Part 5

The bronzed young man in his middle twenties, who drifted back to England either in 1815 or ’16, had little to say to his questioners, though there were hints of a lurid career. As always, the mystery fed on mystery. The man’s fine presence, his Oriental features, and his piercing eyes were enough in themselves to inspire interest; little by little the moonlight of romantic imagination gathered him into its beam. His intimate friends, it was whispered, heard blood-curdling tales of piracies as they sat in the chimney corner. Ah,—if “Tre” would only tell the whole story! They waited for it fifteen years.

The account must now anticipate a little, and leap the years to 1830. The summer months are at hand, and Mary Shelley, the poet’s widow, is arranging and correcting an extraordinary manuscript from “our friend Tre.” Sensible Mary Shelley, with fair complexion, her light hair and calm grey eyes,—what did she make of the wild tale in those numberless pages? One sees her at a desk, remedying Trelawny’s frequent deficiencies of spelling, writing “postponed” for “posponed,” and inserting “gs” in all words such as “strength” and “length.” Trelawny treated the letter with a Cornish disdain. The manuscript in the widow’s hands was a novel of adventure which Trelawny insisted was really an account of his own career. First purposing to call the book “A Man’s Life,” he later changed it to “The Adventures of a Younger Son.”

The scene now returns to the billiard room in Bombay, with the Scotch lieutenant lying on the floor, barely alive. The young savage brandishes the heavy end of a billiard cue he has just broken over his enemy and in true Berseker fashion is about to finish his man, when a voice calms him, and forbids the murder. The speaker who has thus intervened is one De Ruyter, a mysterious adventurer who has made friends with the young savage. In spite of his Dutch name, he is an American, and even claims Boston as his beloved birthplace. The young deserter and this incredible Bostonian now escape to De Ruyter’s ship, an Arab craft almost openly engaged in piracy.

The years that follow find the savage in his element; the tale is one of piracies, pursuits, boardings, battles, pistol shots, stab-wounds and slicings, and blood running bright and stickily through scuppers into waters alive with gathering sharks. There are tiger hunts, fevers, corpses, despairing yells, and sudden deaths numberless as sands of the sea. Having no definite base of operations, the precious pair indulge in grand and petty larceny all through the eastern seas; the scene is now the Indian ocean, now the coast of Celebes, now the inlets of the Philippines. What there is of “love interest” is very slight, and centres about the corsair’s Arabian child-wife, Zela, a Byronic heroine who perishes opportunely, and is then cremated on a funeral pyre.

There are three volumes of this fee-fi-fo-fum and manslaughter, the last ending with the return of De Ruyter and his acolyte to Europe, their separation, De Ruyter’s death at sea while in the service of Napoleon, and the resolve of the hero to struggle on for the liberty of “the pallid slaves of Europe.” Cutting a throat, it appeared, was but a whimsey when compared to the guilt of those who continued to consort with the “sycophantic wretches who crouch and crawl and fawn on kings and priests.”...

“Romance can go no farther,” said a contemporary critic in the _Military Review_, “than the actual adventures of the homicidal renegade and corsair, the ‘Younger Son.’”

Time has confirmed this sensible opinion. A more brutal, a more ruthless, a more utterly unfeeling book does not exist in English literature. Save for the rhetoric about the “pallid slaves,” and some Byronic transports over the body of Zela, the story knows less of sympathy than a crocodile. Moreover, it is nowhere amusing. What carries it along, what made it a success in its own time, and has won it a reprint in our own, is its superlative vividness. The picture may be that of a man, shot in the heart, spinning about; it may be the impression of thick resistance which human flesh offers to the hand that stabs;—whatever it may be, image or sensation, it is real, it is true, and it is the unconscious artist who affects us and no mere business of superlative photography. Overlong, chaotic, and ruffianly as it is, the book is no lifeless curiosity of literature.

