Chapter IV: Part 4

He found the third hole fouled and shrunk. In a stretch of mud, Rad had written with a stick, “If you follow me any further, I will shoot you on sight.” How did he know Billsky was so near? Maybe he’d seen his fire the night before. Billsky read the writing, and was dreadful hurt and grieved. “He doesn’t understand,” he said, “that I’m going to forgive him. It’s what I’m follerin’ him for.” He prayed half the night, and went on quicker than ever next day.

Few have ever been so far into the Altanero as the fourth hole. It’s hard to find. Long before Billsky made it, he saw a speck in the sky; it was a great bird, sailing round in little, slow circles. Under it was the fourth water-hole.

It was quite a pool when Billsky came to it. There were bushes round it, and fibrous grass. There were three burros feeding on the bushes, and a small tent pitched. A man came out of the tent, and when he saw Billsky he held up his hands.

“Don’t shoot,” he said, “I’m not Radway. You’ve no quarrel with me.”

“Nor with him,” said Billsky. “I’ve come to forgive him. Where is he?”

“Gone,” said the man, “gone mad, I guess. He’s pushed on alone. Day before yesterday I took sick. We was to rest up here, and then cast round careful, always within reach o’ this water. This morning he went out and climbed them rocks there. Then he came back, and said he must go on, he couldn’t wait. I went to stop him, and he laid me out. See here.” The man was most cryin’; he turned his face, and Billsky saw a great black swelling on his jaw. “He went on,” he said, “as if the devil was after him. And the devil’s you!”

Billsky was the meekest little hairy man; and now he too was fit to cry. “He don’t know me,” he said, very sad, “but it’ll be all right. . . . What’s on there?” he said, pointing beyond.

“God knows, who made it,” said the man, “out of hell’s leftovers. But no one else does, for no one’s ever been there.”

“It’ll be all right,” said Billsky again. “I’ll go on after him, and forgive him, and bring him back.”

He started out to do it, taking one of Rad’s burros, which were fresher than his; and bound he’d come up with Rad this time.

I don’t rightly know what happened there, beyond the last water. One thing, I never been there. I gather Billsky just pushed on as usual, following Rad’s tracks. He followed ’em easy: the only footsteps within a hundred miles or so! As he went he sang “Glory for Me,” because he was going to be able to forgive Rad at last.

The big bird in the sky, he swung off from the water-hole and followed Billsky. There was just them two moving things for him to see: Radway on ahead, mad to get away from Billsky, and old Billsky, mad to forgive him, and singing the glory song.

Billsky couldn’t tell me much about this part of it. He just went on, and on, and on. Sometimes, he said, there were stars. The place was so still he began to think he could hear ’em shine: a sort of fizzing, like an arc-light, which, of course, he knew to be foolishness. Sometimes there was just the sun, a great fire, like as if it were fastened to the earth and burning all the life out of it. There were the rocks, of course, but he didn’t remember them much: only one great black cleft, and a glimmer in the walls of it. The glimmer was gold-veined turquoise, just sticking out o’ that cliff so you could have pried it loose with a toothpick. Billsky couldn’t tell you where it was if you paid him. He wasn’t thinking of anything but forgiving Rad.

Then, with a noise, he says, like a roll of rifle-fire, that big bird dropped out of heaven like a stone, and shot past him, and settled just ahead. There was a dead burro there, and an empty water can. But Radway, he’d gone on. Billsky went after him, singing powerful; but his voice didn’t make much noise.

Then there was a little crack ahead. Something sang past Billsky, and flipped a tiny flake off of the side of the cañon. Billsky stopped and looked at the flake lying at his feet, just as pretty as a pink rose-leaf. He knew a bullet had chipped it off, and that he’d come within shooting length of Radway. He let out a yell of joy. “It’s me, Rad!” he yelled. “I’m comin’ to forgive you!” But Radway didn’t stop. He went on, as if he was mad; and behind him came the man that was killin’ him: the man that only wanted to forgive him.

There were more shots. Billsky said Rad fired at him all that afternoon, but owing to the refraction, he wasn’t hit once. Besides, Rad was breaking up. Once your nerve goes, you break up quick in the Altanero.

