Chapter VI: Part THREE: I (1)

In the room, besides the people, there was a coffin and a black flag decorated with the skull and crossbones of buccaneers--or fictioneers. Every once in a while persons went down a ladder to a dim, smoky room where heads bumped the ceiling and where casks and kegs and straw-covered wine bottles stood and hung about in an ornamental sort of way. Mediterranean-looking servitors went to and fro in the subterranean crypt or chamber with great mugs of ginger ale. Visitors usually bent over the large, dark table in the centre whereon lay a carefully executed map--the map of “Treasure Island.” The men wore their hair long, the women wore theirs bobbed. Candles, the only light, threw grotesque shadows. Occasionally a waiter sang, “Pour, oh, pour the pirate sherry” from “The Pirates of Penzance” or “Yo-ho-ho! and a bottle of rum.” Somewhere in obscure darkness a parrot squawked. The sounds were favourably construed into cries of “Pieces of eight! Pieces of eight!”

Mermaid, otherwise Mary Smiley, wore coiled upon her head such a magnificence of dark, red-gold hair as to make her the target of envious glances from cropped young women all about her. Of these looks she seemed completely unaware, but they excited the amusement of her companion. Dick Hand did not fit in with the general Bohemian scheme of the place. He was in Greenwich Village but not of it. His proper environment was a certain office much farther down town in New York, on Broadway a little above Bowling Green. There, in the region of tall buildings at once rigid and supple and perfectly self-possessed as only skyscrapers can be, Dick worked by day. By night he pleasured about town. He was by no means addicted to the Pirates’ Den, nor to the Purple Pup, nor Polly’s, but Mermaid, in her last year of special study at Columbia, had expressed a desire to visit--or, rather, revisit--the Village. So they had come down on a bus to Washington Square and then fared along afoot. Mermaid had been expressing her satisfaction with the evening.

“How badly they do this sort of thing here,” she said, glancing again about her. “You and I, Dickie, wouldn’t be so unoriginal, I hope!”

Dickie, who had no instinct in these matters, asked, “Are they unoriginal?”

“Of course.” She smiled at him and two tiny shadows marked the dimples in her cheeks. “They have simply no ideas. Don’t you see how religiously they have copied all the traditional stuff and accepted all the traditional ideas of what a pirates’ den ought to be? A real pirates’ den was never like this. Pirates lived in a ship’s fo’c’s’le or, on occasion, in a cave; or they went glitteringly along a white beach such as we have at home across the bay from Blue Port. They did not live in a litter of empty casks; an empty bottle was only good to heave overboard unless you had occasion to break it over a comrade’s head. Pirates never had a skillfully executed chart. Usually they had no chart at all; only certain sailing directions and a cross bearing. Robert Louis Stevenson, writing ‘Treasure Island,’ burlesqued an ancient, if not very honourable, profession.”

“Never thought about it,” responded Dick, carelessly. “You may be right. But what do _you_ know about pirates, anyway. Where do you get all this stuff?”

“There are just as many pirates as ever there were,” asserted the young woman. “There’s Captain Vanton out home. He is a typical pirate. The pirates who visited the Great South Beach at one time or another are still there, off and on.”

“Oh, say, Mermaid. You don’t really believe in ghosts, do you?”

“I don’t have to believe in them, Dickie, I have seen them.”

“On the beach, home?”

“On the beach, home, and here in New York, too.”

“What were they?”

“Just people, Dickie. I don’t pretend they were flesh and blood. I don’t pretend they ever spoke to me or looked at me. They looked through me, sometimes.”

“But, Mermaid, you know it’s silly.”

“But, Dickie, I know it’s not.”

Young Hand finished his ginger ale and made a face at the mug. Then he asked: “Well, how do you account for ’em?”

“Have I got to account for them, Dickie?”

“I mean, why can’t I see them?”

“How do you know you can’t?”

“I never have.”

“That doesn’t prove anything--it doesn’t prove you never will. Dick, see here, go back to your mathematics. There’s the fourth dimension. All we can see and feel has only three dimensions--length, breadth, and thickness or height--but mathematics tells you things may exist which measure four ways instead of three.”

“But I can’t see ’em; neither can you or anybody else.”

“Of course. But you can see representations of them. A house on paper is not a house, but a picture of one. A ghost may only be a representation, a sort of picture, a projection of Something or Somebody that measures four ways. A house measures three ways and you can put it, after a fashion, on a sheet of paper where it measures only two ways. Why can’t a ghost be a three-dimensional----”

“Tommy Lupton never saw a ghost,” interrupted Dick, with a smile. “Can you picture Tommy patrolling the beach at night as a dutiful Coast Guard and coming upon a projection of Captain Kidd?”

“Certainly. Tommy is extremely likely to meet Captain Vanton,” said Mermaid, promptly.

“You mean that Captain Vanton is Captain Kidd living on earth again?” jested the young man.

“A reincarnation? No. He might be the shadow of Captain Kidd, though. He might be the three-dimensional shadow of a four-dimensional creature.”

“Come off! You said awhile ago that you didn’t pretend the ghosts you saw were flesh and blood.”

