Part 10

In the hospital, Saunders continued to let go his grip on life as gently as possible. Tangible woe and regret had become active agents in assisting the passive manner of his fading away. A new major-surgeon came up from Tientsin to assume charge of the hospital, and he was angry when he examined Saunders and heard the history of the case. "That man is dying of homesickness and worry," he growled to the hospital corps private in the ward; "and now he hasn't enough vitality left in him to risk moving in an ambulance. He'd snuff out like a candle on the way to Tientsin, and you can't keep him alive more than two weeks longer. He may as well die in some comfort as be jolted to death."

Much of the time in the following week Saunders hovered along the borderland of dreams which were not wholly disquieting, for he had become on friendly terms with the gilded dragons on the shadowy rafters, and now and then they talked to him. The sick men of P Company had been sent back to duty, and Saunders did not know those who had taken their places along his aisle of the columned temple. When he noticed them, it was to whisper little inconsequential memories of home, and to tell passers-by of some new discovery gleaned from an intimate familiarity with numberless gilded dragons that never slept. He still noted the tally marks on the frame of his cot, and when he was too weak to reach them, the man in the nearest cot scratched a cross for him until only seven marks remained. The letter was no longer read, but the tragedy it told was woven through much of the delirious talk of the patient.

Meantime "Shorty" Blake had been routed with heavy loss among the canteens and other diversions of Tientsin, and, greatly the worse for wear, made his way to Taku and boarded a Japanese transport bound for Nagasaki. He went ashore in that entertaining port with three Mexican dollars as the melancholy remnant of his pay and travel allowance "to the place of enlistment," and presented his papers to the American quartermaster stationed in Nagasaki, who gave him an order for transportation on the next United States transport sailing for San Francisco.

Discharged Private Blake was much disconcerted when he was informed that no Government vessel was to stop en route from Manila in less than two weeks, and that he was stranded "on the beach," with several other recent losses to the fighting strength of the army in the Orient. A bundle of looted silk had been exchanged in Tientsin for bottles of astonishing Scotch whiskey made in Shanghai, and there was nothing else of cash value in the light marching order of ex-private Blake. He hired a room in a toy-like Japanese hotel, and late that night returned without his three Mexican dollars, but with the perverted energy of a runaway automobile. Charging headlong through the dainty paper walls of the hotel rather than be annoyed by trying to find the door mobilized a small army of Japanese policemen, and memory came back to Blake when he was dragged into the street, his haversack hurled at his head by the agitated landlord.

Daylight found him very thirsty and nervous, wandering along the edge of the bay, waiting for a glimpse of a blue army blouse and the tenuous hope of a small loan. He leaned against the stone wall of the Hatoba, with his haversack under his tortured head, and twisted as his cheek rubbed a hard lump beneath the canvas. Ramming his hand into the haversack with a peevish curse, "Shorty" pulled out a package wrapped in wadded silk, and unrolled a teapot of green imperial jade. A stocky manikin of the Nagasaki police was standing near, and the soldier addressed him and the sleeping harbor without partiality:

"If I didn't forget all about Jim Saunders and his teapot, I'm a liar. An' he must be dead an' planted by this time, an' the old homestead gone to hell, an' nothin' left but this looney little teapot as his last will an' testament. I'll surely send it to Kansas all right, tho' it ain't goin' to cheer the old lady very much. The teapot must be worth as much as a dollar and a half."

Then the demon of thirst gripped Blake by the throat, and the effort of swallowing fairly shook him. He slipped the teapot into his haversack, and to his credit it must be told that he struggled with temptation for several minutes. Then he muttered weakly: "I ain't goin' to sell it. The teapot will be all safe in hock till I can send for it or make a strike. Who's goin' to know the difference, anyway? Saunders had no business to pass away like a sick chicken, an' load me up with this billy-be-damned piece of bric-a-brac."

But shops and saloons were not yet opened, and "Shorty" Blake walked heavily along many blocks of silent streets, his thirst more raging and insistent as he found himself thwarted. Every scruple vanished and he was ready to sell the teapot for the price of a pint flask of anything searching and fiery.

