In the Farthest Sea

by G. B. Lancaster

In the Farthest Sea

By G. B. LANCASTER

 

HARRY MOREL earned a sick heart through all his days, as many another has done, and will do. This is a thing beyond human help; but each man has one choice given at the beginning. He can face his trouble, and make no sign; or he can fall, and allow it to wreck his life.

Harry's life was wrecked, and the fault was partly Tregarron's. Tregarron's wife came into it too. But she was dead long since, and for Harry was left a shut door—and more pain than a man bears well in his youth. After the first Harry bore it particularly badly, and then the men who had known him did not take his name in their mouths any more.

So much of the story is past and paid for. The rest belongs to one little hour of a sunny morning on the Bountys.

The Bounty Islands lie very nearly in latitude 48° south by longitude 179° west, and they are quite the bleakest land on God's earth. They are granite; brown, greasy granite, grooved through the centuries by generation and generation of passing seals and penguins. They are barren; they are accurst; and their name is the grimmest joke on the school maps.

Once in many years a timber tramp or a whaler goes to pieces among the twenty odd islets, and then all the sea-birds of the Antarctic fatten and fight in the wreckage. But, taking the straight months as they run, it is only the bi-yearly Government steamer fetching a compass round all the southern groups that ever picks up the Bountys where they sit, naked and uncaring, in their naked sea.

The skipper of the Government steamer had known Harry in the old days. They had sailed together on other seas; and when life was not well with Harry on land, the Old Man received him, and asked no questions. He was down on the books as greaser, as fireman, as cook. The year he met Tregarron again he had shipped as fourth mate, and he never went after that. The Old Man would have signed him on as belaying-pin or a cleet with equal compliance; for he had trodden a winepress of his own in his time, and he knew that the smart of the juice is on the soul for always.

The boat cleared from the Bluff one nightfall, heading south for the open sea, and leaping in all her timbers to the pulse of the long live rollers. Clear away on horizon, sea and sky kissed, red-lipped. Between, the water ran rust-brown with the whale food, and icebergs, unsubstantial as half-formed thoughts, made a city in the farthest gloaming.

Of the two men on the bridge, one was known through the service as an upright man and a careful sailor. The other was known through New Zealand as drunkard, card-sharper, and worse besides. But the Old Man's wind-driven little eyes twinkled amiably as he jerked his pipe-stem to the tumbling distance.

“Seems rum thinking there's no one to meet us in the land we're going to,” he said. “Eight years I've drawn these islands, and never sifted so much as a dead man's clothes. Queer little cog in the world's machinery, this.”

“Better luck this time, perhaps,” said Harry absently. He braced up to the strong brine wind, and the unsatisfied trouble lessened in his eyes. “There's that ketch missing from out——”

“Ketch be fiddled! with the tides at this set! Look now, and I'll tell you——”

The Old Man's stories had the salt of life and the sting of truth. Harry leaned on the rail, and listened, and burnt the old live passions again in his pipe-bowl, while the land passed away and the world was just a brimming teacup set in the universe.

“Yes,” he said presently, when the Old Man spoke of one they both had known. “I suppose that's what killed him, poor devil. But, of course, he wouldn't talk about it Getting cold, isn't it?”

Then he went below to clean out the first mate at poker.

He took part in the landing through the bull-kelp of Auckland Island. He potted sea-lions on Enderby, and agreed with the boat swain who swore into the ravished magazine of the depot there, saying, “Them triple-plated whalers 'ud steal the heye out of a triple-plated sail-needle.” But the idle days were not good medicine this time, and revolver practise lost charm long before the Bougong laid to off the Bountys, and began to patch up the depot. It was burst all ways by the wind.

Harry borrowed the gig on the second morning, and rowed under the ramp of great blank cliffs, and up the jagged waterways, and through smooth landlocked channels where mild fur-seals sprawled on the water's edge in the sun. On the ledge of a cliff to leeward something glittered, four-square. Harry pulled across, ran out the anchor, and went up the scarped rock by the sheer strength of his fingers.

It was awkward climbing, for the granite was level as glass and polished as some far away old oak balusters where he used to wear out his schoolboy clothes. On the first ledge he slipped his boots, and slung them to his neck by the laces. Then doggedness, and a certain desire for this thing that had now gone out of sight overhead, drew him up, with curling toes and crooked fingers that sought for every crevice, and lost skin in the finding.

A king penguin started from a hummock and ran athwart him, talking like a set alarum-clock with the bell off. It ran with its body sheer upright, and its ridiculous little feet pattering and sliding on the greasy going.