“Is Captain Vanton flesh and blood?” asked Mermaid. “Did you ever pinch him or see him bleed?”

Dick stared at her with pain and disapproval.

“Mermaid, what a crazy thing to suggest! And how--how confoundedly gruesome! Sounds like Poe. We’ve been living with a spectre all these years out in Blue Port. A spectre with an invalid wife nobody ever sees. Seems to me Mrs. Vanton is more likely to be the ghost. And a spectre with a son. _He’s_ flesh and blood, for Tommy Lupton once punched his head. Guy’s flesh and blood, Mermaid.”

A colour overspread the young woman’s check. “I know that,” she said.

Then with a triumphant thought Hand exclaimed: “Besides, lots of people have heard Captain Vanton talk. What do you say to that? You said ghosts didn’t talk.”

“I said I had never had them speak to me,” she corrected him. “I said they looked through you, and not at you. Captain Vanton does not look at you.”

Dick felt aggrieved. “I didn’t think you’d quibble, Mermaid,” he said. “It isn’t like you.”

Mermaid reached up and patted a coil of her hair. Then she rested her cheek on that hand and, reaching across the table, closed the other gently over Dick’s.

“I’m not quibbling, Dickie,” she declared. “I mean just what I say. Captain Vanton is a ghost to me and that’s all about it. I don’t have to pretend. Once, years ago, he came to see Aunt Keturah and I answered the door. I don’t remember whether he looked at me then or not. It doesn’t matter. If we can see ghosts, ghosts can certainly see us. They can certainly speak to us, too, if they wish; though whether we can speak to them I’m not so sure. You’ve got the wrong idea entirely.

“A ghost is simply a person or thing that joins you with the past, the unremembered or unrecorded or unknown past. Somewhere, sometime, at some place, and in some manner, Captain Vanton and I have met. I don’t know it; I feel it. You’re a chemical engineer and I’m a chemist, too, of a sort. I’m getting into chemico-therapy, the chemistry of the body, and chemical agencies in healing. Now chemistry is all right, in fact, it’s wonderful, but it doesn’t explain everything and it never will. You may say that’s because there’s a lot yet to be explored. There is, but when it has all been dug up and tested, something will still remain in the dark. The world will always have its ghosts.”

Dick looked at her sympathetically. “If you were any one else, Mermaid, I’d say you were nutty,” he vouchsafed. “I’ll admit this place is enough to make a person go plumb insane. Look at that coffin! And look at these freaks about us!”

Mermaid smiled. By the flickering of the candles he could see three freckles, the three he always remembered, about her nose, rather high up, a decorative arrangement to call attention, perhaps, to the brilliant blue of her eyes. He was struck again with the sense of her charm and unusualness. He had never met another girl like her, and he knew he never would. There couldn’t be, anywhere. What other girl, versed in exact science, would argue earnestly for the existence of ghosts? Dick knew that she meant what she was saying. He thought to himself: “It’s only the difficulty of getting it over to me. There aren’t the words, I suppose. She’d always be two jumps ahead of you!” Aloud he said: “Then your ghost may be someone else’s flesh and blood. Ghost--flesh--blood--coffin--skull and crossbones--nightmare people. This is the life!”

Mermaid laughed. There was a ring in her laugh of complete surrender to mirth. A joyful surrender. She said: “I am worried about Aunt Keturah. She hasn’t been well. I’m going home as soon as college closes. I don’t suppose I’ll see you again soon, Dickie.”

“Why not?” said her companion. “Come West with me--you and she--to San Francisco this summer. I’ve a water purification job across the bay in Marin County. It would do your aunt a lot of good to see California. There’ll be days when I’ll have nothing to do--waiting around while tests are going on and contracts are being drawn. We could go to Palo Alto and Monterey and Lake Tahoe. Perhaps farther.”

Mermaid considered.

“I have a particular wish to visit San Francisco,” she said. “It has to do with ghosts. I’ll try to persuade her, Dickie.”

Mr. Hand was elated. They rose and went out into the coolness of the springtime night. They walked, and found themselves presently in Washington Square. Something in the moment took Dick Hand by the throat. In a shadowy lane, a little apart from the benches of people, his words dulled by the rumble of the Fifth Avenue omnibuses, he took Mermaid’s hand, his fingers closing over it with intensity.

“Can’t we--can’t we make it a honeymoon trip, Mermaid?” he asked.

He could just see the slight movement of her silhouetted head. She murmured: “I’m afraid not, Dickie. I--I want to be very sure.”

He unclasped her hand slowly and they walked to one of the green monsters, vain of their size and path and importance, which take people uptown.

II

College closed. Mermaid went home. She found Keturah Hand in “poor health,” but a diagnosis of any specific complaint seemed difficult.

“Old age and remorse, my girl,” her aunt assured her. “Thinking of all the things I’ve done I might better not have done, or have done differently.”

“Why, any one can do that,” Mermaid answered. “I looked for you to develop some interesting ailment, Aunt Keturah, something new and original that I might exercise my knowledge upon. I am now certified to be competent to analyze you. I know all the diets. If there is anything you’d like particularly to eat, don’t eat it.”

