The Web of the Sun (Adventure Magazine, 1922)/Chapter 1
I
WANDERLUST and a touch of poetry led Charles Lassiter into the service of the Stendill Steamship Company of New York, Guayaquil and Rio de Janeiro; an unsuspected business ability kept him there and smothered whatever adventurer lay in the lad.
By the time Lassiter saw the only possibility of romance in the Stendill offices lay among the girl stenographers, the size of his pay check had tethered him to his post. In point of fact, he never did marry a typist, slough his poetry and make another swallow's nest in the canons of New York. A certain Jack-a-Dreams mood, a shimmer of fancy, always floated between him and the comfortable commonplace of marriage.
The women in the office resented Lassiter's bachelorhood. The sex instinctively looks upon a man as a possible easement of life's roughnesses. The unattached male is at once a criticism upon their collective charms and a slacker. Once a typist snapped out in Lassiter's presence something about “the big stiff spells 'soul' with a dollar mark.”
She would have been surprized, and no doubt further irritated, had she known that when the women employés of Stendill filed out into Maiden Lane at four o'clock, Lassiter always leaned out of the window and watched their tiny figures lose themselves in the roaring traffic. There was something vaguely alluring about them, thus vanishing—as seen from a top view, ten stories removed.
DURING this period of his life Lassiter attended evening classes of Spanish, commercial law, the custom differentiations of the various South American countries, because he saw, as every one else saw, that the future of American trade centered largely in its own hemisphere. In course of time he became one of the Spanish correspondents in the office. In this position the letters he received from the South Americans, their leisurely rhetoric and ornate courtesy painted sun-shot Utopias before his wistful fancy. Sometimes a sort of despair filled the clerk that mere slips of paper could travel to and from such a favored land while he remained rooted at his desk.
Lassiter had been in the service of the Stendill Company for four and a half years when Henry Stendill, its organizer and first president, died and was succeeded by the present incumbent, M. L. N. Morrow.
This is no place to go into M. L. N. Morrow's extraordinary shipping career. All railway and steamship wiselings, all students of the development of America's sea-borne trade, are familiar with the great impetus the Morrow plan gave the Stendill service, and, by reaction, to every other American ship corporation.
Not to dally over threadbare material—when Morrow took control of the Stendill fleet, those steamers were sailing back from South America in ballast, or at best, half laden. Morrow developed the idea of owning industries to freight his own bottoms. Today the Stendill tri-color floats over copper mines in Bolivia, ivorynut plantations in Peru, cacao forests in Ecuador, rubber camps in Brazil, coffee plantations around Sao Paulo and packing houses in Buenos Aires.[1]
In this burst of development, there arose in the Stendill offices a strong demand for Spanish-speaking men to be used in the South American service. Notwithstanding the fact that Lassiter lacked what may be called the belligerency of the usual successful American business man, nevertheless he was tried out, first as traveling auditor, later as traveling business representative of the Stendill lines on the South American West Coast.
It really turned out a fortunate choice. About Lassiter hung a shadow of wistfulness that softened everything he said or did. It ameliorated his American brusquerie into something closely akin to the courtesy of the Latins themselves. Chance had tossed Lassiter into his milieu. For example, one of the Bustamentes of Santiago in closing a deal to ship government nitrates in Stendill bottoms, remarked with a smile:
“Señor Lassiter, an acquaintance of mine once swore to me there were no gentlemen in America—I am sorry he did not find you at home.”
And the South American agent had the aplomb to parry the thrust at his country men's gaucherie by saying—
“It was unavoidable; at the time I was studying how to avoid provincialism in Santiago.” The riposte through the cloak of a compliment entirely delighted Bustamente.
Lassiter never forgot his sailing out of New York harbor on his first commission south. The tang of adventure that had landed him in the Stendill offices four and a half years previously, reasserted itself in his blood. It seemed the life was coming to him in his thirty-second year.
He stood on the weather side of his steamer, facing a half gale that beat in from the Atlantic. It seemed to him. that the spume and wind blew out of his life the musty years of his office work, his cocoon-period. He was sailing into a new and wine-y dawn.
