Part 9

Wilson pulled himself together and picked up his log-book. He felt that it was his duty to write what he heard. When he had finished, the scales fell from his eyes, for at a great price he had been taught to discern that virtue of simplicity which most of his craft must spend years to learn. When the pilot fell into a doze, he stole below and began to write his "story." It was not all as the pilot had told it, but its backbone and its vitals belonged to the simple and untutored old man. Next day when he read it to "Pop" Markle the pilot brightened and observed:

"Any sailor could understand that, my lad. It sounds as dodgasted ordinary as if I had wrote it myself. The pilots will think a heap of that piece. I want you to hold your job, sonny."

The third day passed, and then the fourth, and the booming head wind was holding the lubberly brig out of sight of the Delaware Capes. The pilot insisted that he be carried on deck whenever the sun shone. He was looking for the Henlopen light. When he was not drowsy, he would talk of home to his young comrade, for all his thoughts were flocking thither.

"I don't think I'm going to fetch it, sonny," he murmured when the fifth day broke with no land in sight. "It looks like you're going to be the sole survivor of the _Albatross_. That will make your piece a heap stronger, won't it? My own boy couldn't have done more for me than you have. If we don't pick up the Capes by noon, I want you to write a letter for me to Mary, that's my wife. You can take it ashore at Lewes. You'll find the cottage easy enough. And you must go around and look at my vegetubbles. One of my boys will be home, and he'll see that they get my hulk to the buryin' ground. The skipper here has promised to anchor long enough to send me ashore."

Wilson choked, and tried to cheer the old man. But the faded blue eyes were serene with the foreknowledge of his end. The letter was written at his dictation, and Wilson sobbed while he went below to find an envelope in the skipper's desk. Then the pilot tried to sign it, and his knotted brown fingers held the pencil while Wilson helped him trace the wavering:

"Your loving Seth."

Late in the afternoon of this, the fifth day, a tiny shaft, like a beckoning finger, cut the cloudless western skyline. Seth Markle heard the shouts of the men clustered forward who were eager to bring him the longed-for news. Wilson and the skipper came to him, and propped him up in his pillows on the poop-deck.

"Henlopen light," he whispered. "Henlopen light, and Lewes just around the Point."

The dim light of life burned brighter in this draught of hope, but soon waned lower than before. After a long silence, the old man tried to speak. Wilson put his ear close to the resolute mouth, and could barely hear:

"Tell her how good you've been to me. I--I hope the piece is all right. The last cruise.... Oh, Mary, you're waiting around the Point of the Cape."

He was alive until sunset, but he did not speak, except once when Wilson thought he heard a fluttering whisper of "Mary," and after that the rough-hewn face became very peaceful.

The brig crept into the lee of the Breakwater soon after daylight next morning. Wilson went ashore and found the cottage with the marvelous vegetable garden, and a sweet-faced woman who read her letter while the bearer walked softly among the cabbage rows, and noted, with a quick pang, how lovingly they had been tended. Presently Mary Markle came to him, and put her motherly arms around his neck and kissed him through her tears. They went to a near-by cottage where dwelt the eldest son. There Wilson left them. Before he went away he said:

"He was the best friend I ever had. I'm coming down day after to-morrow. May I go to the church with you?"

He had to tarry in the streets, for the news had spread, and other weeping wives of pilots and seamen pressed around him. When, as tenderly as possible, he was able to leave them, he went to the telegraph office and sent this message to the managing editor of the _Standard_:

"Just landed. Am sole survivor of pilot schooner _Albatross_ run down and foundered a week ago. Will report with my story at noon."

On the train Wilson added to his "story" in the old log-book the facts of the last days of Pilot Seth Markle. His pencil quivered and balked when he recalled the words and face of his gentle old critic, and somehow, through his tears, he brought the narrative of the last cruise to its unadorned conclusion. Then he closed the book and leaned back with a great weariness. Now he was passing that bright vista of shore through which he had first seen the Bay, where he had chosen to advance rather than to retreat. Those intervening days seemed like years of life. He had gone away a boy, he was coming back a man.