“You remind me of John Pogginson of Patchogue,” protested Mrs. Hand. “An up-to-date doctor put him on a diet some time ago. But instead of telling John what he couldn’t eat he gave him a list of all the things he could eat. There were eighty-seven of them; and in the eighty-seven were things John Pogginson had never heard of. He had a wonderful time. But his wife almost died of indigestion. She said it wasn’t what she ate, but seeing the things John could eat, that made her ill.”

The two women sat down that night for what Keturah called “a long talk.” Mrs. Hand wanted first to discuss Mermaid’s plans; but Mermaid said she hadn’t any.

“Thanks to you,” she told her aunt, “I’ve been able to get what I wanted; but I confess I don’t know yet what I want to do with it. I want to go to work, of course, and I hope I can get into experimental work of some kind. Perhaps at the Rockefeller Institute, perhaps elsewhere. Chemicals won’t cure all the ills flesh is heir to, but they will cure a lot more than we know about. I don’t care about a career, that is, I don’t care about making a world-startling discovery or getting particularly rich or especially famous. I do care about getting a reasonable amount of happiness and satisfaction out of life; and that means being busy at something congenial to you. And going ahead a little in one direction or another.”

“I hope you’ll marry,” said Mrs. Hand, abruptly.

“I hope so, too,” assented Mermaid. “If I can be so fortunate as to find the right man, or if some man can be fortunate enough to find me the right woman, or--well, both. We’ve both got to find each other, I suppose.”

“Children,” said Mrs. Hand, with condensation.

“The more the merrier.” Mermaid did not speak lightly. Some deepening of her voice took all the flippancy from the words.

“You’ll have money, my money,” pursued Keturah Hand. “Eventually; it goes to John first. He’s a good brother to me and he’s been a good father to you, as good as he could have been to his own flesh and blood. You know the story?” she asked, with harsh suddenness.

“Dad has told me,” Mermaid replied, quietly. “It is so many years ago that he has no thought but that his wife and his own daughter are dead.”

“I have something to answer for in that connection,” her aunt said, and in spite of the harshness with which she spoke, her voice trembled. “I made Mary Smiley, that was Mary Rogers, very unhappy. I thought her unfit to be John’s wife. I--I rubbed it into her that she was unfit. Little, silly, childish, frivolous creature. How much I am to blame for her running away with her baby I don’t know--never shall, I suppose, until the time comes to answer for it.”

“Whatever you said to her, the facts remain,” the girl commented. “Actions not only speak louder than words, they talk the universal language. She ran away.”

“I think John felt that,” said Keturah. “He has a strict sense of justice and she wronged it. It was the child. That cut him to the heart, and no wonder. After five years you were washed ashore. I’ve always believed in miracles since that day.”

Mermaid nodded.

“When you study science, Aunt,” she said, confidingly, “you come to believe in miracles as a matter of course. That is, unless you have one of these impossible minds that thinks a thing more wonderful than the explanation. It’s the explanation of everything that’s really miraculous. For instance, you used to scoff at Dad and myself because we saw ghosts. There was the Duneswoman----”

“You wrote me that it was an effect of phosphor----” Mrs. Hand paused, helplessly.

“Phosphorescence,” supplied Mermaid, “the wonderful glow you see sometimes in sea water. It’s rare as far north as this but very common in the tropics. But to say it is an effect of phosphorescence doesn’t explain it, except to the impossible, narrow little mind. The real explanation lies in the mind of the person seeing it. If it were just a peculiar phosphorescent outline everybody should see it--everybody who was around. Dad and I see it; the others don’t. Do you know why?”

Keturah hesitated, then shook her head.

“It is something in common,” Mermaid told her. “There is, or was, someone who knew us both, and who becomes manifest to us both in that way. It’s like two people seeing the same ghost. Why should the ghost appear in that way? I can’t tell you. Perhaps the person was drowned. Why should the Duneswoman appear to us at all? Perhaps to witness to something. We may never discover what; and then again the day may come when that vision will be the last impalpable evidence necessary to make something clear. Then the Duneswoman may make complete the explanation of a surprising but perfectly ordinary set of facts; and the explanation, and not the facts themselves, will make up the miracle.”

“I guess likely you’re right enough,” surmised Mrs. Hand, “though I’m not sure I follow you all through. I’m a matter-of-fact kind of a person. That’s why any one like Captain Vanton gives me the creeps and gets on my nerves so. I don’t know what he does to that wife of his, or what he has done, but I don’t wonder we never see anything of her. She must be a wreck, living with that man. And he’s ruining that boy.”

“Guy?” asked Mermaid. A quick ear would have caught the peculiar note in her voice.

“Guy goes around with a hang-dog look. He never speaks to any one. He lives like a hermit, and his father’ll make him as bad as himself,” stated Keturah, with conviction.

“I must go see him,” said the girl. Her voice was deep and vibrant. “I must see his father.”

“His father has got Aunt Keturah’s jewels,” announced Mrs. Hand. “I’ve been sure of it ever since the day they disappeared over to the beach. How he knew about them I don’t pretend to say; but as he followed Captain John Hawkins in the command of the _China Castle_ he must have come to knowledge of them some way or other. Do you remember when you were not more than eleven his coming to call here?”