What he expected that dawn to bring him he could never have formulated. There was a woman in it, certainly. A brunette, since he was a demi-blond and as yet, had not known brunes. A woman fairer than he had ever seen, a bit nebulous, if the truth be told. In the visioning of every bachelor gleams the rondures of a woman real or feigned, just as in the memory of a benedict glows the dalliance of unmarried days. These are the morning and evening stars of a man's life.
To any one at all familiar with South American West Coast traditions, Lassiter's naïveté must appear amusing. Lassiter would have no opportunity of knowing the exclusive upper-class Spanish-American families. Lassiter not only did not belong, his work made him impossible. To the South American aristocracy commercialism is tainted. The Latin clings to the medieval idea that wealth should be wrung from the sweat of the unwilling, not from the purse of the unwary; he prefers peonage to commerce. It is more glorious—and less fatiguing. Lassiter was damned before trial and never had his day in court.
Moreover the sort of romance with which Lassiter titillated his fancy does not obtain south of the equator. The American-Spaniard's idea of romance is marriage and mistresses. It is somewhat akin to the Peruvian shop-keeper's idea of business, where he has three or four prices on every article in his tienda.
Spanish-America's slogan seems to be, Caveat emptor et mulier.
The whole ensemble lacks a certain high cold wind that blows through the Anglo-Saxon idea of romance.
In time Lassiter learned these things, and the bars of his prison slowly enfolded him again. The West Coast of South America became an extension of the Stendill offices in Maiden Lane.
M. L. N. MORROW'S greatest feat at the head of the Stendill millions was his organization of the Zeppelin passenger service from Quito to Rio de Janeiro, and the establishment along the Amazon and across the Andes, of a line of hangars, supply depots, and big tourist hotels at favorable locations. At present, it is the world's most ambitious aerial achievement.
In formulating his plans, Morrow called Lassiter from Lima to New York for a conference. The president presented the idea in a block to Lassiter for the South American agent to elaborate it.
It was this:
At that time the transcontinental railway from Buenos Aires to Valparaiso which connected with the Antofagasta line into Peru, Bolivia and Ecuador, held a monopoly on travel across South America. Valparaiso was twenty-six days from New York, by way of Buenos Aires. Morrow's projected line from Rio to Quito would cut this schedule to sixteen days with the advantage of flying over some of the richest tropical scenery in the world. Underneath the traveler would unroll the mysteries of the Amazon, the grandeur of the Andes, and the beauties of ancient Spanish cities. As a tourist attraction, such an aerial tour would be unequaled on the globe. Moreover the price that could be quoted would be almost as low as the longer and more grueling journey by train across the monotonous plain of the Argentine.
Morrow estimated the cost of such a project at from fifteen to eighteen millions. It turned out in fact to be sixteen and there-quarters. When he laid this outline before his subordinate, he impressed upon Lassiter the need of absolute secrecy in the preliminary survey. The Chile-Argentine railroad would not be indifferent to such rivalry. No doubt they would install a duplicate service. Moreover, having a railroad as a base of construction, they could launch their dirigibles before the Americans could get into the air.
“Therefore,” pointed out the president, “I would suggest that your preliminary survey be conducted as inconspicuously as possible. Why not be engaged ostensibly upon some other venture, say prospecting for copper, or seeking a soil that will produce this new South American drink, mate. Use your judgment about the color of your expedition, select your own personnel, choose your own route, and do it all unobserved.”
Lassiter remained in New York upward of three weeks after this consultation, preparing for his journey of exploration. During this period there stuck in his head the problem of an entirely inconspicuous survey.
Here was the difficulty. Lassiter was well known, almost noted, along the West Coast of South America for the many enterprises he had promoted. Latin-American financiers had come to watch him as a commercial weathercock pointing the winds of fortune.
The Latin-American is not a man of action in the American sense. He is deliberate, but highly observing; he is indolent, but full of chicane. He is an extremely difficult man to beguile. Lassiter knew if he launched any sort of expedition into the interior of South America from any point along the coast, half a dozen men in his employ would be agents of the Argentine-Chile railroad.
That formed his problem. The Stendill agent required no ordinary deception. He needed something enigmatic, impenetrable, absolute—there he stuck.
Life has a surprizing way of presenting to the seeker exactly what he is looking for. It seems almost as if mind fashioned matter in its own image as Berkely claims it does. To wish is to possess.