Harry paused, taking breath and shaking the sweat from his hands. There was just the sleepy cluck of the waves below, and the broad white light of the sun above. And nothing else but the hot shining rocks, until an angry molly-hawk scattered from somewhere a half-made nest of guano and quills on his head, and he could not find a stone to throw at her.

He swung himself over the next ledge, walked three steps, and picked up the shining thing whereby hung a man's life. For it was an unworn match-box, struck by J. Bell & Co., Wellington, and it had four good matches in it. Also it was distinctly hot to the touch.

Harry sat, filled his pipe, and lit it. The flame spurted blue on the warm air, and through it half the Bountys quivered in haze, where they lay, unclean growths, on the body of the sea. Each one was foul with guano, bleak, liver-colored, and hopelessly barren. The waves beat them angrily, and Harry heard them answering out of the slow silence:

“Life is solid and lasting as the wind spray. Death is immortal. We are Death. We are Desolation. We are Derision.”

The gray-brown seals slept on the flat brown-gray rocks. The penguins came singly in from the sea, and wore their part in the thousand-year track to the nearest rookery. The molly-hawks dipped and called through the spray far below. All their red eager life was such a little, little thing pitted against the strong death of one brown rock. Harry got up, and slid by clumsy ways down to the farther sea.

“Brutal place,” he said; and beyond the rookery his eyes blinked on a feather of smoke.

It thrilled him one instant.

“By Jove!” he said, and stumbled quickly over the stamped guano bottom where the penguins sat shoulder to shoulder. “Shouldn't wonder if the man who made that would be rather pleased to see me.”

The feather blew out of a dip in the eternal glazed almond-toffee of the rode. Its beginning was a feeble blaze of driftwood and kelp and seal scraps that spread a filthy stench to the hot air. A man crouched beside the fire, tending it jealously. And the man was Tregarron. His bloated face sagged at the jaws, and his eyes were sunken. But in all other respects he was the same Tregarron.

He rose from his knees, stretching for a piece of seal-meat laid on a rock; saw Harry, and dropped back, staring, and saying “Thank the Lord,” many times over. Tregarron did not usually take that name in his mouth for prayer.

It made Harry laugh now, for he discovered that he had come all across the seas to pay Tregarron for certain wrongs done to a woman now dead.

“Give me something to eat,” demanded Tregarron then. “Bread—biscuit—anything of that sort—quick.”

Harry turned out his pockets, finding two ship's biscuits and the part of a third. The other man snatched and bit at them ravenously; stooping twice to drink from a warm rain-water hollow beside his foot.

It struck Harry as very funny that Tregarron should think of his appetite with all that was going to be between them. He sat on a granite boulder and waited; and presently Tregarron stood up, speaking as a man suddenly awakened.

“I'm afraid I've been rather rude, haven't I? But if you knew what it is to eat flesh, flesh, only flesh, till you loathe the feel of it between your teeth, and fancy it's turning you into a brute beast——”

“It wouldn't do that,” said Harry politely. But his voice was curiously even.

Tregarron did not recognize the underword.

“I'd have gone mad,” he cried. “I'd have gone mad if you hadn't come. There is the boat always, you know. We took the second boat when the ketch foundered; and she split on that tongue that runs there—and the bodies came round for days.” He was beginning to shake, and Harry watched him rather closely. “There was one—I think he was a mate by his clothes; he hadn't got any face to speak of—and I tried to land him and strip him. But he just bobbed and bobbed, and went away again. And there was another of 'em bobbing out in the surf. And the birds yell as the men yelled when they were drowning—it makes me sick——” His voice stammered to silence, and Harry said sweetly——

“It's as well we know there is no such thing as retributive justice, isn't it? Otherwise, one might think——” The pause was completely suggestive.

Tregarron's face altered to a new fear.

“Oh, you brute!” he said. “You brute!”

He slipped quick bare toes into rock crannies, and began to swarm up the six feet of granite. But the trigger of the Colt in Harry's hand clicked out all the necessary warning, and Tregarron slewed round. Then he pasted himself to the rock so far as was possible, and shook like a man in an ague.

“You any good at pot-shooting, Tregarron?” Harry was playing with the thing most carelessly. “I'm rather fair myself at anything up to sixty, flying or—running.”

Tregarron moistened his lips, but no sound came from them. His face looked very ugly, twisted over his shoulder like that.

“Better come down, I think, hadn't you?”

Tregarron dropped, squirming, and sought for speech on the ground.

Harry was lightly built, and much of his nerve was gone through hard living. But he looked quite as deadly and as swift as the small bright thing in the palm of his hand. Tregarron lifted his eyes from the tense shaw lying ink-dark across his feet. Then he straitened with a mighty effort.

“Go on, and get it over if you are coward enough,” he said.