The rattle of rickshaw wheels made him suddenly alert, and he stumbled toward the sound. As he turned a corner there was a collision, and the racing coolie in the shafts slid on his head, while the passenger barely saved himself from an ugly backward fall. The Japanese officer so nearly upset accepted the awkward apologies of the soldier derelict and politely asked whether he had been hurt. "Shorty" pulled himself together and, saluting instinctively, he spoke with breathless haste:

"No, sir, no damage done, and I hope you wer'n't shook up; but don't you want to buy a prime jade teapot, and help out an American soldier who's broke, an' ain't got no other means of support? I know it ain't worth much, bein' nothin' but a toy, but I need the price, whatever it is."

The officer bowed as if honored by the confidence, and replied: "It is not customary to sell jade teapots in the streets so early in the morning, and I am in the hurry to arrive with my duty. But Japan and America are so great friends since Peking, eh? Is it not? A-h, is th-a-a-t the jade, and from Peking, eh? I do not know everything about jade, but there are many good times for you in that teapot; ha, ha! I think so. I am not so mean to rob the honorable soldier. You will make a borrow of this two yen--two dollars--all right, eh? And you will take my card and the teapot will come with you at my house at noon hour, eh?"

Before the beclogged brain of "Shorty" Blake had caught up with these directions, the rickshaw was whisking around a curve of the hillside, and the derelict was left staring after, the jade teapot in one hand, and two one-yen notes in the other. Visions of wealth made him tingle, and he rewrapped the treasure with reverent deliberation. Then began another battle with a battered fragment of a conscience, and the voice of Saunders was so distinct in his ear that he turned suddenly more than once to mutter to the empty street:

"I'm on the edge of the shivers. It's a bad sign when you hear voices as plain as that. It's that baby whine of his, always cryin', 'Ten days more an' the folks will be homeless and starvin', an' I can't do nothin'.'

"Holy smoke! I've heard that string of dates often enough to keep track of 'em. An' there's three more days leeway or I've missed my count. An' me with a fortune in this little monkey-doodle teapot, if that Jap wasn't stringin' me."

From stories told later to his "bunkie" on the transport, it is probable that "Shorty" Blake passed through great mental stress during the forenoon of his second day in Nagasaki, but that this ordeal was nothing compared with his torments after an interview with a wealthy dealer in curios at the home of a major of Japanese infantry on the hill. There is reason to believe that the discharged private of the China Relief Expedition kept his appointment in a fairly sober condition, although much shaken and easily startled. An hour later, the Japanese officer accompanied "Shorty" Blake to the telegraph office and the branch of the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank, with an air of anxious guardianship, as if determined to see a wavering project through to the finish. Shorty skipped references to his escort in subsequent narratives, as if the topic were painful, dismissing his interview with the sweeping summary:

"I had to go an' put that little Jap wise to the whole hard-luck story of Jim Saunders. Then he talked to me like a Dutch uncle, and had me on the mourners' bench in no time. Them Japs is strong on filial duty, and he never let up on me till the job was done."

Twenty-four hours later, the Signal Corps operator at the American army station in Peking copied a message addressed to "J. Saunders, P Company, Ninth Infantry, Field Hospital No. 1."

"Sold teapot for eight hundred dollars gold. Have cabled six hundred to old lady to bust mortgage. Will bust Nagasaki wide open with balance. If not dead, brace up.

(Signed) "SHORTY."

It seemed indecent to carry this telegram to the bedside of Private Saunders. He had lost all interest in the world of men and things, yet was inexplicably lingering, as if caught in an eddy as he drifted out. Fantasies had fled, and his mind was clearing, as if to pay some heed to the important business of ceasing to be. The message was first read by the major-surgeon, and there was more than professional interest in his tone, as he said to the nurse of the ward:

"Give that man ten drops of digitalis and a dose of brandy, and try to wake him up enough to understand this telegram. It's the only thing on earth that may pull him through. He told me his troubles, and this ought to be his salvation."