It was evening when Billsky came up with him.

You know evening on the Altanero? The sun’s down on the edge of things, as big as a burning house. All the rocks turn clear as glass for a minute. It’s as if the light went clean through them, and came out colored with their colors: rose, violet, gold. The air you breathe glows. The rosy-red cañon Billsky was in ended sudden in a wall that hit the sky. The sunset touched it, and it became like a veil, says Billsky, a blood-red curtain hung from earth to heaven. At the foot of it lay Bad Radway.

Billsky ran at him, trying to yell. He had his water flask ready. All day he’d been saving water to give to Radway, but he was too late. Rad just looked at him; and all that had been inside him: all the remorse, the guilt, the black fear, the unknown damage of the soul that first drove him to be scared of Billsky, came out in that look.

It struck Billsky to the heart. “Rad, Rad,” he said, “don’t you be scared o’ me! I forgive you, Rad!” he said.

But Bad Radway didn’t hear. He was dead.

Billsky had done his part, but he was all broke up. He got back to the water-hole somehow, after burying Rad at the foot of the cliff. He and the other man that had been Rad’s partner lit out for home right away. They’d had enough of the Altanero.

When I last saw Billsky, he was terrible hurt and grieved because the other man held him to blame for what had happened to Radway. “He seems to think,” said Billsky to me, “that I done something to him! Me that follered him all that way just to forgive him! He seems to think, that guy does, that I done something!”

Then, in a puzzled, exasperated kind of way, he laughed. “But come to think of it,” said Billsky, “it was funny.”

Well, as I said before, religion’s a queer thing to handle; but I don’t see anything funny in it.

_Marjorie L. C. Pickthall_.

TOLD TO PARSON

A little girl came rushing into the gate of the vicarage at Postbridge, Dartmoor, and it chanced that she met the minister himself as he bent in his garden and scattered lime around upspringing seeds.

“These slugs would try the patience of a saint,” he said, hearing footsteps, and not looking up. “They have eaten off nearly all my young larkspurs. How can one fight them?”

Then a small, breathless voice broke in upon him.

“Please, sir, mother sent me, an’ I’ve runned a’most all the way from our cottage wi’out stopping once. ’Tis old Mr. Mundy, please. He’m dying—so he told mother when her fetched him his milk this morning—an’ he says he’ve got something very special to tell anybody as’ll care to come an’ listen to it. But nobody don’t want to hear his secrets in the village; so mother said ’twas your job, please, an’ sent me for your honor.”

“My job—yes, so it is, little maid. I’ll come at once. An’ they’d better send for the doctor. It isn’t his regular visiting day until Thursday, but probably it’s his job, too.”

“Mother axed the old man that; an’ he said as he didn’t want no doctor, nor his traade [medicine] neither. He says h’m nearly a hundred years old, an’ he won’t be messed about with at his time of life, but just die easy an’ comfortable.”

In twenty minutes the clergyman had walked a mile and crossed a strip of the wilderness that stretched round about the little hamlet on Dartmoor where he labored. A single cottage separated from the rest by wide tracts of furze and heather stood here, and near it lay a neglected garden. But “Gaffer” Mundy had long ceased to fight the moor or care for his plot of land. His patch of the reclaimed earth returned fast to primitive savagery. Brake fern sprouted in the potato bed; rush, heather and briar choked the currant bushes; fearless rabbits nibbled every green thing.

“Come in, whoever you may be,” said an ancient voice. So the visitor obeyed and entered, to find the sufferer, fully dressed, sitting by a fire of peat. Noah Mundy was once very tall, but now his height had vanished and he had been long bent under his burden of years. A bald, yellow skull rose above his countenance, and infinite age marked his face. As the earth through centuries of cooling has wrinkled into mountains and flattened into ocean beds between them, so these aged features, stamped and torn with the fret and fever of long life, had become as a book whereon time had written many things for those who could read them. Very weak was the man, and very thin. He was toothless and almost hairless; the scanty beard that fell from his chin was white, while his mustache had long been dyed with snuff to a lively yellow. His eyes remained alive, though one was filmed over with an opaline haze. But from the other he saw clearly enough for all his needs. He made it a boast that he could not write, and he could not read. There was no book in his house.