“I’ve never forgotten it.”

“He said a Captain King was dead and that he had killed him. He said this Captain King wouldn’t trouble us any longer--your father and me. Your father remembered then that one of the crew from the wreck of the ship, the ship you were saved from, had talked of a Captain King when he was dying and of a little girl that must have been you. So we thought--your father thought, anyway--that Captain Vanton might have known something about you.” She reached over and took Mermaid’s hand, awkwardly. “He went to see him, but Captain Vanton couldn’t or wouldn’t tell him anything.” Keturah paused and sighed.

“Captain Vanton told Dickie Hand’s father about the death of Captain King,” said Mermaid, surprising her aunt. “Dickie once told me so.”

“I want to know!” exclaimed Keturah. She was silent for several moments in busy speculation.

“What do you make of it all?” she asked, finally, lifting her head. Mermaid, who had been looking steadfastly at the wall, her hands clasped behind her head, the whiteness of her arm gleaming against the rich colouring of her hair, spoke without looking at her aunt, without shifting her pose.

“I make something of it,” she said, “and I am going to find out--something. I may not find out the truth of it all, but I will at least find out if I am wrong.”

III

Captain Vanton looked much less like a ghost than a man who had seen a ghost when Mermaid confronted him in the mahogany and teakwood parlour. She had with her a black bag, as if she were about to take a journey. She seated herself easily and her manner was composed, though her heart was beating rapidly. The short, thick figure of the retired seaman moved back and forth across the polished and whitened floor of the room as it had moved across the whitened and polished afterdeck of tall ships. His spreading sidewhiskers with their misleading air of benevolence could not contradict the disturbance in his reddened eyes. He had not looked at his caller since her arrival, and he did not now. Stranger still, he had not spoken to her. A few gestures and she was in the parlour, seated; the door was closed and they were alone.

“Captain Vanton,” began Mermaid. She paused an instant, then went on: “I am grown up and it is time that you told me my story.”

She saw the hands of the mariner, clasped behind him as he paced away from her, tighten. She knew she must say more to make him address her.

“Captain King----” she began.

The heavy tread was cut short. He was standing in front of her. He was speaking in a throaty voice as if his words had to carry against the force of a powerful gale to reach her.

“Don’t speak that man’s name,” he was saying.

“You must tell me my story,” Mermaid repeated.

He stood there irresolutely, an abject figure of shame, a sea captain unready with an instant decision, an order, a command, a shouted epithet. He hesitated; and when he would have put his helm hard over it was too late.

“My aunt and I are going to San Francisco,” the girl was saying. “In San Francisco they will remember Captain King.”

And now his hands twisted and shook, and again he turned toward her. He muttered: “I will tell you all that matters.”

But he could not begin. He cleared his throat and shook his head. His red and tormented eyes looked her way. She found herself looking directly into them--and then away. She could not read all they held; and she knew she did not want to.

“You find it difficult. Correct me if I go wrong.”

He made a sound that could be taken for assent.

“I was in San Francisco as a very small child,” Mermaid began. “This I know because the ship, from the wreck of which I was saved, sailed from there. But I know it quite as much because Guy has told me about the city and it recalls something to me. For a long time it recalled nothing distinct--only a vague sense of the familiar. I have thought and thought about it, and some time ago there came to me a definite image of something in the past. It was the figure of a man, a sea captain like yourself, coming and going to the house or wherever it was that I had my home. I don’t remember anything about it. I only remember that there was someone in it--it must have been my mother--who had a childish voice.... And she was pretty, too, in a girlish way; at least I suppose she was. I remember no faces; I remember no figures except the single figure of the seaman who came and went; I remember only the childish voice and the sense of prettiness about me. One other thing I do remember and that was seasons of fright. I think they were connected with the coming and going of that seaman. He was, no doubt, the man you have refused to let me name. Very well; it is unnecessary to name him. What I want to know is--did he live with my mother?”

The man in front of her had been standing stock still. Still with his back turned to her he answered, “Yes.”

“He was not my father?”

“No.”

“Who was?”

“John Smiley.”

The girl showed no surprise, only relief. She drew a deep breath, then murmured: “Thank God for that!”

From the motionless figure facing away from her came a question: “You knew?”

“I was certain.”

“How?”

“Both my father and I have seen her.”

“Since--since----?”

“Since her death.”

The standing bulk of Captain Vanton quivered. He reached for the arm of a chair and collapsed in it. He kept his back to his visitor.

“She was drowned at sea?” Mermaid put the question in a shaky voice.

“Aye,” he answered, and the unexpected word had in it a ring of terror.

Suddenly Mermaid found herself sobbing silently in a terrible anguish of thankfulness and wonder and sorrow. The stifled sound of her weeping filled the room. Captain Vanton made no move but sat with his head fallen on his breast, the white sidewhiskers concealing his profile. His breast rose and fell slowly.

The girl got control of herself, and said: “I have what I need to know. The rest does not matter, except as it concerns--Guy.” Her voice trembled again and her eyes filled. “Your own story--that’s your affair. But you have no right to ruin his life because of it--and that’s what you are doing!”

Something of the awful sternness of the patriarch sounded in his reply: “I will save him.”