When the young reporter walked into the _Standard_ office, the first man to greet him was a bald and bulky stranger with an impressive manner, who said:

"Ah, the young hero, I presume. You had a great streak of luck, didn't you? Glad to see you pulled through. My name is Wilson. I'm to take your notes at once and work up the story from them. We're going to play as the leading feature in to-morrow's paper, and follow up with a page for Sunday."

Young Wilson looked at "Doc" Wilson with a new assertiveness and threw back his slight shoulders as he replied:

"No, thank you. Nothing doing. My story is written, and it's going to be turned in to the boss as it stands. I'm going in to see him now."

"Oh, nonsense," snapped "Doc" Wilson. "I can understand your wanting to do the story, and your head being swelled a bit and all that. But if you want to hold your job you'd better fork over your notes without any more fuss about it. The old man passed it out that he was going to fire you, anyhow. I'll say a good word for you if you can produce the goods."

Young Wilson brushed past his elder, who stood dumbfounded at the insolence of the "pup." Then the managing editor was confronted by an unabashed intruder, who announced:

"Here's my story, sir. There's about six columns of it. And it's all ready to be edited. And no 'Doc' Wilson nor anybody else is going to rewrite it until you've passed on it."

The managing editor saw a bedraggled figure with a firm-set jaw and a level glance which looked him squarely in the eyes. He took in the sea-stained clothes, and the burned and grimy face, and smiled as he said:

"I'll read it, Mr. Wilson. Go home and come back at six o'clock. Then we'll talk it over. You've been through a tremendous experience, haven't you? It's your story. Don't fret about that."

When James Arbuthnot Wilson next entered the managing editor's office, that dignified personage grasped his hand and exclaimed:

"My son, why haven't I known you could write a story like this? It's the real thing. It's a masterpiece. Where did you learn how?"

The boy's face twitched as he said very slowly:

"The man who taught me how died in sight of home. It's his story. It isn't mine at all. I want a day off, if you please, to go down to Lewes again. I'm--I'm the last of the _Albatross_."

THE JADE TEAPOT

Private Saunders, of the Ninth Infantry, was flushed and dazed with fever, but able to walk from the ambulance up a stone stairway into what looked to him like a huge and gilded warehouse. At first glance, he did not see the long rows of cots whose gray blankets blended with the carpet of dusk and shadow in the late winter afternoon. Monstrous golden dragons seemed to writhe and flicker against the roof beams far above him, or twist in play on lines of massive columns. Saunders dropped his kit and leaned on his rifle while he rubbed his eyes with a trembling hand. If this was the hospital of the American army in Peking, he wished that some one would turn out the guard and capture the menagerie that had taken possession. Sliding uncertain feet across the flagged floor, he fell over a cot and gripped a protesting leg, whose owner sputtered:

"Get off o' me, you left-footed lobster. Ain't there no chance for a man to be sick without the roof fallin' on him? Why, hello, Jim, what in blazes is the matter with you? Brace up and holler for the orderly. He's somewhere down at the end of the line, packin' up what's left of Chase of P Company, who just passed in his checks."

Saunders sat on the edge of the cot and wept with the whimper of a tired child:

"Is it the hospital sure enough, Shorty? All them ten-foot dragons makin' faces at me in the dark ain't comfortin' to a man with wheels in his head. Guess this must be the Emp'ror's private temple. Why, here's a dozen o' my pals spraddled around over the floor. I've hit the right place, all right. Lead me to my bunk, an' get me bedded down."

The overworked hospital corps private, who was nurse and orderly for the ward, picked up the accouterments of Saunders, and helped him crawl under the blankets of the cot alongside "Shorty" Blake. The contract surgeon, delaying to question a group of convalescents in the courtyard, came in to examine the new patient, and said "pneumonia" to the nurse. Saunders heard nothing of the consultation, for he was looking up into the gloom of the distant rafters, and trying to count the racing gilded dragons that would not be still and made his head ache intolerably. When lanterns were lighted at the ends of each aisle, the shadows danced worse than before, and to his fevered eyes the great temple was populous with glittering shapes in terrifying agitation.

