hardly to have heard the drunkard’s interruption. “Save me this one man! I have tried, and failed, and I am discouraged to the bottom of my heart. But I cannot give him up. I will never give him up till he is dead, or I am. If I cannot do any other thing in Windover, for Christ’s sake, save me this one drunken man!”

Bayard lifted his face in a noble agony. Job hid his own before that Gethsemane.

“Does the parson care so much--as _that_?” thought the fisherman.

The rain dashed on Bayard’s white face. He rose from his knees.

“Job Slip,” he said, “you have signed a contract which you can never break. Your vow lies between God and you. I am the witness. I have bound you over to a clean life. Go and sin no more.--I’ll risk you now,” added Bayard, quietly. “I shall not even walk home with you. You have fifteen rum-shops to meet before you get back to your wife and child. Pass them! They all stand with open doors, and the men you know are around these doors. You will not enter one of them. You will go straight home; and to-morrow you will send me written testimony from Mari, your wife,--I want her to write it, Job,--that you did as I bade you, and came home sober. Now go, and God go with you.”

As Bayard turned to give the drunkard his hand, he stumbled a little over something on the dark pier. Job had not risen from his knees, but stooped, and put his lips to the minister’s patched shoe.

* * * * *

“This is to sertify that my Husband come home last nite sober and haint ben on a Bat sence, god bless you ennyhow. MARIA SLIP.”

This legend, written in a laborious chirography on a leaf torn from a grocer’s pass-book, was put into Bayard’s hand at noon of the next day. Joey brought it; he had counted upon a nap on the study lounge, and was rather disappointed to find it occupied. Mrs. Granite said she had sent for Cap’n Hap; she said the minister’s temperature had gone up to a hundred and twenty, and she should think it would.

XIII.

Jane Granite came out of the kitchen door, and sat down in the back yard underneath the clothes-lines. She sat on the overturned salt-fish box that she kept to stand on and reach the clothes-pins,--Jane was such a little body. She looked smaller than usual that Monday afternoon, and shrunken, somehow; her eyes were red, as if she had been crying. She cried a good deal on Mondays, after Ben Trawl had come and gone on Sunday evenings.

The minister was quite himself again, and about his business. This fact should have given Jane the keenest gratification; whereas, in proportion as their lodger had grown well and cheerful, Jane had turned pale and sober. When he was really ill, her plain face wore a rapt look. For Captain Hap had remained on duty only a day or two; Mr. Bayard had not been sick enough to need professional nursing, this time, and it had since devolved wholly upon the women of the household to minister to his convalescent needs.

Happy Jane! She ran up and down, she flitted to and fro, she cooked, she ironed, she mended, she sewed, she read aloud, she ran errands, she watched for the faintest flicker in the changes of expression on his face: its dignity, its beauty, and its dearness for that one precious page out of her poor story were hers. All the rest of her life he belonged to other people and to other things: to the drunkards and the fishermen and the services; to his books and his lonely walks and his unapproachable thoughts; to his dreams of the future in which Jane had no more part than the paper Cupid on the screen, forever tasting and never eating impossible fruit; to his memories of a past of which Jane knew that she knew no more than she did of the etiquette at the palace of Kubla Khan in Xanadu.

Jane understood about Kubla Khan (or she thought she did, which answers the same purpose), for she had read the poem aloud to him one day while her mother sat sewing in the wooden rocking-chair. Jane was “educated,” like most respectable Windover girls; she had been through the high school of her native town; she read not at all badly; Mr. Bayard had told her something to this effect, and Jane sang about the house all the rest of the day. Yes; Jane understood Kubla Khan.

Jane watched the luminous patience in the sick man’s eyes,

“Where Alph, the sacred river, ran Through caverns measureless to man.”

She repeated the lines mechanically, with the bitter consciousness of the half-educated of being moved by something which it was beyond her power and her province to reconcile with the facts of her life. She sighed when the brilliant eagerness and restlessness of returning health replaced that large and gentle light. Bayard had asked her mother to let Jane keep his copy of that volume; he said he had two sets of Coleridge. He had written her name in it; how could he guess that Jane would lock the book away in her bureau drawer by day, and sleep with it under her pillow at night? He tossed her a rose of common human gratitude; it fell into a girl’s heart,--a burning coal of ravenous longing,--and ate its way.

It was summer in Windover; and Jane’s one beautiful leaf of life had turned. Mr. Bayard had long since been able to take care of himself; coughing still, and delicate enough, but throwing off impatiently, as the gentlest man does, in health, the little feminine restraints and devotions which he found necessary and even agreeable in illness. It would not be too much to say that Jane loved him as unselfishly as any woman ever had, or ever would; but in proportion as his spirits rose, hers sank. She reproached herself, poor child, that it did not make her perfectly happy to have the minister get well. Suffering and helpless, he had needed _her_. Busy and well, he thought of her no more. For that one time, that cruelly little time, she, Jane Granite, of all the women in the world, had known that precious right. To her, only to her, it had been given to serve his daily, common wants; she had carried up his tray, she had read or written tireless hours as his mood decreed, or she had sat in silent study of his musing face, not one lineament of which did muse of her.