The words stung the girl. In a moment he had become a silly and tyrannical and destructive old man with a fixed idea, a delusion--the worst possible delusion, a delusion of a duty to be performed.

“You are making of him a hermit, a recluse, a solitary and distorted young man,” she said. Her voice was like the lash of a whip. “You have poisoned his mind, and you will permanently poison his peace and happiness. Everything that would shame him you have told him; without knowing what it is you have told him, I have sensed that. And this has been going on for years. You have forbidden him to associate with other boys and other young men. The sunlight of companionship you have shut away from him. Here in this desolate house, shrouded in these wintry evergreens, in the dark, in the damp, in the company of a sick woman and an old man full of years and past evil, you have kept him and tried to form him. If he is not wholly misshapen it is through no omission of yours. It must stop!”

She was thinking to herself, in her rage, that of all madnesses a monomania was the most terrible to contend with. She was in no doubt as to the form of his malady. He was obsessed by a notion of saving Guy from the snare of the world’s wickedness into which he himself had fallen, into which he had seen so many men fall. He had seen the trap spring and close on himself and others. Not many had ever escaped it; those who had were mutilated for life. There had been this mutilation in his own life. He would not trust the boy to walk warily, he would not trust himself to teach him to avoid the snare. He would keep him where he could not walk into it if he had to seal him in a living tomb to accomplish his purpose.

With many a boy the undertaking would have been a preposterous impossibility. With a sensitive youth of a poetic and dreamy temperament, under absolute control from earliest childhood, the thing was feasible; more, it was being done. Mermaid recalled with a sense of pitiful compunction Guy’s strange eyes with their wild animal look, the most characteristic thing about him. But at least then, in his teens, he had held up his head, and looked about him. Now.... She had passed him on the street twice and he had not even seen her. She had spoken to him once and he had hardly been articulate in his reply; had seemed to hate and distrust her, not as Mermaid, not as a woman, but as a person of his own kind.

She came back to a consciousness of what Guy’s father, after an interval of silence, was saying:

“... I have told him only the truth.”

“The truth! You have not told him the truth, nor shown him the truth. What you have told him is worse than a lie. For a lie is like certain substances which are poisonous only in large doses. Strychnine, for example. Tiny quantities, a nerve tonic; larger quantities, convulsions and death. But a little truth is a deadly poison, always. And the only antidote is more truth and more and more! There cannot be too much of it; but you have never given him anything but the truth of two or three persons out of the millions of men and women that dwell on earth.”

She rose from her chair, picked up the black bag she had brought with her, walked around deliberately in front of the seated man and opening it showed him the contents--jewels. Roped pearls and lovely sapphires, Oriental rubies, diamonds, unnamable stones--all the blazing wealth of gems that Keturah Hand had kept stuffed in a pillow for many years and had lost one summer on the beach.

“See,” said Mermaid, quietly. “Here is a ransom. Take it. Let Guy go free. Let him live the life of a man. Let him stumble and sin and suffer, pick himself up, breathe the fresh air, and feel the warmth of the sunshine. You, who choose to live here in the darkness, can be happy in the artificial light of--these.”

The man’s face became red in a ghastly setting of white whiskers. He struggled to sit up. He put out one thick hand and clutched a rope of pearls. Then, with a great effort, he unclenched his hand and drew it slowly back to his side as if he were dragging a heavy weight back with it. He managed to articulate one word:

“Where?”

“They were once Keturah Hawkins’s,” she told him. At the name his shoulders twitched. “They were coveted by the mate of the _China Castle_. He insulted their owner, and for it he was flogged. I do not know what crimes they may have been responsible for before they came into John Hawkins’s hands. But they have been responsible, since that time, for a flogging, the wreck of one life, the destruction of one soul, and now I offer them to you to save a boy’s happiness. Will you take them and be satisfied?”

“They spell ruin,” he muttered, thickly. He made no gesture. Mermaid quietly closed the black bag.

“Since you will not take them as a ransom I will return them,” she said, “and offer another ransom in their stead.” Her low utterance was without the note of determination and equally without assurance of success.

He heard the door close after her. Then the man called Captain Vanton did an unpremeditated thing. He went to a drawer in the desk at the end of the mahogany and teakwood cabin-parlour, drew out a bundle of manuscript, wrote carefully a signature upon it, and the date, then thrust it back. Again he drew out something, this time a pistol, and shot himself dead.

IV

The first thing to note about the manuscript left by the late Captain Buel Vanton, a resident of Blue Port, Long Island, who inexplicably shot himself dead after affixing the date, was unquestionably the name, written at the end of the document a few seconds before the author took leave of it--and a good many other things--forever. Captain Vanton signed his narrative, for a narrative it turned out to be upon examination, with what had, at first, the appearance of a pen name. It was entirely legible, and read: “Jacob King.”