This, the largest of the clustered buildings in the park of the Temple of Earth, was an extraordinary hospital, even in daylight. Sacred to the annual pilgrimage of the Emperor in his worship of the Supreme Deity, these temples had been inviolate for many centuries until profaned by the conquering foreign allies. The walled park became the camp of the American forces, and one of the most sacred shrines of the land was used as a field hospital. A regiment could have been drilled on the marble pavement without crowding, and the two hundred sick soldiers scattered in the vastness of it were bitten with a sense of chilling desolation.

Between flights of delirium, through his first night in hospital, Saunders heard the groans and restless muttering of many men, and his fancies magnified them into an army. There were neither screens nor walls to divide the wards, only the rows of cots between the carved pillars that marched across the temple floor, so that all individual suffering and the tenacious struggle of dying became common property. The soldiers who passed away in the night time did not trouble their comrades so much as when death came in daylight, and the end was a spectacle thrust upon those in surrounding cots.

A little after midnight the tramp of stretcher bearers punctuated a thin and wailing outcry, coming from that which they bore, and the temple floor awoke with weary curses. Those near the doorway learned that a Chinese coolie, caught in the act of stealing coal from the quartermaster's corral, had been tumbled off a wall by a sentry's shot. The lamentations of the victim rasped sick nerves beyond endurance, and the hospital held no sympathy in its smallest crevice. The coolie was an old man and badly hurt. Opium had made him impervious to customary doses of morphine, and after he had been drugged in quantities to kill four men, he was no nearer rest. From a far corner of the temple the wounded coolie wailed an unending

"Ay oh"--"Ay oh"--"Ay oh!"

Soldiers rose in their blankets and made uproar with cries of--

"Kill him!"

"Smother the brute!"

"Give him an overdose!"

"Now, ain't this an outrage!"

"Hi, there, One Lung, give us a rest, for God's sake!"

"Throw him out in the yard."

Daylight brought to Saunders infinitely grateful respite from a world through which he had fled from flaming dragons that shrieked, as if in torture:

"Ay oh"--"Ay oh"--"Ay oh!"

The grip of his delirium weakened in a few days, and the surgeon called him a "mild case." At the end of a week, Saunders was able to sit up a little and talk with the men around him. But the violence of these early impressions in hospital had unstrung a system drained by long service in the Philippines, and by the contrasting hardships of the cold winter in North China. The gloomy temple frightened the soldier, for sometimes the private has nerves, but he kept his fears to himself, thinking them womanish. He fell to brooding too much of home, and the more he dwelt upon the distance between Peking and those who loved him the more insistent became his morbid fear that he would not go back with his company.

It happened almost daily that the Ninth Regiment band trailed through the hospital compound, playing a dead march. There was always a halt in front of the stone stairway, and after a few moments the dragging music sounded fainter and farther away. A little later those in the temple could barely hear the silvery wail of "taps" floating from a corner of the outer wall, where a line of mounds was growing longer week by week. Then the band returned, playing a Sousa march or a "rag-time" medley. The listeners in hospital filled in the gaps between the music, and the mind of Saunders was busiest of them all in picturing the routine of a soldier's funeral in Peking.

The surgeons looked him over in morning inspection rounds, and said there was nothing the matter to prevent his recovery. "Shorty" Blake and "Bat" Jenkins of P Company strove to make Saunders take some interest in life, and would have been cheered if he had even sworn at the rations and the lack of hospital comforts. They brought him jam and condensed milk from the commissary-sergeant, which he refused to eat; they assembled around his cot the most vivacious convalescents, selecting as entertainers those valiant in poker and campaign stories. Finally Saunders was persuaded to overhaul his haversack and show his slender store of souvenirs gathered in Peking. Blake and Jenkins moved over to pass opinion on the riches, and Saunders welcomed them tremulously:

"I was plannin' to take some things home to mother and sister," he began, "but I didn't have a chance to get much while the lootin' was busy. Wouldn't have done me any good if I had, when the captain had the tents searched and collared most of the company stuff. I ain't sorry I missed it on the loot, for the old lady 'ud throw out o' the window all the stuff I sent her, if she thought it wasn't paid for. She's fierce in backin' foreign missions, an' the Chinamen is her purticuler pets."