Harry laughed—a very little.

“Knowing me as you do, that is not so plucky after all. When did I ever hit a man—or a woman—who couldn't hit back? Perhaps if I had had a wife—and the wise provision of the law to back me—I might have struck her—and put fear into her—and insulted her under all conditions that the devil could suggest—always within the law—until she died of—bronchitis, wasn't it? Perhaps I might have done all that—to a wife.”

He was still handling the Colt with light fingers, and his words ran out soft and very distinct. But he took his breath like a man in a punishing fight

Tregarron's lip lifted above his teeth.

“Perhaps you might,” he said, “if there had been another man.”

“Take that back! Take it back, you liar, or I'll put a bullet through you this instant. Well? Speak! You know she was true.”

“Not your fault, then,” snarled Tregarron.

Harry leaned his hand heavily on the rock, and his eyes looked away past Tregarron.

“My sin only,” he said, as though speaking to a higher tribunal. “But I never told her. Never!”

There was pain enough in the man's voice if Tregarron could have heard it. But in the blatant conceit of other days he strutted, unmindful of his raggedness, and saying one thing that touched Harry to red wrath.

“And did you not know why I never cut you into strips that day? My God! You did, though! As you knew, too, why I cleared out and left you to—kill her. I had some care for her name, if you hadn't. You! You, who did it all!”

It was not a nice story that stood between these two men. For Tregarron was not a nice man, and it was he himself who had first coupled his wife's name with that of Harry Morel. Harry had heard of it at the club, and straightway fled to his diggings to load all his available ironmongery, and to sob in his boyish rage and shame when Polhill came in to show him the only way of escape.

“Of course everyone knows that Tregarron is blind jealous of his wife,” he said. “And he is quite the completest brute the devil ever turned out I don't know what you've been doing, Harry——”

“I swear she is the purest——”

“Do you think there is any need for that, you young donkey? But all the world doesn't know her personally as we do, and—perhaps he loves her in his own swinish way. But that's not your business. Your business is to bunk clean off the reel, and so stop Tregarron from advertising his family jars on wholesale lines. That is—if you have any regard for Mrs. Tregarron.”

This last was unnecessary after all that Polhill had just seen. But Harry did the one quite honorable action of his life, and went away that night. Later, when he had dropped many rungs down the ladder, he heard how she had died. Then he sought Tregarron, and did not find him.

Tregarron stood up, and answered him now in sulky defiance.

“A husband has some rights, I suppose. And she loved you first; yes, and last too, damn you! I'll swear she told you so often enough.”

“Never,” said Harry, behind his teeth. “She never told me. I never knew. All this time I never knew. A-h-h! If I'd known! Oh God! if I'd known——”

It was the cry of the man for the mate that was meant to be his since time began; for the loss that had given him an empty heart to carry into eternity. He stared, unseeing, over the mighty unrest of water that was so troubled beneath the calm of heaven, and Tregarron took spirit to crawl away after the fashion of a great unwieldy slug.

A seal nosed its young one carefully down a rock-slope, and rolled in where white spume followed the double splash. Two molly-hawks fought all across the eye-range like feather-dusters possessed, and in the rookery the penguins pattered busily, throwing squat black-shadows in the strong light.

But Harry was drawing a woman's face back to him across the years. His mouth and eyes were marvelously tender, and outward sound and sense had dropped from him.

A little blue crab nipped Tregarron's toe, and he yelled incautiously. Then he yelled again. For the nose of a revolver generally feels cold on the nape of a man's neck, though the bare rocks around be flaking with heat.

“No, you don't,” said Harry blandly. “There's the little matter of my own honor to be answered for yet. I didn't choose to settle it publicly, as you observed before; so we'll settle it here—now. Sorry I've only one shooter, but a penny will arrange that.”

He spun the coin up, and put his foot on it where it rang again on the granite.

“Call for first shot. Have you got a pretty straight eye, Tregarron? It won't be very wise for you to miss. Go on. It's you to call.”

Tregarron shook flaccidly, and his little eyes squinted with fear.

“I won't. I can't. It's murder.”

“You should be an authority on all kinds of murder, I grant you. But this is not quite the same thing. I'm giving you equal chances, you see. Only I don't think you can shoot me so dead but I'll have the throat out of you before I die, Tregarron.”

“You utter coward! When I am weak from exposure——”

“You are no weaker than a woman. Will you call?”

“No, I won't. You've done me enough harm already.”

“I may do you more in a minute. Will you call?”

“You took her love from me.” Tregarron's voice was charged with a blind fury. “Not that I wanted it. She was too white and puny for my taste. But I kept her. You never saw her again. I took care of that.”