Not a name of any distinction. It suggested absolutely nothing to the coroner. In fact, it would have been regarded as a piece of annoying irrelevance on the part of the late Captain Vanton had not his son, a young fellow with a hang-dog look, said sullenly that it was the real name of the writer. The coroner had been mightily puzzled and not a little suspicious. Whereupon Guy Vanton had suggested, still more sullenly, that the manuscript itself might supply an explanation fuller and more convincing than his own assertion. The coroner thereupon turned his attention again to the document before him, and read it--a serious occupation that took him as long as an ordinary inquest. Yet, in a way, the occupation saved trouble if not time, for after his perusal the coroner decided that it was “a plain case of suicide--man plumb crazy--must have been crazy for years”; and that an inquest was wholly unnecessary. As the manuscript on which the late Captain Vanton (or Jacob King) had lavished so much literary skill (or insane invention) thus became, through the coroner’s intervention, an official record, any one caring to hunt through the dusty and sneeze-provoking accumulation of papers in the coroner’s office could read it in full, from beginning to end, written, as it had been, at various times and in various places, in several colours of ink, but always in the same small, slanting, distinctive hand. So perused, it ran as follows:

V

I, Jacob King, was born in New York City. I ran away to sea at the
age of 14, and at 19 I was a ship’s officer.

At 19 I was a man, not a young man but a grown man, and any one who
has followed the sea will know what that means. The sea ripens a man
early, ripens him and fixes his mind for good or for evil, according
to his capacity to understand the life about him. Nowadays on shore
I see young fellows of 19 that are not much better than children,
except that they have stretched enough to wear long trousers. That
is the life of the land, where such a thing as responsibility seems
to be unknown until men have begun to decay. I was not that way; and
if I had had a better mind I might have made a success of life. I
think I would have been successful ashore, anyway, for I was quick
and clever and never shirked work; but mostly I think so because
I was hard and young and brazen. I knew how to fight and I knew
how to bluff. Ashore, it would have been enough to know how to
bluff, I should not have had to fight. At sea a man cannot succeed,
permanently, without actual worth and fighting and winning. On the
land, so far as my observation goes, actual worth is by no means
necessary to success. Any number of things may make a landsman
successful; he may acquire money or fame and his success is measured
by what of these things he has acquired; it is not measured by the
stuff in him, as it is at sea, but by what he gets hold of; and if he
cannot keep hold of it he becomes a failure again, though he is no
worse a man than before. Landsmen do not value the man but what he
has. By that measure I have become, I suppose, a pretty successful
person ashore; I, who was a disgrace to salt water, can hold up my
head here with some of the best of them. I am not famous, it is true,
but I have a fortune of $200,000 more or less, a pretty considerable
figure in these days.

At 19 I was a ship’s officer and at 21 I was a first mate. It was
then, on my first passage as chief officer, that the first of a
series of events which I have to relate occurred. The ship on which I
was then was the fast clipper _China Castle_, John Hawkins, master,
and the passage was from Boston to Shanghai. Captain Hawkins was a
young man in years, like myself--about 26, I think. He had sailed the
_China Castle_ between New York and San Francisco at the time of the
California gold rush and was now taking her out on her first passage
to the East. At last she was to be put into the tea trade, for which
she had been built, but from which she had been taken from her very
launching for the immensely profitable California route. Besides
myself and Captain Hawkins there was in the cabin Mrs. Hawkins, his
young wife; she is the only other person aft who matters in my story.
She had not been married to Captain Hawkins long, only a year or
so, and this was her first passage with him and a sort of deferred
honeymoon.

Mrs. Hawkins was a beautiful woman, a young woman, of course. She
was, I think, two or three years younger than her husband and about
as much older than I. She was very pleasant, as agreeable as she was
beautiful; and she did not stand on ceremony as a captain’s wife is
likely to do. I suppose this was partly because it was her first
voyage and it may have been partly because we were all about the
same age; but it was mainly her own gracious nature. I, for my part,
had not seen or met many women and I had never seen or met any woman
like her. From a boy I had been to sea, and while I had been on ships
where the captains had their wives along they had never been women of
my own age. They had never been good-looking women, let alone being
half so lovely as Keturah Hawkins, and I had never been aft as first
officer and privileged to associate with them on terms of something
resembling social equality. Of course, social equality is impossible
on board a ship; but in so far as it could be brought about Mrs.
Hawkins brought it about in the cabin of the _China Castle_. That and
her beauty turned my head. She used to wear splendid jewels that her
husband had got for her, though they were nothing to what he procured
afterward, I judge, in the Orient. She had very fine blue eyes, a
bright and flashing blue such as you see in midocean, particularly
in the tropics in fine weather, the blue of deepest water. Her hair
was a dark red, in great coils as thick as the heaviest rope cable
aboard the ship, and her skin was a white that did not seem to tan
or lose its whiteness from wind or weather, though sometimes a faint
freckle or two would appear upon it. Her grandniece, though but a
young girl, is wonderfully like her in every appearance. The sight of
this girl tears me to pieces. It brings it all back. It brings back
the hour in which I went clean out of my senses, sitting there alone
in the cabin with Keturah Hawkins. She did not scream or struggle,
but in a moment she ran away and bolted herself in her room. Of
course when the Captain came down from the poop deck, where his
regular pacing had been audible over our heads all this time, she
told him.