Shorty broke in with an oath: "Yes, I know all about P Company's captain and his hair-trigger conscience. He swiped all our loot, but he sent home forty-seven mail packages, duty free. I got that from the postal clerk. What you got left, Saunders?"

The invalid spread an embroidered panel of crimson satin and a roll of blue silk on the edge of his cot, and threw a handful of silver ornaments and a cloisonne snuff-box on the blankets.

"I didn't loot even this stuff," he said, with an apologetic air, "but bought it along the Chien-men Road, so it could go to the home folks with a clean bill of ladin'."

The spectators sniffed incredulously, but with unexpected tact hid any livelier display of doubt.

"Why don't you mail the goods home with a letter, and send a good jolly?" said Jenkins. "We'll get 'em off for you. There's a mail wagon goin' to Tientsin early to-morrow mornin'. Tell the old lady you're fat an' sassy. She'll call in the whole village to show 'em the presents from her brave soldier boy out among them poor, benighted, gentle, murderous Chinese heathen."

Saunders rallied for the afternoon, scrawled a letter, and sent his gifts. Then he buried his head in the blankets and wept, the effort having stirred new depths of hopeless homesickness. Through the following week he failed to gain in strength and spirits, and the surgeon mentioned "nostalgia" once or twice in chatting with the nurse.

"He may lie there and flutter out, with no disease worth a diagnosis," said the "medico." "The poor idiot thinks he would die on the way if he was shipped across country to Taku, to connect with a transport; and he's sure he'll be buried if he stays here. If we can get a little strength in him, I'll see what I can do to get him started home."

Saunders was not yet a dying man, but the natural process of recovery seemed at a standstill. There came a sharp turn for the worse after "Shorty" Blake limped in with a letter, which he tossed to the languid private with a cheery shout of--

"Wake up, Jim; here's the latest news from home. Hurry and tell us the price of butter an' eggs at the corner store."

But Saunders read the letter in silence, and while he read, his thin young face twitched, tears came, and the helpless length of him moved in little jerks that rippled the blankets.

The chaffing queries of his comrades were unanswered, and the patient seemed to be asleep through the afternoon and evening. When the light of the next morning filtered through the latticed windows of oiled paper, "Shorty" Blake saw Saunders grope for the letter under the blanket roll that served him for a pillow, and read it again. His voice was weaker than before, as he beckoned Blake and Jenkins to the cot, and said:

"Here's what comes of my leavin' home to be buried in this muck-heap of a town--an' my folks turned out to starve. You might as well read it, though you can't do any good."

Shorty saw a woman's handwriting, and he took the closely written sheets with singular gentleness. The spelling was imperfect in spots, and there were many erasures, but he stumbled through the uncertain lines, which said:

"MY DEAREST SON--

"No letter has come from you since you left the Philippines, but I'm sure you are all right, because no notice has come to me from the War Department as your next of kin. All I know is that your regiment is in Peking, and I hope and pray you are with it, all safe and sound. Sister Mary and me are pretty busy, as there has been no one to help us with the place since your brother died last spring. I know your enlistment ain't up for another year, and it's wicked to desert, and they would shoot you for it anyhow, and whom the Lord loveth He chasteneth; but it does seem kind of hard when we want you so much at home that you have to be fighting them poor Chinamen when I've been sending money for their souls these thirty-seven years. But as long as we all have our health there ain't any real troubles I suppose.

"I don't mean to find fault and you mustn't worry about us. I'm as active as a cricket and Mary hasn't been ailin' any to speak of. It's been a good long spell of dry weather, and that's good for my rheumatism, but it wasn't very encouraging for the crops. The mortgage on the house and farm is due in six weeks, and I can't get a renewal, though it's only six hundred dollars, as you know. The bank people is that haughty about the thing that I don't exactly see how we can get around them.