But it was summer in Windover, and the minister was Jane’s no more.

It was one of the last of the days of a celestial June. Bayard had lived the month of blossoms out eagerly and restlessly. His work had grown enormously upon his hands, and required an attention which told on every nerve. He had gone headlong into the depths of one of those dedications which do not give a man time to come up for air. His eye wore an elate, rapt look. His cheeks burned with a fine fever. His personal beauty that summer was something at which the very “dock-rats” on the wharves turned back to look. No woman easily forgot it, and how many secretly dreamed of it, fortunately the young man never knew. The best of men may work his share of heart-break, and the better he is the less he will suspect it.

Bayard was far too busy to think of women. For he did not exactly think of Helen Carruth; he felt her. She did not occupy his mind so far that he experienced the need of communication with her; he had never written her so much as a note of ceremony. After her brief scintillation before him on Windover Point that April afternoon, she had melted from his horizon. Nevertheless, she had changed the tint of it. Now and then in the stress of his prosaic, thankless, yet singularly enthusiastic work, there came to the young preacher that sense of something agreeable about to happen, which makes one wake up singing in the morning of one’s hardest day’s labor, or sends one to rest dreaming quietly in the face of the crudest anxiety. The devotee, in the midst of his orisons, was aware of the footstep of possible pleasure falling lightly, distant, doubtful, towards his cell. Some good men pray the louder for this sweet and perilous prescience. Bayard worked the harder.

And it was summer in Windover. The scanty green carpet of the downs had unrolled to its full, making as much as possible of its meagre proportions, atoning in depth of color for what it lacked in breadth and length: if the cliffs and boulders were grayer for the green, the grass looked greener for the gray. The saxifrage had faded, but among the red-cupped moss the checkerberry shot up tender, reddish leaves, the white violets scented the swamps, and the famous wild roses of the Cape dashed the bayberry thickets with pink. The late apple blossoms had blushed and gone, but the leaf and the hidden fruit responded to the anxious attention of the unenthusiastic farmer who wrenched his living out of the reluctant granite soil. In front of the hotels the inevitable geraniums blazed scarlet in mathematical flower-beds; and the boarding-houses convalesced from housecleaning in striped white scrim curtains and freshly painted blue wooden pumps. The lemonade and candy stores of “the season” sprouted with the white clovers by the wayside; and the express cart of the summer boarder’s luggage blossomed with the lonely and uncomfortable hydrangea, bearing its lot in yellow jars on piazza steps. Windover Point wore a coquettish air of expectation, like a girl in her best dress who waits in a lane for an invisible admirer.

Windover Harbor was alive and alert. The summer fleets were out; the spring fleets were in. Bayard could hear the drop of anchors now, in the night, through his open windows; and the soft, pleasant splash, the home-coming and home-yearning sound which wakened the summer people, only to lull them to sleep again with a sense of poetic pleasure in a picturesque and alien life, gave to the lonely preacher of the winter Windover the little start of anxiety and responsibility which assassinates rest. He thought:--

“Another crew in! Is it Job? Or Bob? Or Jean? Will they go to Trawl’s, or get home straight? I must be off at dawn to see to this.”

On the little beach opposite Mrs. Granite’s cottage the sea sighed in the night to answer him; ebbing, it lapped the pebbles gently, as if it felt sorry for the preacher, who had not known Windover as long as it had; it inhaled and exhaled long, soft breaths, in rhythm with which his own began to grow deep and quiet; and the start from a dream of drowning in the undertow off Ragged Rock would tell him that he had slept. More often, of late, the rising tide had replied nervously; it was fitful and noisy; it panted and seemed to struggle for articulation: for the June sea was restless, and the spring gales had died hard. The tints of the harbor were still a little cool, but the woodland on the opposite shore held out an arm of rich, ripe leaf; and the careening sails warmed to the sunrise and the sunset in rose and ochre, violet and pearl, opening buds of the blossom of midsummer color that was close at hand.

Bayard was in his rooms, resting after one of these unresting nights. He had set forth at daybreak to meet an incoming schooner at the docks. It had become his habit, whenever he could, to see that the fishermen were personally conducted past the dens of Angel Alley, and taken home sober to waking wife and sleeping child. In this laborious task Job Slip’s help had been of incredible value. Job was quite sober now; and in the intervals between trips this converted Saul delighted to play the Paul to Bayard’s little group of apostles. Yet Job did not pose. He was more sincere than most better men. He took to decency as if it had been a new trade; and the novel dignity of missionary zeal sat upon him like a liberal education. The Windover word for what had happened to Job was “re-formation.” Job Slip, one says, is a reformed man. The best way to save a rascal is to give him another one to save; and Job, who was no rascal, but the ruin of a very good fellow, brilliantly illustrated this eternal law.