Such was the existence from which the deserter and adventurer returned to Europe. Were one to swallow the book whole, it might well be imagined that the Trelawny who arrived in London was a proper subject for a gallows. Yet the adventurer who in England took the place that was his by birth as a gentleman’s son was no skull and bones ruffian. There are no stories, no rumours that tell of ruffianism or ruffianly qualities; when this young Arab-featured man called on his neighbours, there were no blanched faces at the windows, or wild whispers to send the ladies upstairs and hide the spoons. Sometimes a good family will unaccountably produce a ruffianly type; the incident is rare, but it is encountered,—but Trelawny was not of these.

The Younger Son who had been born with something dark and ancient in his blood, who had endured a savage and neglected boyhood and adolescence, had returned to England reasonably civilised at least. Such was not the customary result of seven years of piracy!

The explanation is probably a very simple one; the boy savage, the demon midshipman, had grown up. With the arrival of manhood, the fundamental qualities of the man’s character and original mind had broken through the barbarism of his early life.

The streak of Celtic battle savagery he had inherited was still in his veins; he never lost it. Seven years later, while accompanying Byron to the revolt in Greece, he spoke of “the best of all excitement.” The poet showed curiosity. “Fighting,” added Trelawny, and was not guilty of a pose. There were times when he showed a certain cold-blooded streak; the pirate was not touchily fastidious. He had a mind, he was a born observer, and he was nobody’s fool. There is no evidence that he had much imaginative quality. The ideas he had, he clung to emotionally, for they were really emotions in borrowed clothes. His enthusiasm for “Europe’s pallid slaves,” for instance;—what is it but his own transmuted resentment for his own loveless and cruel boyhood,—what was his hatred of “sycophants, priests and kings” but his own hatred of those in authority who had oppressed his youth? He does not appear ever to have arrived at any intellectual understanding of his attitude.

The young man of mystery returned to England with a little money, and presently carried out an anchor to windward. He married, and in a sentence of matchless pathos, lamented his rose-decked chain. He had become “a shackled, care-worn and spirit-broken married man of the civilised west.” There are those who say that the lady was frivolous and wasteful. It probably mattered little, for the adventurer’s relations with his various wives were astoundingly casual; they have something of the kiss and good-bye of the legendary sailor.

The roses of matrimony beginning to lose their petals, the younger son took to escaping on vagabond adventures. The incredible snobbery of contemporary British life, “its mystic castes, coteries, sets and sects, its ... purseproud tuft-hunting and toadying” got on the nerves of this man who had seen life in the raw. Fleeing to Switzerland, he made friends with another wandering Briton, one Mr. Edward Elliker Williams, a half-pay lieutenant of the Eighth Dragoons. Mr. Williams chattered for hours of his marvellous friend, Mr. Percy Shelley, the poet, who had so splendidly defied the ideas and conventions of contemporary Britain. There was a man and a rebel! Expelled from Oxford for atheism, the hero of a romantic elopement at eighteen, the hero of a defiant free union at twenty-one, the contemner and accuser of every dastardly sycophant, king and priest in the solar system. And a poet, sir!

Mr. Shelley the exile,—here was a man for Trelawny of his own unconventional mould. Shelley the rebel. Shelley the Lucifer! He would go to him; the sycophants, kings and so forths had better take care. “I swore to dedicate myself,” said the pirate later, “hand and heart to war, even to the knife, against the triple alliance of hoary headed impostors, their ministers and priests!” How the rhetoric brings before one’s eyes the liberal anger at the Tory reaction following the wild revolutionary years!

Mr. Williams arranged the meeting, and took “our friend Tre” to Pisa. Was “Tre” a little disappointed at the appearance of the exiled Lucifer and poetic arch-scandaliser; had he prepared himself for something robust, defiant and rhetorical, someone quite in his own style? There are times when this emotion seems visible between the lines of Trelawny’s account of the meeting. Whatever the expectation may have been, Shelley won his piratic visitor heart and soul. A young man with an Arab’s thin nose and bronzed cheeks and a young man with great open eyes, a boy’s fresh face and a crown of yellow hair,—the pirate and the scholar rebel—a fantastic alliance!

No wild outcries from British throats, however, disturbed the stout and comfortable Italian padres who stopped in the streets of Pisa to take snuff, and wandered off brushing the specklets of brown dust from their soutanes. Incomprehensible _Ingleses_! The exiles were all under thirty, they had all made their lives something of an adventure, they were all glad to be alive.