“’Tis you, eh? I could have wished for a man out of your trade, but it won’t matter. I’ve got a thing worth telling; but mark this, I don’t care a button what you think of it, an’ I don’t want none of your bunkum an’ lies after I have told it. Sit down in that thicky chair an’ smoke your pipe an’ keep cool. Ban’t no use getting excited now, for what I be going to tell ’e happened more’n sixty years ago—afore you was born or thought about.”

“My smoke won’t trouble you?”

“Bah! I’ve smoked and chewed an’ snuffed for more’n half a century. I’m baccy through and through—soaked in it, as you might say. An’ as for smoke, if what you tell to church be true, I shall have smoke, an’ fire too, afore long. But hell’s only a joke to frighten females. I don’t set no store by it.”

“Better leave that, Mr. Mundy. If you really believe your end is near, let us be serious. Yes, I’ll smoke my pipe. And you must feel very, very sure, that what you tell me is absolutely sacred, unless you wish it otherwise.”

“Nought sacred about it, I reckon—all t’ other way. An’ as for telling, you can go an’ shout it from top of Bellever Tor you’m minded to. I don’t care a farden curse who knows it now. Wait till I’m out of it; then do as you please.”

He drank a little milk, remained silent a moment with his eyes upon the fire, and presently began to tell his life’s strange tale.

“Me an’ my brother was the only children our parents ever had; an’ my brother was five years older’n me. My father, Jonas Mundy, got money through a will, an’ he brought it to Dartymoor, like a fool, an’ rented a bit of moor from the Duchy of Cornwall, an’ built a farm upon it, an’ set to work to reclaim the land. At first he prospered, an’ Aller Bottom Farm, as my father called it, was a promising place, so long as sweat of man poured out there without ceasing. You can see the ruins of it yet, for when Jonas Mundy died an’ it falled to me, I left it an’ comed up here; an the chap as took it off my hands—he went bankrupt inside three year. ’Tis all falled to pieces now, for none tried again.

“But that’s to overrun the matter. When I was fifteen an’ my brother, John James, was twenty, us both failed in love with the same maid. You stare; but though fifteen in years, I was twenty-five in understanding, an’ a very oncoming youth where women were concerned. Nelly Baker had turned seventeen, an’ more than once I told her that though a boy of fifteen couldn’t wed a maid of her age without making folks laugh, even if he could get a parson to hitch them, yet a chap of three-an’-twenty might very properly take a girl of five-an’-twenty without the deed calling for any question. An’ her loved me truly enough; for though you only see a worn-out scarecrow afore you now, yet seventy year agone I filled the eye of more maidens than one, and was a bowerly youth to look upon—tall, straight, tough, wi’ hair so black as a crow.

“John James he never knowed that I cared a button for Nelly. I never showed it to a living soul but her by word or look; an’ she kept quiet—for fear of being laughed at, no doubt. Her folks were dead on the match with John James, an’ he pressed her so hard that she’d have took him but for me. He was a pretty fellow too—the Mundys were very personable as a family. Quite different, though, from me. Fair polled, wi’ flaxen hair, an terrible strong was John James, an’ the best wrastler on Dartymoor in them days.

“Me an’ her met by appointment a week afore she’d got to give him a final ‘yes’ or ‘no.’ I mind it very well to this hour; an’ yet ’tis seventy-odd years agone. On Hartland Tor us sat in the heather unseen, an’ I put my arms around her an’ loved her, an’ promised to make her a happy woman. Then I told her what she’d got to do. First I made her prick her finger wi’ a thorn of the furze, an’ draw blood, an’ swear afore the Living God she’d marry me as soon as I could make her mistress of a farm.