Harry spoke into a minute-long silence, and his tone was curiously flat.

“We shall neither of us see her again—ever. But we shall find out what one of us will see, directly. Is it heads?”

Then Tregarron collapsed in the fire ashes, and hid his eyes, and groveled. The facets of his signet-ring struck out long flashes as he moved his hands, and Harry remembered that the seal was a drawn sword, and the motto, “For God and mine honor.” Tregarron's wife had worn one on her watch-chain.

“You'd better get up, and take it standing,” he suggested. “For there will be no pull-back now, Tregarron.”

The man on the ground began to pray uncouthly. Harry dragged him to his feet in savage disgust.

“I think you've forgotten your prayers overlong by the sound of them. Oh, you crawler! can't you stand up to me like a man?”

“Suppose—you won?” moaned Tregarron.

“There is that contingency, certainly,” said Harry drily. Then he flung the revolver down. “Come on, and we'll fight for it, then. We'll fight for the right to pick that up, and go pot-shooting with it. You have science, and I haven't; and raw meat and a stinting of the stomach won't have done your wind any harm. But I'm ready to take it this way if you prefer it. Stand up, there.”

Tregarron hesitated. Then his cheek stung with a vicious, open-handed slap.

“Will you answer to that, then?”

Tregarron answered with a roar and a whirling forward rush that locked his arms about Harry's middle, and sent the two staggering round the rock basin drunkenly. Tregarron was the heavier man, of greater knowledge, and he was fighting for his life. But Harry was pure berserker in his long-nourished hate and his loathing of the close touch and breath of the man who had been Her husband. There was not much room for science; for when Tregarron would have thrown the other, they came to the ground together, and rose again together; gasping, struggling, bruised, close fastened in dumb live fury. There was none to call time, and none to give applause, except always the penguins tailing in from the sea, and the slothful, sleek seals that opened one eye, turned, and slept again. A knot of molly-hawks spilt, clutching and shrieking, into the surf, and through the hot, drowsy silence there seemed to come the mutter of the big ice loosening about the Pole.

Once before two men had fought with never a one of their breed to give judgment on the issue. Cain carried a brand on his brow for that; and the shadow of it fell across the ages to another man's forehead as he felt Tregarron's throat strain under his knee and the heel of the Colt warm in his hand.

Tregarron's eyes were tight shut against the death, and his face was very horrible to look at. But he was too spent for further effort. Harry's breath came hardly, and the rocks reeled right and left in the glare. He waited for them to swing level again, and a thought ran through his mind as a telegraph-ribbon runs. This was near to the close of the breeding season. Soon, very soon, the seals would go down into the sea, and the penguins would follow, and on all the Bounty Islands would be deep and speechless desolation, where a man might cry alone to the winds and the rain by day and week and month and year.

Harry rose lightly, springing back, and slipping the Colt into his pocket.

“Get up, man,” he said. “I'm not going to kill you.”

Then Tregarron took him about the feet, exactly as the thing is done in Eastern countries, and let loose a flood of fulsomeness to all ruling powers, including the quick death spat from the revolver barrel. It was not an elevating exhibition, and Harry kicked himself free with contempt.

“You'll have time to praise heaven when I'm gone. We'll finish this first. You are such a brave man, Tregarron, that I don't know if you most fear life or death. But I am going to try you with life. There will be a boat round again in about six months. She won't come nosing up these little channels, but if you can strike the depot island by swimming, you'll probably get picked up. You have a choice of about thirteen, I think.”

What Tregarron said in the next five minutes is not nice to remember. Harry took therefrom some payment for certain things borne. Then he answered one speech out of the tossed invective.

“Of course you can follow me up if you like, but I don't think you will. For if you do I'll shoot you. And I'll shoot straight. By ——, I will!”

“I'll die,” moaned Tregarron. “I'll go mad. I know I'll go mad.”

“I hope not. I shouldn't like you to forget your mercies. Stand over there till I get out of this.”

Tregarron rocked his body, sitting in an abject heap, and cursing in frightened whispers. On the height above Harry stopped, and tossed pipe, matches, and tobacco into the other man's lap.

“I used some of your matches just now,” he said, and went on. But when the power to do any more good or evil was afterward taken from him, he rather liked to remember this. It was his favorite cutty, too.

He brought back a little blue crab to the Bougong, and it straightway pinched blood from the Old Man's finger.

“That warn't worth knocking yourself into a lather about,” said the Old Man, shaking it overboard. “See anything else?”

Harry leaned on the taffrail where the water was beginning to talk at the vessel's side.

“Yes,” he said. “I saw a couple of molly-hawks fighting like devils—or like men.”