Destiny was preparing strange things.

III

The younger son, having decided to throw in his lot with the poet’s, remained in Pisa. He liked the group and the environment, though the bookish intellectualism of the Shelleys swept him often enough beyond his depth. Byron, also living in exile, was a familiar figure, and there were rides together out into the country and pauses by the roadside to indulge in the noisy sport of pistol practice.

Shelley read, and hidden away in a little pine wood, wrote poetry; Byron lurked in his huge palace guarded by a growling English bulldog and a squad of chattering retainers captained by a giant Venetian gondolier.

The poets liked the younger son. He was a rebel too, in his way, his piratic career made him interesting, he had good stories to tell, and above all, he was a man of action who could be trusted to do practical things for the impractical. A boat is to be built, Tre will attend to it; a boat is to be sailed, Tre will do that; household goods are to be moved, we must talk with Tre. Affection forms quickly in such an isolated group, and there seems to have been a certain affection for piratic Tre, perhaps the first the man had ever known.

As the weather grew hot, Tre advised the Shelleys to go north, and found them a house at Lerici on the Gulf of Shezzia. The place was but a shabby barrack, but it was on the sea, and Shelley rejoiced. In the evenings, the whole population of men, women and children took to the water like ducks, and their shouts of joy filled the house. Shelley and Tre joined in the frolic, but Mary Shelley looked grave, and said it was “improper.” “Hush, Mary,” said the poet, “that insidious word has never been echoed by these woods and rocks; don’t teach it to them.”

The late spring ripened into summer, and with July came the historic tragedy.

Early in the spring a kind of yachtsman’s fever had descended upon the little group. Byron had arranged for the building of a yacht, and Williams had designed a boat for Shelley and the friends at Lerici. In designing the hull, Williams had probably attempted an imitation of the fast American vessels he had seen along the coast; it was a model he did not understand. One Captain Roberts, a sometime British naval officer then living in Italy, had the boat built under his eye at Genoa; she was twenty-four feet long and eight in the beam; she drew four feet of water and was schooner rigged with gaff topsails. Not a boat, this, to fire a sailor’s heart, for the rig needs a crew to run it, and is difficult to handle quickly, especially in a small space. Two English sailors and a ship’s boy had sailed the vessel from Genoa to Lerici. When asked how she sailed, the tars had replied that she was a “ticklish boat to manage,” and that they had “cautioned the gents accordingly.”

Originally christened the “_Don Juan_,” the fateful vessel was now re-christened the “_Ariel_.” To give her more stability, Williams filled her with ballast,—a dangerous business, for the vessel was undecked. The designer would hear no criticism of his craft.

“Williams is as touchy about the reputation of his boat as if she were his wife,” grumbled Tre.

Such was the yacht in which Shelley, Williams and the English sailor lad, Charles Vivian, sailed from the port of Leghorn on July the eighth, 1822. The poet had sailed down from Lerici to welcome Leigh Hunt and his family to Italy, and this friendly office done, was returning home again by sea.

Two o’clock in the afternoon, haze, July dulness, and almost no wind in the Gulf of Spezzia. Trelawny, busy doing something aboard Byron’s yacht, the _Bolivar_, watched his friends sail away. He had hoped to escort them to sea in Byron’s vessel, but at a last moment difficulty over sailing papers had arisen with the port authorities. The haze was thickening and growing dark, a menacing thunder was rolling nearer; presently the _Ariel_ vanished from Trelawny’s sight into the leaden gloom.

A squall, needless to say, is a swift business anywhere, but the Mediterranean variety has a certain thunderbolt burst and a drenching vengefulness all its own. On the ships anchored about the _Bolivar_, barefooted seamen were running along the decks preparing their vessels for the squall which moment by moment assumed a more threatening look. Suddenly came rain, and in the rain the wind; the storm blustered through the night.