I don’t know why he didn’t shoot me dead; well, yes, I think I do. I
think his wife interceded for me and I think he believed the proper
punishment could only be something everlastingly shameful and as
painful as possible. He had me triced up by the thumbs and flogged
in the sight of the crew. I was flogged till I lost consciousness.
It was two days before I could stand a watch. My only idea then was
to kill him. I told him so, which was an unnecessary thing to do.
He took precautions, however, such as seeing that I had no weapons,
and never giving me an opportunity to attack him. Mrs. Hawkins kept
to her room; I had my work to do, and that went on as though nothing
had happened. No private affair, no matter how serious, relaxes the
discipline of the sea. When I told Captain Hawkins that I would kill
him some day he only looked at me and said: “You’re a good ship’s
officer but you’re a disgrace to salt water. If you want to kill a
man, the first man for you to kill is Jacob King.”

I thought he meant suicide--“go drown yourself” as the contemptuous
phrase of the fo’c’s’le puts it. It was years before I saw what he
meant by that “If you want to kill a man, the first man for you to
kill is Jacob King.” I know now just what he was driving at. I have
killed Jacob King. I have killed my man. I won’t need to kill another.

But that has come a long time after. A long time. Too long, maybe.

When we reached Shanghai I got my discharge, of course, and a good
discharge it was, for I had done my work well and Captain Hawkins,
as fine a seaman as ever lived, was strictly just. I stayed ashore
awhile and lived an evil life, drinking and smoking opium and
consorting with thieves and ticket-of-leave men and all the riffraff
of an Eastern seaport. All the while I was haunted by the remembrance
of Keturah Hawkins. Drunk or sober, sane or in opium dreams, I
saw her--saw her great cables of dark red hair, her white skin,
her dazzling blue eyes, her delightful smile that she had smiled
expressly for the benefit of the young and capable first mate of
her husband’s fine ship. If I had been able to do it I would have
possessed myself of her even then. I would have killed her husband, I
would have killed every one aboard the _China Castle_, to have her.
In opium dreams I did kill them all; I slew all Shanghai and burned
the city and launched as many ships to pursue her as were launched to
bring back Helen from ancient Troy. All dreams, all mad delusions! I
was a fevered, burning, babbling, stupefied wretch of a sailor with
no money in my pockets and nothing to fall back upon but a splendid
ruggedness of body and a good discharge as first mate.

The good discharge was sufficient to get me a berth on a ship sailing
for San Francisco. Once at sea again I was all right except in my
mind. That had been all twisted and distorted by the punishment
inflicted upon me by Captain Hawkins. I couldn’t get over the
disgrace of it; which was deserved, of course, though I didn’t
think so. I kept thinking of myself as a man who had been shamed
beyond all deserving. I was convinced that I had merely been too
rashly assuming, and that if I had gone about it differently or
had taken more time, had not acted so impulsively----All this was
self-deception, of course, and it degraded Keturah Hawkins, in my
thoughts, at least. Perhaps I thought that if I could not lift myself
up to her I could pull her down to my level. What I didn’t see was
that a good woman--or a good man either, likely--cannot be lowered by
whatever baseness any one may choose to think or say. The only person
that is lowered is the thinker or the sayer. You’ll find this and a
whole lot more coiled away in that poem of Emerson’s about Brahma:
“I am the thinker and the thought,” or something like that, it runs.
I don’t know whether a man makes the thought that passes through his
mind, but I do know that the thought makes the man. At least, it
made me. I was still Jacob King, but I wasn’t the same Jacob King.
Something in me had been poisoned. The slow poisoning of----? The
swiftest poison is not the most sure.

I was very bad, I mean mentally, when I got to San Francisco, and
the life I led there did not mend me. Gradually as I kept seeing the
image of Keturah Hawkins in all states of sleep and waking, at all
hours and under the influence of all sorts of drugs and in the midst
of all kinds of surroundings the image itself faded; or changed and
coarsened. I did not notice that the dazzling blue, as of sunshine
trying vainly to shaft through unfathomable depths, had disappeared
from her eyes, but soon I could no longer see those heavy cables of
dark red hair, made up of so many twisted strands, nor the wonderful
milky whiteness of the skin. The features became indistinct, and soon
I saw clearly nothing but the magnificent jewels she had worn--the
ropes of pearls that took lustre from her skin; the emeralds that
shone in green drops in the rich, dark, smouldering red of her
hair; the sapphires that seemed to condense and make permanent the
more brilliant blue of her eyes. About these gems that she had worn
there was the glitter, the undying glitter of hard stones. All
that was lovely, all that was spiritual, all that was human in the
vision of her perished; and still the splendour of those jewels
remained. I used to see her as an imperceptible outline--no face, no
rounded arm, no wealth of hair, just an imagined outline with here
and there certain gorgeous jewels in an ornamental and decorative
arrangement--fastened on the air. At such times I went clean crazy,
but I could do nothing. I was getting too besotted to straighten up
for any length of time. And there wasn’t any cure. How could there
be? I couldn’t cure myself. I was being poisoned by the irremediable
past. How abolish the past? It’s all very well to talk about living
a thing down, but the only thing that can be lived down is the thing
that wasn’t entirely so. My past was.

