Part 17

He did not go home to supper--only when bodily fatigue overcame him did he creep into the house and up to his bed. He went to sleep easily, with the word "dead" on his lips, but the realization hammering vainly at his brain. In the morning, still unawake from the shock, he ate what breakfast he could force down his throat, and went to school. Her place was still vacant, and at recess he left the playground, going near to her home again. The crepe was still on the door, and he walked the streets as before, muttering, "Dead, dead!" He was absent from the midday meal; but arrived before supper time, still in a daze. An angry stepfather read him a note from the principal, reporting the truancy, and took him out to the woodshed.

"I've had enough of this!" said the man, as he doubled a clothes line. "You were not home to supper last night; but I said nothing at breakfast, because I wanted to think it out. I'm going to give you what you need. Your mother spoiled you, and I always knew it."

He struck the impassive boy round the legs. Partly from this, partly from the mention of his mother, the tears welled into his eyes, and, the barriers removed, the uprush overwhelmed him. Down on his face in the ash heap he fell, sobbing convulsively, while the unrestrained tears streamed through his fingers.

"Dead!" he said in a choked voice. "Dead, dead! Oh, father, she's dead! She's dead!"

The abashed stepfather stayed his hand. "I can't very well whip you, boy, if you feel like this," he said kindly. "I never thought you cared for your mother. You didn't take on like this when she died, nor for your sister. Come into the house when you're through crying. I don't like to hear you." The man went in, troubled in mind at having misjudged the boy.

The boy sobbed his aching heart dry on the ashes, then lifted his face, drawn, tear stained, and old--very old, for a boy. "Zenie!" he called softly. "Zenie, Zenie!" The voice rose to a wail. "Come back! Zenie, come back! Come back! Oh, God, send her back! Please send her back! Zenie, come back!" It ended in a cry of utter despair.

Then, close beside him, so close that it seemed almost within his ear, he heard a voice, clear and distinct, yet without sound or volume, say, "Yes, I will come."

He stood up and looked around. No one was there. He went out of the shed; but the back yard was empty. He went back to the ash heap, marveling to the extent that his benumbed faculties would permit; and as he sat there, a peace, a tranquillity, and a content that he had known only in her presence, came to him, and the dragging pain at his heart passed away.

Peace, tranquillity, and content are poor attributes with which to fight the battle of life. Being a boy, he soon worked clear of the shadow of death; but, without the helpful influences of his life he relapsed into the old shyness and indifference. Deprived of all that he had loved, he found nothing new to love; and, thus unreceptive, he ceased to respond to it when given and became unlovable. He lost ground in study, became sullen, suspicious, and at last incorrigible. When he had worn out his teachers' and his stepfather's patience, he left school ungraduated, with a scant knowledge of the lower studies to his credit. He went to work at driving a delivery wagon, and failed. Again and again he obtained work of this character, but could not hold his place.

Then his stepfather, after repeated advice and punishments, gave him up, furnished him with a suit of clothes and a sum of money, and turned him out. He sold papers for a time; but lost his money in this venture. He blacked boots at the few hotels of the small town, until this too proved a failure. He went off with a circus, and learned of real hardship and ill treatment; which embittered him the more. He drifted to New York, a newly fledged hobo, found the Bowery and its adjuncts, and, seventeen now, and grown nearly to full stature, he was in due time shanghaied aboard an outbound deep-water ship. At the end of the voyage he had learned to steer, to loose and furl a royal, and to get out of the way, which is all that is required of an ordinary seaman, and thus equipped the crimps saw to it that he signed again. Lacking in ambition and initiative, he remained at sea, and, compelled to learn, went through the grades of ordinary and able seaman, becoming in five years a competent boatswain of square-rigged ships.