This, of course, is no new truth. It was promulgated two thousand years ago by a certain wise man, whose teachings, un fortunately, have fallen in disrepute with the human race. This seer expressed it—
“Seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall.be opened unto you.”
THE manner in which Charles Lassiter came to know Ezekiel Birdsong is a case in point.
In New York the South American agent had few acquaintances, because he was in that city only once or twice a year, and in New York an acquaintanceship seldom persists for more than from ten minutes to fourteen or fifteen days. So Lassiter always found himself alone in New York, the city of his birth.
To amuse himself he usually strolled a little after dinner up and down Broadway or Fifth Avenue, watching the dinner parties, the theater-goers, the crowds. To the theaters themselves he did not go because, like most men with a touch of romance in their make-up, the drama is too fore-ordained, its movement too metronomic, its action too logical. When logic comes in at the stage door, romance takes to its wings.
After the hour of dinner and theater movement, Lassiter liked to sit in Bryant Park. This is an impersonal bit of pavement with a few iron benches, and hopeless trees, where of Summer evenings office men, newspaper hacks, lawyers, yeggs, Chinese laundrymen, Jap curio dealers and vaudevillians come out and sit for a while to breathe the air.
The presence of the library gives this park a certain informed atmosphere. Loiterers here are knowing gentlemen who discuss the topics of the earth—bolshevism, the secret treaties suppressed in the Evening Post, the Egyptian art of preserving mummies, the vice problem, the best methods of blowing safes, the composition of the varnish on Cremonas, whether Dr. Cook reached the pole.
High against the sky-scrapers flash and fade acres of electric signs advising the midget philosophers below to “Smoke Madelains,” “Eat Whateley's Wheat Waffles,” “Chop Suey,” “Tell Her With Flowers,” “Goldstein's Detectives Never Sleep.”
Motors and trucks honk; the beetle creeps down an antiquated street car track; the snore of the subway trains rises to £ buried thunder; the pavement trembles, the benches quake, the fetor of dust, oil and breathed air floats up out of its man-holes. The skyscrapers pulsate heat. The crowds flow past in well-defined drifts.
Bryant Park always appealed to Lassiter as the first movement of some great con fused drama that would never know a curtain.
ON THE evening before he was to sail for South America, Lassiter strolled down to Bryant Park and found a seat in this air-hole of the crust of New York. The bench-mate chance dealt to the promoter was a short sturdy man in a black suit, which needed pressing, who wore a felt hat with a brim a trifle wide for Broadway.
He was sunburned, and presently, when he took off the hat on account of the heat, Lassiter noticed he had a suit of jet-black hair oiled down to a piano finish over the left side of his head, while on the right side it was piled up in large, exact, scroll-like curls. It was the coiffure of some rustic Brummell. The man himself had the look of a youth who had ridden his years into hard places.
As Lassiter absorbed these details, his bench-mate turned to him with perfect spontaneity and asked the name of the Bush Terminal Building. His voice had the slurring, nasal twang of an uneducated Southerner. The promoter gave the information with a faint sense of amusement.
The man drew a deep breath, made a move with his hat as if to fan with it, but seemed to apprehend some social mistake and restored it to his glossy head.
“New York may be a way up north,” he volunteered, “but it appears about as hot as Arkansas to me.”
“Come from Arkansas?”
“Ezekiel Birdsong, from a town of the same name.”
He used the phrase with a patness that suggested many repetitions, at the same time he turned and held out a hand to Lassiter.
This seemed to be in the nature of an introduction. The South American agent shook hands, gave his own name, then asked a little uncertainly—
“Do you mean you live in a town named Birdsong?”
“That's right—Birdsong, Yell County, Arkansas. Named after my daddy. He moved us out there from Blue Ridge, Tennessee, Sequatchie County when I was just a shaver. He staked off a claim to a hundred and sixty acres of fine bottom land and jest naturally squatted on six hundred more. When they come and tried to put him off, glory to God, they'd waited too long and it belonged to the old man.”
Mr. Birdsong dropped his phrase of laudation with perfect simplicity and with no trace of irreverence.
The South American agent looked up at the sign which assured him Goldstein's detectives never slept; then after a moment, observed in a casual voice that Arkansas lands had advanced sharply in value.