"But where there's a will there's a way, and the Lord tempers the wind to the shorn lamb, and if we ain't got any cash, there's others worse off. Your uncle Joseph is breakin' up fast, and he's ten years younger than me. He's the last of the tribe that's left on either side, and his family won't have anything to spare when he's gone. Of course it's hard to think of losing our old place, but I'm still pretty spry, and my black silk is good as new. I can't just quite tell where Mary and me will be if we leave home so soon, but you write just the same and the postmaster will know. You remember him, that stumpy, light-haired Jameson that married one of the Martins.

"God bless you, my poor wandering boy.

Your loving "MOTHER."

Jenkins was reading over "Shorty's" shoulder, and several hairy faces framed in gray blankets had edged silently nearer.

"Well, what do you think of that?" said a Sixth Cavalry corporal. "And here's Saunders been givin' up the ghost without havin' any real troubles. Now it's time for you to brace up, and beg, borrow, or steal the dough and shoot it along to the old homestead. That letter was written more'n a month ago."

But Saunders had turned his face away and was a useless member of the ways and means committee, which convened with "Shorty" Blake as chairman. A praise-worthy burst of philanthropic ardor subsided when it met the cold fact that the paymaster had not visited camp in two months, and was not expected in Peking before three weeks later. Investigation revealed also that nearly all the available cash in P Company had passed into the hands of three expert poker players, who were reported as being "hard as nails, and wouldn't give a dollar to save their own mothers from the poorhouse."

Saunders showed no symptoms of interest in these endeavors, largely because he foresaw their magnificent futility. He was in a condition of hopeless apathy, and beyond rereading the letter from home now and then, made no effort to rally. He kept a tally of the days remaining before the foreclosure of the mortgage, with a series of thumb-nail scratches on the frame of his cot.

There were twelve days to be marked off when "Shorty" Blake, who had been discharged as cured, clattered into the ward, and yelled as he leaned over Saunders:

"I lost track of my dates while I was in this gold-plated asylum, and my discharge is due to-day, and I was figurin' my enlistment wasn't up for another week. There's a squad of discharged men goin' down to Tientsin in a wagon-train to-morrow, and I've drawn my travel pay, got my papers, and I'm off for little old New York. Here's where I drop off on the way an' do what I can for your old folks in Kansas. Got anything you want to send them?"

Saunders became almost animated as he rolled over and tried to speak in a fluttering whisper:

"I ain't got any money for 'em; but tell 'em I was doin' well when you left me, and to keep their nerve, an' I'll get back as fast as I can. But speakin' between us, Shorty, there's nothin' doin' for me, and I'll be planted before you get to 'Frisco. Maybe I've got some little trick to send along. Wait a minute. Fish around under the cot and find me a roll of rubber blankets."

The uproarious "Shorty" opened the bundle and disclosed a jade teapot, in a wrapping of wadded silk. It was a flawless bit of carving, fashioned from a solid block of imperial green jade, no more than a pretty toy to the soldiers, who examined it indifferently and wondered why Saunders wished to send it to his mother.

"It's the last thing I've got," he explained, "and the last present they'll ever get from me. I think they'd like to know I wasn't so blamed forgetful at the finish. Just lug it along, Shorty, an' if it don't get broke on the way, you can mail it when you cross the country."

The wish and the token were a sick man's whim to Blake, but he wrapped the jade teapot and tucked it in a soft corner of his haversack when he packed his kit late that night. He was vaguely aware that his purpose of finding the distressed family of Saunders would not survive the journey home, yet he had meant it when he made the promise. He believed Saunders as good as dead, because he had seen men die of homesickness in the field hospitals of the Philippines.

"I'll send his silly teapot to his folks," he told another discharged private of P Company, as they climbed into a four-mule wagon next morning; "and I'm sorry I can't help him out, same as you are. If the doctor would pack the poor fool in a wagon and ship him to the sea, he couldn't any more than die on the way, and there 'd be a fightin' chance he'd brace up."

With this farewell tribute of sympathy, the fortunes of Private Saunders slipped into the background among the varied interests which occupied the attention of the late Private Blake along his route to Taku Bar.