The powerful stimulants stirred a current of life in Saunders, and he heard and comprehended the tidings from "Shorty" Blake, and the heroic compromise of that distressed soul who had saved the home of his "pal," but could not let go his grip on the remainder of the windfall. The invalid gulped and there was almost the shadow of a grin in his stammering whisper:

"That b-b-blamed fool Shorty is a ---- angel, ain't he? I-I don't b-believe I'm d-dead yet. Say, can I go home if I'll get strong enough to stand the hike?"

This effort exhausted Saunders and he slept awhile. The surgeon was taking his pulse when he awoke, and the friendly nurse holding a cup of beef tea to his lips.

"You seem to have quit making an ass of yourself," said the surgeon; "and I've seen your company commander this afternoon. If you can work up enough strength to stand the trip to the coast, I'll see that your discharge papers are made out. You'll be no more good to the army."

The same inducement had previously failed to interest Saunders, but now he had determined to live, in the mighty inspiration of joy and hope renewed. He drank beef tea and begged for more, and when he flashed a feeble sputter of profanity because he was not allowed a bit of bacon, the ward became noisily cheerful. The captain of P Company was not a hard man, but he had suspected Saunders of malingering until the major-surgeon told him the private's hospital history, and how he had been saved from death by the miraculous intervention of the departed and flagrantly notorious "Shorty" Blake.

"Saunders isn't a bad soldier," said the captain, "but he's always been a bit too sentimental and broody. And if he's decided to save another funeral in the company, you'd better ship him home before he changes his mind. We can't feed him on another batch of such stimulating news if he slumps again. I'll look after his discharge papers, if you will certify him for disability."

It was three weeks later when Saunders, very thin and somewhat wobbly, waited in Nagasaki for the next transport homeward bound from Manila. He met a discharged corporal of Riley's Battery whom he had seen in hospital, and the gunner was eager to tell a highly colored tale whose peroration ran:

"And I was just in time to see the finish of 'Shorty' Blake's bombardment of Nagasaki, and it must have been a wonder all the way. They took him off to the transport in a sampan, with four little Jap policemen sittin' on his head and chest, and him kickin' holes in the cabin roof. The only night I was out with him he was playin' a game of turnin' rickshaws upside down, and sittin' on the axle, with the passenger yellin' murder underneath until Shorty got ready to move on. I asked him where he got all his money for rum and police court fines, and he was that twistified with booze, he says:

"'I ripped the mortgage off the old homestead like the hero in a play, and took my commissions like J. P. Morgan reorganizin' a railroad. If you don't believe it, ask the Jap whose name begins with a jade teapot.'"

CAPTAIN ARENDT'S CHOICE

His wife half raised herself from the couch which had been her abiding place for more than twenty years. "My broken flower," the captain named her in his prayers at sea. The One to whom these petitions arose each night his liner throbbed along the Western Ocean track had granted that the heart and soul of the wife should wax in strength and sweetness while her body lay bound in chains of suffering. Because to-night there was worry in the tired, brave eyes which strove so well to mirror only gladness when the captain was at home, he was much disturbed, the more because he had made the cloud to come.

She looked, indeed, like a "broken flower" beside the towering strength of the captain, who growled through his flaming beard when he would speak most softly, who moved in a series of small earthquakes as he tried to pace with gentlest tread, while they thrashed out the momentous problem.

"To think of the new home is wonderful," she said in German, for this they talked when together. "Do the doctors truly believe I shall be stronger if we live at New York? Is there, indeed, hope of health again? Ah, but it is risking all we have saved in these twenty-five years, and----"

The captain no longer withheld his voice and it boomed through the little house with a hurricane note, though he meant it to be only reassuring:

"But the gain is wonderful. Such a home as I have found last voyage--in the country, in the hills, near New York. There is life in the air, and it will make you well every day. And better than that, what is everything to you and me, I shall be with you almost a whole week every voyage--almost a week in a month. Now, when I must sail from Liverpool, I am home here in Antwerp with you perhaps two days a month, perhaps not at all when storm and fog delay my ship, or when the passage is bad for the North Sea packet in winter.