Mr. Birdsong nodded.
“Yes, God has sure blessed our fam'ly, and I thought I would pay back His many mercies by spreaden the Word.”
Out of this sentence, the phrases “many mercies” and “spreaden the Word” each wore the cadence of much use.
The Stendill financial agent looked at his man carefully—
“By—by what?”
“Spreaden the Word,” repeated the Arkansan, not realizing the words could involve any obscurity.
“You came to New York to—to—spreaden the Word?” groped Lassiter.
“Oh, no, not in New York. I guess there's plenty of Bibles in New York. I'm going to South America. That's my chosen field.” His faint accent on the words “chosen field” told Lassiter this, too, was a favored cliché.
The South American agent nodded, still slightly at sea—
“I see—you are going to South America to sell Bibles”
“Give 'em away,” corrected Birdsong.
“To give them away?”
Mr. Birdsong nodded—
“To make my calling and election sure, brother,”
Lassiter took a moment in an effort to construe this olio of politics and theology, but after a moment resigned.
“When do you sail?”
“That's just up to the Lord,” drawled Mr. Birdsong. “I'm working for Him now.”
He spoke as concretely as if he knew the Deity's street address and telephone number.
“I come up here to sail on the Brazilian tomorrow. I thought I come up in plenty o' time, but they tell me down at the office all the rooms are sold on the Brazilian. Not only that, but all the rooms are sold for the next six months to come. I went down to the Brazilian herself to ask and make sure, but down there they said the office men knew more about it than they did.
“Well, after I done all I could, I jest went back to my room and put my case before the Lord. I been wrastlin' with Him all day in prayer; tellin' Him, if it's His will, to lead me to a stateroom on the Brazilian somehow. Well, I wrastled all day. About a hour ago, I felt like I got a answer, so I jest let Him direct me, and took a little walk and come out here and set down.”
Lassiter stared at the fellow.
“You don't really mean you are sitting here waiting for—for the Omnipotent to send you a berth on the Brazilian?”
Birdsong straightened with a faint belligerency—
“Why man, you don't doubt He could, do you?”
Lassiter abandoned the point hastily.
“How are you going to get along in South America—do you speak Spanish?”
“Why, no,” admitted the Arkansan simply. “God may send me a Spanish interrupter, or He may cause me to speak in tongues. He's running this shebang, not me.”
The conversation was again slipping out of the Stendill agent's grasp. He cast about for another topic and observed that he himself was sailing on the Brazilian the next day.
Birdsong sprang up, a sudden light pouring into his sunburned face.
“You are! Well, bless His holy name! I knowed He wouldn't desert me here in New York! Praise the Lord!”
Lassiter held up a protesting hand:
“Hold on! Wait, Mr. Birdsong. I don't want you to build any false hopes—I can't take you”
“Why, I'll bet you do!” cried Birdsong. “What have we been led together here for? Fount of Mercy!”
“I am not aware of being led, although”
Lassiter hesitated as the amazingness of the coincidence thrust itself upon him.
“—although it is extraordinary that you should have stumbled upon anybody at all billeted for your steamer. Come to think about it, it's really astounding—six million people in New York; three hundred passengers on the Brazilian—six or seven hundred squares in New York where crowds foregather; perhaps fifty of those passengers are out in the squares tonight”
“Brother Lassiter what are you doing?” inquired the Arkansan ingenuously.
“I was trying to calculate how many chances out of a billion you had of meeting a passenger on the Brazilian when you walked out, took this seat and waited for one to come along.”
“My brother,” said Birdsong with a warming smile, “don't worry your head about the mysteries of God. I used to try to reason things out full I jest th'owed myself on His holy promises—ain't you got an extry bed in our room on the Brazilian?”
“No.”
“Ain't you got no space on the floor where your trunks ain't settin' where I could lay down at nights?”
“Well, yes,” admitted Lassiter, “I have a whole suite of rooms, but”
“Praise God!” ejaculated Birdsong in a conversational tone.
“But hold on,” protested Lassiter with an uncomfortable feeling that his moral supports were slipping.