Physically he developed into a man of iron, tall, straight, and symmetrical, brown as a Moor, and with his sullen stare changed to a meaningless frown. Mentally, except for the growth of a splendid professional courage, he remained at a standstill. He did not go backward. He read an occasional book, and the correctness of diction he had acquired at school remained with him, unspoiled by the associations of the forecastle. But he was a drifter, an ethical bankrupt, signing in ships picked by the boarding masters, robbed by them of his money, lending it when asked, or spending it with hopeless indifference, as resigned to the life he lived as any fatalist, and unable to realize that there might be a better within his reach; until, starved into a mental activity by a long passage on short rations, he moved himself sufficiently to secure a berth in one of the Atlantic liners, where good food was plentiful. Here his acquirements were of little use to him--he scrubbed paint by day and decks by night. But he came in contact with passengers.

Engaged with bucket and swab on a section of the after saloon one day, in the dull, apathetic frame of mind that was now natural with him, he noticed the approach of two passengers, a bewhiskered, peppery looking man of middle age, and an elderly woman with an unusually kind and sympathetic face.

"Look there!" said the man, in tones that Bridge could hear. "See what seamanship amounts to in these floating blast furnaces! That fellow's a sailor, if I know one, from his head to his heels. But they've made him a scrubwoman."

"I should think he would try to do better," answered the old lady, after a searching look at Bridge's expressionless face. "Notice his bearing. He is Othello, off the stage. There are unlimited possibilities in such a nature."

They halted near the rail for a further inspection of him. Bridge, swabbing industriously, pretended not to hear. He had not attracted so much attention for years.

"See the slumbering fire in those dark eyes," went on the innocent old lady--"the reserve power, the strength to do, and dare, and die--the tremendous will of a strong man, who lets nothing baffle him when aroused. That man has not been aroused. See his hair--"

"Nonsense! A stiff drink'll arouse him."

"There you are again, skeptic," laughed the old lady. "But, I tell you, eyes and hair indicate character! His hair is the very opposite of Zaza's, but equally rare and matchless in hue. Each indicates temperament."

They went on, and Bridge dropped his swab and watched them till they were out of sight. He had never seen them, to his knowledge, and their comment on himself and his work had not greatly disturbed him. But the name Zaza, the name of someone they knew, had seemed familiar. It had brought the same thrill of recognition that he had experienced years before at school, when the little girl was called up to sing--the little girl that died, and whom he had almost forgotten.

"Zaza, Zaza," he repeated to himself. It was a strange name. Where had he heard it?

It was his lookout at the bow that night from eight to ten, and he took his place clad in sou'wester and oilskins; for a fog thick as darkness had settled down on the ship. He could see the stem in front of him, but little farther in the smudge. Aft was the dim outline of the windlass, and beyond the dimmer outline of the V-shaped breakwater. To starboard and port were the two mighty anchors, magnified by the fog. Eyes were of little use on such a night; but he dutifully kept his ears open for sound of foghorn or steam whistle, and paced up and down, thinking of matters unthought of for years--his old home and school days, his mother and sister, and little golden-haired Zenie who had died. Step by step he reviewed his life of failure and incompetence. Voyage after voyage, event after event, men and influences--all came under the criticism of his aroused faculties, until they ended with the comment of the old lady on the after deck. "That man has not been aroused," she had said. Where was the reserve power, the strength, the will to do, that she had seen in him?

The review went backward, man after man, happening after happening, to the meeting with his stepfather at the ash pile, and back of this to the boy in the street, who had told him a casual piece of news and asked him to the ball ground. Here was where it went out of him--the courage to do, and strive, and work, and win. He now realized that it was not the passing away of his mother and his sweet little sister, nor the mis-judgment of his stepfather and the ill treatment of men, that had unnerved him; it was the losing of Zenie, who had never looked at him but once, but whose presence on earth had made him a strong, victorious boy and a good scholar. And the heart hunger and pain that had left him at the ash pile came to him again.

"Zenie!" he called almost inaudibly into the fog. "Zenie, come back! Come back to me!"