It was in San Francisco that I got acquainted with a man named Hosea
Hand and came into a strange relationship with his brother, one
Richard Hand. Hosea Hand was a sailor, one of the crew of the ship
on which I had come from Shanghai. He was younger than I, and after
we got to San Francisco and the ship’s discipline relaxed I saw a
good deal of him, first and last. One day in a lonely mood he told
me his story. His brother had cheated him out of an inheritance, or
so he figured, and he had run away to sea, like myself, as a boy.
Two things about the story struck me: his brother, if what he said
was true, might pay money to have him stay away from home--not that
Hosea Hand had any thought of returning home but I could represent
him as being bent on doing so, and myself as able to keep him away,
for a price; the other thing--and this impressed and excited me much
the more strongly--was that the Hand farm was on Long Island not far
from the little town of Blue Port where Keturah Hawkins had her home.
I turned the whole thing over in my mind during the sodden days and
nights of a week. I do not believe that in the condition I was in
all that time I was capable of reaching a bold decision--not even
boldly evil. At last I wrote to Richard Hand. I told him that I, a
stranger to him, not only knew his brother’s whereabouts but knew
his story; and I had found Hosea Hand resolved to return home and
settle accounts. I could keep the boy away, but must have something
for doing it. It would be a sensible thing for him to do business
with me. I wanted money, and I wanted information. His reply and its
enclosure would be evidence of good faith.

He replied; and it was plain that he was frightened. Hosea Hand was
no longer in San Francisco, having shipped on a vessel for New York.
Richard Hand did not send much money, but any sum looked large to me
at the moment. I spent the money in one night, and began to consider
how I could get more, or how I should proceed next, having in mind
the fact that the young brother had expressed an intention of going
home. If he did so, I knew he would not bother Richard Hand further
than to tell him to his face that he was a cheat and might go to
the devil as fast as he liked. Then I should be unable to get more
money. I wrote to Richard Hand--the letter would reach him before
his brother appeared--asking about Captain Hawkins. Where was he,
where was his wife, what were their means, what connections had they?
Richard Hand sent back a pretty full account of the Hawkinses. Both
were at sea at the time. There was property. They had no child as
yet. Mrs. Hawkins had an older sister, married, with two children, a
boy and a girl. Their name was Smiley and the girl was named after
Mrs. Hawkins. In the event of the Hawkinses remaining childless,
these two would most likely inherit their property. All this did not
interest me much and I wrote no more to Richard Hand at that time. Of
a sudden the passion for that woman of the dark red hair and milky
skin reawakened in me. I was young; I shook off my dissipation, and
set out to find her.

In all sorts of ships and in any sort of berth I went about the
world, from seaport to seaport; and as I was a good ship’s officer
I had no trouble to get about. I sailed from San Francisco to New
York, and there I heard that Captain Hawkins had left the _China
Castle_ and was somewhere on the Western Ocean, as seamen term the
North Atlantic, with cotton for Liverpool. I followed, as nearly as
possible, but got to Liverpool after he had sailed on his return
trip. A long chase followed. There is no point in setting it down
here. It lasted for years. We three ranged from Singapore to Boston
and from Rotterdam to the Cape Settlement. Twice in that time I
caught glimpses of Keturah Hawkins. Once I saw her standing on the
afterdeck of her husband’s ship, clearing from Havre as we entered
the harbour; again I saw her driven past, on a boulevard in Rio de
Janeiro. The third time I did not have merely a glimpse of her but
met her face to face.

It was totally unexpected. I did not even know that the other vessel
in the harbour of Almeria was her husband’s. Almeria is a Spanish
town with nothing to recommend it to any one except the trader. I was
in ballast and called on the chance of a cargo--grapes or anything.
Above the town, on the bare brown hills, lies the ruin of the Moorish
fort, just a long enclosure, a masonry wall about shoulder high, with
embrasures. It is the only thing to see. She had come ashore to see
it, leaving her husband supervising the work of loading cargo, a job
he never left entirely to his mate. I was wandering around with a
young Spaniard; not that either of us could understand the other very
well but some kind of company seemed essential. We came upon her,
all alone, a foolhardy thing, but she had superb self-confidence.
She lifted her eyes, saw me, half turned and started away, walking
steadily but with no appearance of flight. I overtook her. I don’t
know, as I live, what I said, but whatever it was she never answered,
nor did she look at me. As we passed through the gateway out of the
fort she paused for an instant and gave a beggar a small coin. At
that moment I saw Captain Hawkins approaching.

He looked straight at me, never moving a muscle of his face,
approached her, and said something in an undertone, a request to
wait, I imagine. Then he came toward me and I turned and led the way
into the fort, within those shell-like walls four centuries old.
Inside I faced him. It was easy to see what was coming.

I was beaten, badly beaten. His fists, hard as iron belaying pins,
broke down my defence and hammered blows upon my head, my shoulders,
my body. I was soon winded and down, and still he did not leave off
beating me. He kicked me about as I grovelled there in the fine dust
of that Moorish citadel, the outpost of Granada. I was a dog and he
used me like a dog. When I was senseless he left. How I got out of it
I don’t know; I think the young Spaniard got others to help him and
put me on board my vessel. When I recovered the next day the other
ship had gone.