"The doctors say you cannot live in wet, gloomy England, and here it is not much better. You will get well where we are going. We can be together as much as when I was chief officer in the old _Deepdale_, running out of Antwerp. The deeds of the home are ready to sign. I pay the ten thousand dollars when I come to New York this voyage. Then you come out the voyage after with me, for the company makes for us exception to the rule that a wife cannot sail on her husband's vessel."

She wistfully smiled as if led by a beautiful dream, thinking in her heart that to be sure of seeing her husband so often would be more than ever she dare hope for. Even beckoning health must yield first place to such a gift as this, but not yet satisfied she asked with tremulous insistence:

"But the bank will send the money over without risk, and it is all we have in the world, dear Max. Do you remember how the nest-egg was put away so long ago, when we hoped for children, and this was to be the beginning of their fortune? Why carry the money on your ship? Why take it with you?"

"_Mein Gott_, sweetheart mine, is not the old _Wasdale_ safe as the dry land? Is not the old vessel safer than the banks, which, as they say in New York, bust higher as a kite every little while? Perhaps they give me a piece of paper worth ten thousand dollars in Antwerp. When I dock in New York, perhaps the bank has gebust while I am in mid-ocean, then my paper is worth nothing; the money is a total loss. In the _Wasdale_, in my room, in my safe, it is mine, and I have never lost a life, much less ten thousand good dollars. You do not worry when I go to sea. Am I not worth as much as our stocking full of gold? Answer me that, my Flora."

He did not know through how many nights, when she heard the winter gales from the North Sea cry over the roof, a quivering agony of fear had gripped her wide-eyed lest the _Wasdale_ might have met disaster. But experience had taught the wife that no argument could prevail in which the safety and strength of the ship were questioned. Helpless to make reply, she accepted defeat, for the parting hour was far gone and the separation always taxed her fitful energy near to breaking.

Always as he raised her for the last kiss, and then halted reluctant in the doorway, he was to her as her bright youth had first seen him, a red viking, born to master steel and steam instead of the galleys of his forebears. This night he smote his chest resoundingly before he vanished into the hallway, and said in comforting farewell:

"It is here, in the old brown wallet, next my heart, where thou dwellest, my Flora. Our money is soon on the old _Wasdale_. God keep you!"

* * * * *

The biting wind of early March fairly whipped the captain up the side of the liner lying, with shortened cable, mid-stream in the Mersey. Clutching a stiff hat with one hand, baggy trousers fluttering, the tails of his frieze ulster tripping him, it was an odd and ungainly figure of a man that gained the deck and lumbered forward. A quartermaster near the gangway grinned when the pot-hat bounced from the bristling red head and carromed merrily off the deck-house, but a glance from the tail of Captain Arendt's eye froze the mahogany countenance of the offender into instant solemnity. It was a hint that the master of the ship was coming into his own. A few moments later he emerged from his quarters transformed. The smartly setting uniform of blue and the flat cap jammed down hard were so evidently what he belonged in, that the shore-going clothes had been like a clumsy disguise. A small boy flattened himself against the rail and saluted with immense dignity. The captain pinched him with a hairy paw and chuckled:

"Hello, Moses, or vas it Josephs I calls you last woyage? Holy Schmokes! If you keep my room no better dis woyage, I bites your head off close to your neck. You hear? Scoo-o-t."

"Moses-Josephs" fled, and Captain Arendt turned on his heel to go back to his room, remembering with a start that he had not placed the precious wallet in his safe, but had transferred it to his blouse. He clapped his hand to the breast pocket, hove an explosive sigh of relief when he found it there, and was instantly bent on banishing all chance of loss, when the chief engineer popped up from below and sought him out in breathless haste with these tidings:

"Sorry to trouble you, sir, but a drunken dock-rat of a Liverpool fireman refuses to go on watch, and he's reinforced the argument with a slice-bar, and laid out two of my oilers and a stoker, and I need more help to get him in irons. He's raising hell, and no mistake, sir."