“Sure, I'm holding on,” a certain twinkle in his black eyes signaled a sense of humor; “I ain't goin' to let go. The Lord's done His work, and I'll do mine. Now look here, Brother Lassiter, you won't even see me in your sweet rooms. I'll slip in about ten or half past at night—long after you've gone to bed; and I'll have out by three or four in the morning long before you get up.”
The Stendill agent felt himself thawing, a little unwillingly. Then, too, Birdsong's faith appealed to him as a sporting proposition. The man had taken a chance of about one in ten million (he had managed the figures roughly) and was about to win. It gave Lassiter a sort of thrill. It was a bit of genuine romance, a touch of the wildly improbable, a gesture of the lawless gods who make laws, but who disport themselves above laws.
“What are you going to do when you get down there, Brother Lassiter?” Birdsong's accent included himself in the voyage.
The promoter was amused.
“Why I'm going to”
Here he stopped. For some reason he did not want to tell Ezekiel Birdsong a lie.
“I hope it ain't nothin' to get you into no trouble,” observed the Arkansan simply.
“I think not.”
“I've heard of smugglers and gamblers and such like. I hope you ain't none of them. If you've got any secret sin on your heart, Brother Lassiter, you can tell it to me.”
Lassiter laughed.
“It's a secret, but not a secret sin; it's a trade secret.”
“I'm used to trade secrets,” said Birdsong. “My daddy was a moonshiner in Tennessee before he got religion.”
“My trade secret is this: I am wondering how it will be possible for me to make a journey across the Andes from Quito and not allow my trade rivals to know what I am doing?”
Birdsong studied a moment.
“Are there any lost sinners on that route, Brother Lassiter?”
“Sinners are not lost in South America, Mr. Birdsong; you can lay your hand on them anywhere.”
“Glory to God,” observed the colporteur conversationally; “then why couldn't I take the route you want to go, Brother Lassiter, and you could come along as my Spanish interrupter?”
Lassiter looked at the Arkansan as he proposed this exceedingly simple method of gaining complete obscurity. He had never thought of making his explorations in South America in a humble rôle. Like most well-to-do men the thought of leaving his own sphere never occurred to him; yet it was the easiest, most natural device possible.
The colporteur scrutinized Lassiter's face closely, and saw that he had gained.
“You see, Brother Lassiter, the Lord has sent me a berth on the Brazilian and a Spanish interrupter all at one whack, bless His holy name!”
His drawl held a genial triumph.
Lassiter's mind came back to the matter in hand, and a certain human duty he owed Birdsong.
“I must warn you, Mr. Birdsong, I am going into an unsettled country.”
“That's all right, Brother Lassiter, I come from an unsettled country.”
“There may be even danger.”
“They tell me the martyrs wear the brightest crowns of anybody in the New Jerusalem, Brother Lassiter. I only hope I'll be considered worthy to die in His cause, bless His holy name!”
“All right, we'll try it.” He arose briskly. “Meet me tomorrow at nine at Pier 19 on the Brooklyn side. We sail at 11:30.”
Birdsong extended a brown hand and shook hands on the bargain after the fashion of Arkansas horse traders. Lassiter had an impulse to tell Birdsong how to get to Pier 19, but he did not. Somehow he had an impression, that if Birdsong should walk out and jump on the first car passing, it would be a limited express for Pier 19.
So Lassiter gave no direction, but offered a cigar to the colporteur, which is the New York fashion of sealing a compact. Birdsong looked at the pigskin case curiously, took out a cigar, inhaled its aroma, then put it back.
“No, I put away the filthy weed when I turned to God, Brother Lassiter—” Here he hesitated a moment, then went on resolutely: “Do you think it's right to smoke, brother? Suppose the Lord should call you home, would you like to enter the pearly gates smellin' like a tobacco factory?”
The South American agent pressed his lips together in a sudden quirk and looked up to consult a flare of Goldstein's Detectives who Never Slept. These wide-awake sleuths restored the agent's poise.
“Mr. Birdsong,” he queried, “just what perfume do you suppose the Lord would prefer?”
The Arkansan pondered seriously.
“I always imagined lilac—there's a lilac bush growing right in front of our cabin—me and Mollie was married under it.”
- ↑ For complete list of Stendill holdings in South America, see “American Penetration of south America”: Marine Review (N.Y.), august 1919.