“She was for joking about the matter at first, but I soon forced her to grow serious. She done what I told her, an’ since she believed in the Living God, I reckoned her oath would bind her fast enough. As for me, I laughed out of sight, for I never believed in nothing but myself—not even when I was a boy under twenty years old. Next I bade her fall out with John James. I put words in her mouth to say to him. ‘I know the fashion of man he be—short an’ fiery in his temper,’ I told her. ‘Be hot an’ quick with him. Tell him he’s not your sort, an’ never will be—quarrel with his color, if you like. Tell him he’m too pink an’ white for ’e. Say ’tis enough that your own eyes be blue, an’ that you’d never wed a blue-eyed man. Make him angry—you ban’t a woman if you don’t know how to do that. Then the rest be easy enough. He’ll flare an’ flae like a tar barrel on Guy Fawkes Night. But he’ll trouble you no more, for he’m so proud as Satan.’

“Nelly Baker took in all I said; an’ inside a week she’d dropped my brother. But ’twas what he done after that startled folks, for without a word to any living soul, he vanished, like the dew of the morning, four-an’-twenty hours after she’d flinged him over. I was the last that seed him. We were working together out ’pon the land; an’ he was sour an’ crusty wi’ his trouble, an’ hadn’t a word to fling at me. Dimpsy light fell, an’ I went in a tool shed to don my jacket an’ go home. ’Twas autumn, an’ us had been spreading manure upon the meadow.

“‘Be you coming, John James?’ I said.

“‘You go to hell,’ he answered. ‘I’ll come when I’ve a mind to, an’ maybe I won’t come at all!’

“So home I walked wi’out another word; an’ he never comed; an’ nobody ever heard a whisper about him again from that day to this. For a soldier he went, ’twas thought; but the after history of un never reached nobody at Postbridge; an’ whether he was shot or whether he gathered glory in foreign parts none ’pon Dartymoor can tell you.

“A nine days’ wonder it was, an’ it killed my mother; for John James was the apple of her eye. Her never cared a button for me, ’cause I was the living likeness of her brother—my uncle, Silas Bond. They sent him to Botany Bay for burning down wheat stacks. A bad lot he was, no doubt; an’ a fool to boot, which is worse. For he got catched an’ punished. An’ he deserved all he got—for letting ’em catch him.

“With John James out of the way, I comed to be a bit more important in the house, an’ when my mother died, father got to trust me with his money. I was old for my years, you see. As for Nelly, she kept so true to me as the bird to her nest—for five years; an’ then I’d got to be twenty, an’ had saved over three hundred pound for her; an’ she was twenty-two. A good many chaps wanted to marry her; but she kept our secret close, an’ said ‘nay’ to some very snug men, an’ just waited for me an’ Aller Bottom Farm.

“Then, when I’d reckoned to name the day an’ take her so soon as I comed of age, Oliver Honeywell turned up from down country an’ rented that old tenement farm what be called Merripit. So good land as any ’pon all Dartymoor goes with it. An’ he comed wi’ a flourish of trumpets an’ plenty of money. He was going to larn us all how to farm, an’ how to make money ’pon weekdays, an’ how to get to heaven Sundays.

“Rot the devil! I see him now—a smug, sleek, fat, handsome, prosperous man, with the insolence of a spoilt cat! He’d preach in the open air of a Sunday, for there was no parson nor church here in them days. Strong as a horse,—a, very practical man,—always right. Did plenty of good, as the saying goes, an’ went about like a procession, as if he expected angels from heaven to be waiting for him at every street corner with a golden crown. His right hand was generous, but he took very good care his left hand knowed it. He didn’t do his good in secret, nor yet hide his light under a bushel.

“He was a black-haired man, wi’ scholarship an’ money behind him. He knew the better-most folk. They called upon him, I believe, an’ axed him to their houses, it was said. He hunted, and paid money to help three different packs o’ hounds. An old mother kept house for him. He tried to patronize the whole of Postbridge an’ play the squire an’ vicar rolled into one. Men as owed him nought an’ thanked him for nought pulled their hair to him. But there be some fools who will always touch their hats to a pair o’ horses. There comed to be an idea in people’s minds that Honeywell was a Godsend, though if you axed them why, they generally couldn’t tell you.

“An’ my Nelly falled in love with him.