The captain was halfway down the ladder before the chief had done speaking, and despite the bigness of him, made his way to the fire-room like a squirrel. The pallid, sodden mutineer, backed into a corner, was swinging the iron bar in empty circles, fighting the dancing shadows from an open furnace door, cursing and muttering. His bleary vision had no time to focus on the big man with the red face and snapping blue eye, who ducked under the weapon, smashed him in the face with one hand, squeezed his neck in the other, and flung him against a bunker door with such force that he lay as he fell, a dirty, huddled heap.

"Vash him off on deck, and put him in the hospital," said the captain. "He's a goot man ven sober. He vas vit me in anudder ship once. I knows him. Only his ribs is cracked, I t'ink."

When the five thousand ton _Wasdale_ began to crawl down the Mersey, a hundred emigrants clustered along the after-rail, and shivered as they chattered. Two score cabin passengers walked the saloon deck amidships, and watched the great gray docks slip past. Twilight brooded over the Irish Sea and the filmy Welsh coast when dinner called them to make swift acquaintance, from which the ponderous good humor of the captain was missing. He dined alone in his room, and hastily, because he preferred to keep close to the bridge in these jostling waters. Yet the night had become almost windless, and so clear that the twin lanterns of the light-ship off Carnarvon Bay gleamed like jewels on a canopy of black velvet. Captain Arendt leaned on the rail at the end of the bridge, and sniffed the sparkling air as the evening wore late.

"It looks goot," he muttered; "but I schmell fog. Yes, I schmell fog, and the rail is schticky, and the paint is schticky, and dere will be fog before morning."

He rubbed a massive shoulder and turned to the chief officer:

"And my rheumatism tells me dere vill be wet fog. I am coldt, and vill change my coat. I am also an old fool; but tell the engine-room to stand by for fog, not before morning, but before midnight, by Chiminy! I schmelled it strong dot time, and I never schmelled him wrong."

"Moses-Josephs" was caught in the act of brushing and laying away the captain's shore togs with absorbed attention to detail.

"Choke dot vistlin' noise off, and run avay," was the order that sent the boy scurrying toward the door. "Vait, I tells you," halted him as if he had fetched up against a wall. "How is your mudder, boy? She was pretty sick last voyage, you tells me. Better? Dot is fine. When we come again to Liverpool, if you are a goot boy, you can lay off one trip mit wages, and help her get well. Now scoo-o-t. I don't want you around. You is a tamned nuisance."

"Moses-Josephs" ducked in thanks, and the captain locked the door behind him, and sat at his desk with the "old brown wallet" before him. "I vill count him once," he confided to the barometer, "for fear he may have ewaporated while I forgot him."

His glance fell next on the picture of his wife, framed in silver against the wall. As he slowly counted the rustling notes, he talked aloud to her in German, as he had done many times in sheer loneliness and longing:

"Four hundred pounds--the first four hundred pounds came hard, my Flora, didn't it? Ten years we saved it while I was fourth and third officer in the company. One thousand pounds--we had a grand celebration when that was landed high and dry, eh? Fifteen hundred--it is a grand investment this. Two thousand pounds--it is a fine fortune, but we would be rich with nothing."

The square-hewn face softened and the flinty blue eye was misty as the captain bundled the notes into the wallet and stooped to open the little safe beneath the desk. The combination, always puzzling for him, was unusually tricky, and as he wrestled with it the speaking tube whistled near his ear.

"There's thick fog ahead, sir. We'll be into it before long," rumbled the voice of the chief officer from the bridge.

The captain hastily thrust the wallet into the top drawer of his desk, wriggled into a heavy reefer, and went on the bridge. A dense belt of darkness hung low ahead on the water and curtained the stars. Presently this barrier strangely streaking the clear sky was changed to dirty, gray clouds, then into blinking mist. Thus the fog shut down like wool.

The lamenting whistle of the _Wasdale_ at once began to protest against this game of hide-and-seek. The bridge indicator signaled "half speed," and the vessel stole ahead as if in nervous dread, like a blind horse in a crowded thoroughfare.