A patter of footsteps on the wet deck aroused him, and he looked around. A small cloaked figure had just clambered over the breakwater, and it ran up to him, peering into his face with wide-open, wondering eyes. And they were the eyes of Zenie, set in the same clean-cut little face fringed with the same golden-hued tresses.

"Did you call me, sir?" she asked. "Oh, I beg pardon. I thought I knew you, and that you called me. I don't know--" she stepped back. "My name is Zaza Munson."

"Zaza!" called an anxious voice from the breakwater, and she left him.

The bewhiskered man showed faintly through the fog. "Come along, kid, and go to bed. You mustn't bother the man on lookout. 'Tisn't shipshape."

"Papa," said the child as he lifted her over the barrier, "was my name ever Zenie? Did you call me Zenie when I was little?"

And Bridge, with his tongue hard against the roof of his mouth, and somewhat unsteady on his feet, could just hear the receding voice of the man as he answered:

"No, kid; but your aunt's name was Zenie. She died the day before you were born. You're the dead image of her."

Bridge did not see the child again. He thought of her, of course, marveling at the resemblance and relationship, which he ascribed to coincidence--that now had a meaning to him--but marveling the more at his change of heart, which he ascribed to the kindly thought and comment of the old lady. It began as a furious disgust at his waste of time and energy, but became a serious, practical ambition.

He finished the voyage, and for the first time since going to sea chose his boarding house--the Sailors' Home--and here he talked with second mates and a better class of seamen. He borrowed an Epitome of Navigation, looked it over, and bought one in a second-hand shop, with other books that appealed to him. He stopped drinking, and, with money in his pocket, was able to choose his next ship, an English deep-water craft, whose rules were such as to give him his afternoon watch below and time for study. He furbished up his unused knowledge of arithmetic, and in this ship found a kindly disposed first mate, who lent him an old sextant to puzzle over and become familiar with. He reached for the theory of seamanship as distinct from navigation, and, procuring such textbooks as he could find in foreign ports, mastered the reasons of the various evolutions which so far he had helped perform under orders. When able to, he applied for and passed a second mate's examination, and won a Board of Trade certificate. Then he bought himself a sextant.

He made two voyages in this ship, when a sick and dying second mate left a vacancy, and this vacancy was filled by Bridge, who had attracted the captain's attention by his intelligence and energy. An officer now, his progress was more rapid. He reached farther, laying in for private use magazines and standard works of the world's literature, and gave himself that quiet self-confidence so valuable in conversation, and so difficult for a seaman to acquire. His voice, while losing none of its power to be heard against the wind, became softer and evenly modulated. Few could have told, from his manner and personality that he had not gone through the usual course of an English apprentice, with a capital of good home influences to start with, and a protection from bad as he advanced. No captious shipowner's wife would have said he was not a gentleman.

In seven years from the birth of his ambition, with an English master's certificate and an American ocean license to his credit, he shipped first mate of a large sky-sailyard American ship at New York, and at the orders of the agent who had engaged him took her down to the Horseshoe to await the captain, who was also the owner, he said, and was to join her on the day of sailing. The captain came on the tug that was to tow them to sea, and stepped aboard, brisk, bewhiskered, and peppery, and with him was a young woman who, as Bridge was introduced, he said was his daughter, who would make the voyage with them.

Bridge, after seeing them below, went forward to the windlass, with his brain reeling as it had reeled on the forecastle deck of the liner. The captain was the breezy person who had noticed him scrubbing paint, the daughter the child that had come to him on lookout--whom he still imagined as a child, but now grown to womanhood, and with the same pure, clean-cut face, the same wealth of golden hair, and dark wondering blue eyes--the living, breathing, matured, and perfected image of the little girl that had gone to the angels twenty years ago. He felt, as he supervised the weighing of the anchor, as he had felt when this little girl had come forward to sing to the school, the glorified sense of recognition, and, added to it, the uplift of victory and achievement, the content that comes of long search and the finding of the thing sought. He knew this woman, knew her well, though she had not spoken a word. He knew her now as part of himself, that he had missed, and found. And she was here, in the same ship with him! He would see her daily!