Trelawny went ashore, and listened all night long to the wind and the beat of the rain. He was restless with anxiety. Everything that there was of sailor in the man distrusted the _Ariel_, and he knew only too well that Shelley would be of little use in an emergency. The poet would be dreaming or reading a book at the very moment the wind leaped at the sails. The dawn revealed the shipping in the harbour rolling and pitching about under pouring rain; the anxious day ended without news. The following days found Tre searching among the vessels which had been at sea during the storm, questioning sailors, patrolling the coast with the coast guards, and offering rewards.

Presently comes a messenger in some shabby-showy uniform, and an official letter written in Italian. The bodies have been found on the sands, poor, broken bodies of men lost at sea.

“Oh, bitter, bitter gifts of the lord Poseidon,” said the Greeks, remembering the bruised flesh turning in the waves. What was to be done? Tre says that it was decided by “all concerned,” that Shelley should be buried in Rome beside his little son. Before this might be done, however, there were laws and a thousand regulations to be fought through, for Italy was then divided in separate jurisdictions, and, moreover, bodies washed ashore were regarded by the law as possible victims of the plague. This, of course, was not Shelley’s case, but the law was the law.

It was Tre who found a way out of the difficulty. Was his notion possibly a memory of something he had witnessed in the East? He would cremate the bodies, and send Shelley’s ashes to Rome. It is no injustice to Tre to say that he made his preparations and gathered the funerary material with the business-like directness of an undertaker. He was the man of action as ever, the practical friend who could be trusted to get things done.

He attended to Williams first, and then gathered the forlorn little world of the exiles to see the last of Shelley.

It was a hot August day, and the whitish sands of Villareggio were tremulous with heat. A dead calm lay upon the sea, and save for Byron’s schooner anchored close off shore, the vast gulf revealed no sign of human life. Behind the beach lay a wood of tall, branchless pines, “their dark blue tops packed so close together that no sun could penetrate,” and far away, over the wood rose the marble-crested Apennines. The pyre stood in the open between the wood and the sea. Byron was there and Leigh Hunt, a detail of soldiers, a few coast guards, and some Italian great folk who had ridden out in their carriages to watch so unaccountable a proceeding. Following ancient ritual, the exiles poured salt, oil and wine upon the pyre; the little first flames rose yellow towards their hands. A lonely sea bird came circling near, the pyre burnt with little smoke, and thus the body of Shelley dissolved into the air.

Only the heart refused to burn, though in the hottest of the flame. Tre snatched it forth, and burnt his hand so doing. When all was done, and the pyre burnt out, he gathered the ashes together, put them in an oaken box, paid his soldiers, and went off to Rome with his parcel.

A chapter of his life had come to an end. The little group dispersed, Byron remained to quarrel on with the Hunts, the widows went to England. Tre had been a staunch and helpful friend, and Mary Shelley never forgot the debt. She could write later that Trelawny’s conduct “impressed us all with an affectionate regard and a perfect faith in the unalterable goodness of his heart.” She knew that it was good to have a friend. _The Gentleman’s Magazine_, on hearing of the drowning, had remarked, “Mr. Percy Shelley is a fitter subject for the penitentiary dying speech than a lauding elegy, for a muse of the rope rather than that of the cypress.”

Italy in the autumn, and an empty world. Tre lingered on a year, and found diversion in riding about the countryside. An American-born negro followed him as a groom; the peasants stared at the strange pair galloping by.

Then came a letter from Byron, and life began again with adventure and war.

IV

The Greeks had risen against their Turkish masters, a committee of enthusiastic lovers of liberty had been formed in London to advance the cause, and this committee had persuaded Byron to act as their agent in Greece. From the point of view of what the cant of the day calls publicity, the choice was an excellent one; considered with a harsh and practical eye, it was absurd. This nervous, temperamental artist with the habits and posing mannerisms of a regency beau, this traveller who scarce could walk a hundred yards on his shrunken and deformed feet, yet hid his pain and weakness in a cloak of attitudes,—surely here was no man to manage a horde of wily Levantines all trying to advance their own fortunes, and snatch what they could for themselves of the English subsidy.

Having accepted the task, Byron turned at once to the practical friend. “My dear T,” he wrote, “you must have heard that I am going to Greece. Why do you not come to me? I want your aid, and am exceedingly anxious to see you.”