But, as a matter of fact, he saw very little at first. He was a watch officer, who slept part of each day; and a suspicious and peppery father, with an eye out for good looks in an otherwise efficient and valuable first mate, saw to it that she took her meals with him in his own after cabin, and also that she took her daily exercise on deck when Bridge was asleep and the ship in charge of the second mate, an unbeauteous and beauty proof old sea dog. In the exercise of this watchful function of fatherhood, the old man grew more and more peppery in his manner toward Bridge and his crew, and finally took no pains to conceal an actual dislike for the first mate, which no amount of professional care and forethought on his part could offset.

And it was all wasted energy as far as Bridge was concerned, for a more inoffensive and non-progressive lover never loved. Try as he might, he could not bring himself to address her when they occasionally met, unless she spoke to him first. She seemed to carry in her personality an inhibition on his thought, speech, and action that prevented an overture. And this continued until the ship had rounded the Cape of Good Hope and sailed along the fortieth parallel to the vicinity of St. Paul, by which time the father, having worried himself into insomnia, was compelled to relax his vigilance by the physical necessity of sleeping as long as he could, night or day, whenever sleep came to him, and the daughter, intent upon matters far removed from love and lovers, unconsciously placed herself in the way of a better acquaintance with Bridge.

She came on deck alone one night in the first watch, when the ship was tearing along before a quarterly breeze that she could barely carry the kites under, and from the break of the poop watched Bridge on the main deck giving the last orders toward the setting of a main royal staysail; then, as he mounted the poop steps, she accosted him.

"Mr. Bridge," she said, holding up her father's sextant, "will you please point out to me the Magellan Clouds and the Coal Sacks?"

"Why, certainly," said Bridge, all his shyness vanishing. "Come around to the lee quarter, Miss Munson. I've noticed you before with the sextant. Studying navigation?"

"Yes, as I can. Father has tutored me, and I've got as far as meridian observations and chronometer time; but I want to go farther, and father is a bad teacher. He's somewhat cross, and, Mr. Bridge, do you know I think I'm going beyond him!" She smiled a little roguishly.

"That ought to be easy," answered Bridge. "You are young, with a fresh mind. It is hard for men to study."

"But so easy to do other things--to command ships, to fight, to shoot, to ride horses, to swim. I'm a swimmer, though it took me years to learn. I swam a mile once."

"You can beat me," answered Bridge simply. "I cannot swim at all."

"I am ambitious," she said, "to do what men do. My present fad is navigation. I shall never be satisfied until I have an ocean license."

"It is a great force in you, Miss Munson," said Bridge earnestly. "It is rare in women; but men feel it now and then. It gripped me seven years ago, and lifted me from the forecastle to the cabin. Do you remember?"

"What?" she asked.

"The man on lookout in the _Umbria_, on the night you came forward, when you thought I had called to you? Remember, it was foggy, and your father came after you."

"Was that you?" she asked. "Oh, now I understand. Oh, Mr. Bridge! No, I don't understand. I thought I knew you then, and I have thought since I came aboard that I knew you, that I had met you somewhere; but father--"

"Never mind, Miss Munson. These things are inexplicable. I thought, as the years went on, that it was a certain, curious sort of praise of myself, from an old lady I saw with your father that day, when I was aft scrubbing paintwork."

"My grandmother. She died last year."

"I thought it was her good opinion of me," went on Bridge earnestly; "but now I know it was your visit on the forecastle. Miss Munson, you were then the exact duplicate of a little girl who died at thirteen--a little girl that I worshipped as one of God's angels, and who went to the angels. Her name was Zenie. I have read of reincarnation. I wonder if it is possible that her soul returned--in you."

The girl stiffened and drew back, while her eyes opened in the old wonder of the night on the forecastle. Bridge, looking forward, went on gravely:

"What right have we--poor wretched human souls!--to say that we will do this or that thing, that we will strive and succeed, when there are forces within us past our understanding, that decide the matter for us? I loved that little girl Zenie. She made me a plucky, ambitious boy. She died, and I became a wreck, a tramp, a scrubwoman on a liner. I saw you, and went to work; and here I am--as a sailor a practical success. I once read a poem that I liked. I forget the title and the author; but one verse ran like this:

"'The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ, Moves on: nor all your Piety nor Wit--'"

A heavy cane came down on his head, and an angry voice broke in, "Damn you! Is this what I shipped a first mate for? To keep my daughter up till near midnight, and wake me up making love to her over my window? Zaza, go below at once!" The captain had rounded the corner of the house in his pajamas.

The girl screamed as the cane was poised for a second blow; but Bridge said nothing, nor did the cane descend again. The mate raised his two arms high above his head, leaned backward over the low poop-rail, sagged down, and slid headlong over it into the sea.

Again the girl screamed, and the captain, shouting "Man overboard!" sprang to a life-buoy fastened to the taffrail, tore it loose, and threw it. "My God! what have I done?" he said chokingly. "I did not mean to knock him overboard."

No one heard this. The girl had swooned in the alley, and the man at the wheel was snugly ensconced in a warm, sound-proof wheelhouse, with but one window open.

"Put your wheel down!" ordered the captain through the window. "Bring her up till she shakes. All hands forward, there! Come aft four men and clear away this quarter-boat. Weather main-brace the rest of you!"

They did all that men may do. They hove the ship to, lowered a boat, and searched till daylight. But Bridge, who could not swim, was not found; and the ship went on, with a remorseful captain trying to comfort a frantic girl, who in two days was down with brain-fever.

Zaza was a troublesome patient, and as the captain had now to stand watch with his second mate he could give her little of the attention she needed--he could spend with her only an hour or so from each watch below, and, if all was well with the ship, a few minutes from the watch on deck. In her lucid moments there was small comfort for the unhappy man. Not a drop of medicine would she take from his hand, nor a morsel of food, and not a word would she speak to him; but in the steady, scornful, unforgiving look in her dark blue eyes was a world of reproach.

Yet, when the fever pressed her hard, she would talk, calling him "father," and ask him to look so that he too could see. And, as he could not look into the realm she was in, she must perforce explain, insisting that he could see if only he would look. For she could see so clearly, she said; and as her explanations were repeated again and again, broken in upon by the awakenings to lucidity, it was some time before what she saw took on sequence and color. Then it was a picture and a story complete.

A long, heaving sea she saw first, and a floating life-buoy; then a man clinging to its edge, not intelligently, as would a man who knows life-buoys and the way to use them. This man made no attempt to place it under his arms; he simply clung to its edge, and was frequently immersed, as the circular ring turned in the water. This man was Mr. Bridge, she said; but on his face was no perturbation as to his plight. He smiled, and clung to the life-buoy as though animated by instinct alone. There was no expression other than the smile, nothing of shock, nor interest, nor anxiety. With the rising of the sun there came into the picture a lateen-rigged craft filled with swarthy men, and it steered close to the man; and they pulled him, still smiling vacantly, into the vessel. They gave him a flagon to drink from; but he would not, till tutored. They put food to his mouth, and after a time he ate mechanically.

The picture now embraced a high, mountainous coast, deeply indented with fiords and bays, and the dark men of the lateen craft were landing, taking with them the smiling man who could not eat nor drink without help. Then she saw him wandering alone along the beach in the rain, still smiling, and looking at the sea from which he had escaped. She saw him again, unkempt and unshaven, still alone, still smiling; and later with his clothing in tatters, his hair to his shoulders, his beard covering his features, and the merciless rain beating him. But though his mouth and chin were hidden, in his eyes was still the vacant look at the sea, and the smile. One more picture completed the list; he was more than ever a creature of rags and ends, and emaciated--a living, breathing skeleton, asleep in a cave, but smiling as he slept.