War and adventure! Trelawny wasted no time in exchanging the vineyards of Italy for Grecian mountain slopes and olive trees. Then came a mistake. He abandoned Byron, and went off to adventure by himself.

Tre had never really liked the noble lord, perhaps because Byron, being a man of the world, had a clearer understanding than Shelley of Trelawny the man and his place in life. A stray letter of Claire Clairmont’s, Byron’s sometime mistress, suggests that Tre secretly cherished resentment for some sharp remark. Whatever the explanation may be of Tre’s hidden attitude, the practical man had no intention of wasting his time with the poet, but left him to his fate. He seems to have forgotten that he had come to Greece with Byron and at Byron’s invitation and suggestion.

“I well knew that once on shore, Byron would fall back on his old routine of dawdling habits, plotting, planning, shilly-shallying and doing nothing,” he complained. And again, “Could I then longer waste my life in union with such imbecility, amid such scenes as there are here, when there is excitement enough to move the dead?”

The angry phrases make the adventurer’s motives clear and perfectly comprehensible, yet leave the abandonment of the poet a matter for controversy. Byron had called Tre to his side, Tre had accepted with alacrity; there was no solemn engagement, no cant about duties and so on; Trelawny was free to do as he pleased. A meticulous sense of honor might have detained him, but then the finer shades of honor never plagued Trelawny.

Crossing from the island of Cephalonia to the mainland, the free-lance now made his way through the grey mountains and the ravaged country side to the camp of Odysseus, chieftain of Eastern Greece. Tre thought him a man after his own heart, and wrote enthusiastically of his new friend. Of all the feudal leaders of rebellious Greece, this was the man! The adventurer’s life began to be worth living, there were ambuscades, descents on villages, attacks on Turkish cavalry, and looting expeditions. He was fighting for liberty, as Shelley would have wished him, but he had no illusions about those “pallid slaves,” the newly liberated Greeks. He quite agreed with Colonel Napier’s famous remark, “My dear Mr. Trelawny, no one should assume any direction in Greek affairs ... without the help of a portable gallows.”

Meanwhile in the mud and malaria of Missolonghi, lived the man whom every feudal chieftain hoped to coax into his hands, the noble Lord Byron, agent in chief of the Greek committee. At Odysseus’ suggestion, Trelawny set out for Missolonghi to plead the chieftain’s cause. He arrived there in the rain, and met dejected stragglers riding away,—the English milord was dead. The fretful, bewildered satirist had perished like a bird caught in a net of dirty twine.

On receipt of this news, Tre gathered together the wreckage of Byron’s entourage of adventurers who had drifted in to fight for the Greeks, and led those who were worth leading to Odysseus. He had now married Tarsitza Kamenou, the chieftain’s sister, and had thus become a member of the family. Presently Odysseus made a kind of truce with the Turks, and Trelawny retired to hold the chieftain’s stronghold, a romantic cave high in the crags of Mount Parnassus. It was while he was in this cave that an English adventurer whom he had befriended tried to assassinate him. Trelawny was dangerously wounded. “Two musket balls,” he wrote, “fired at the distance of two paces, struck me and passed through my frame work and damn near finished me.” With truest chivalry, Tre spared his cowardly assailant, and rescued him from his Greek associates, who wished to do unpleasant things.

Events moved fast. Odysseus, falling into the hands of the Greek loyalists, was adjudged a traitor, and thrown from the Acropolis. Tarsitza bore a daughter, and, this accomplished, disappeared from the scene; some say into a convent. With the help of friends in the British Navy, Tre then escaped from Parnassus to a refuge in the Ionian Isles, and lingered there two or three years watching events. “I do not wish to visit England in my present state of poverty,” he wrote.

Then came the destruction of the Turkish fleet at Navarino in ’27, and a breathing spell of success for the Greeks. In the July of the following year, the adventurer reached Southampton with his little half-Greek daughter in his arms.

V

With the return from Greece, the great days of adventure are at an end, the rest of Trelawny’s long life is the story of the kind of man the world calls a “character.”