“At least she said so; though Heaven knows that the pompous fool, for all his fine linen, weren’t a patch on what I was at twenty-one. Anyway, he comed courting her, for ’twas not known yet that me an’ Nelly was more’n friends; an’ then when he heard how we had been secretly tokened for no less than six years, he comed to see me with a long-winded lie in his mouth. An’ the lie was larded wi’ texts from scripture. Nelly Baker had misunderstood her feelings about me, he said; her had never knowed what true love was till she met him; an’ he hoped I’d behave as honestly as he had—an’ all the rest of it. In fact, she’d throwed me over for him an’ his money an’ his high position; an’ he comed to let me down gently with bits from the Bible. As for her, she always lusted after money and property.

“Us fought hand to hand, for I flew at him, man, like a dog, an’ I’d have strangled him an’ tored the liver out of him, but some chaps heard him howling an’ runned along, an’ pulled me off his throat in time.

“He didn’t have the law of me; but Nelly Baker kept out of my way afterwards, like as if I was the plague; an’ then six months passed an’ they was axed out in marriage so grand as you please at Widecombe Church.

“I only seed her once more; but after lying in wait for her, weeks an’ weeks, like a fox for a rabbit, it chanced at last that I met her one evening going home across the moor above Aller Bottom Farm ’pon the edge of the last of our fields. Then us had a bit of a tell. ’Twas only a fortnight afore she was going to marry Mr. Oliver Honeywell.

“I axed her to change her mind; I spoke to her so gentle as a dove croons; but she was ice all through—cold an’ hard an’ wicked to me. Then I growed savage. I noticed how mincing her’d growed in her speech since Honeywell had took her up. She was changed from a good Devon maid into a town miss, full o’ airs an’ graces that made me sick to see. He’d poisoned her.

“‘Do try an’ be sensible,’ she said. ‘We were silly children all them years, you know, Mr. Mundy. You’ll find somebody much better suited to you than I am—really you will. Have you ever thought of Mary Reep, now? She’s prettier than I am—I am sure she is.’

“Her named the darter of William Reep, a common laborer as worked on Honeywell’s farm at ten shilling a week. The devil in me broke loose, an’ quite right too.

“‘We’ve gone up in the world of late then? ’Twas always your hope and prayer to come by a bit of property. But ’tis a coorious thing,’ I said. ‘Do you know that you’m standing just where my brother, John James, stood last time ever he was seed by mortal eyes?’

“‘What’s that to me?’ she said. ‘Let me go by, please, Mr. Mundy. I’m late, as it is.’

“‘He was never seed again,’ I told her. ‘’Tis a coorious thing to me, as you be stand’—on the same spot at the same time—just as he did, in the first shadow of night. His going, you see, made me my father’s heir, an’ rich enough to give you a good home some day.’

“Then her growed a thought pale an’ tried to pass me.

“I went home presently; but from that hour Nelly Baker was seen no more. None ever knowed I’d been the last to speak with her; an’ none ever pitied me. But there was a rare fuss made over Oliver Honeywell. He wore black for her; an’ lived a bachelor for five year. Then he married a widow; but not till his mother died.

“An’ that’s the story I thought would interest some folks.”

The minister tapped his pipe on the hob, and knocked the ashes out. He cleared his throat and spoke. He had learned nothing that was new to him.

“It is a strange story indeed, Mr. Mundy, and I am interested to have heard it from your own lips. Rumor has not lied, for once. The tale, as you tell it, is substantially the same that has been handed down in this village for two generations. But no one knows that you were the last to see Nelly Baker. Did you ever guess what happened?”

The old man smiled, and showed his empty gums.

“No—I didn’t guess, because I knowed very well without guessing,” he said. “All the same I should have thought that you, with your mighty fine knowledge of human nature, would have guessed very quick. ’Twas I killed my brother—broke in the back of his head wi’ a pickax when he was down on one knee tying his bootlace. An’ me only fifteen year old! An’ I killed Nelly Baker—how, it don’t matter. You’ll find the dust of ’em side by side in one of them old ‘money pits’ ’pon Bellever Tor. ’Tis a place that looks due east, an’ there’s a ring of stones a hundred yards away from it. The ‘old men’ buried their dead there once, I’ve heard tell. Break down a gert flat slab o’ granite alongside a white thorn tree, an’ you’ll find what’s left of ’em in a deep hole behind. So she never comed by any property after all.”

The ancient sinner’s head fell forward, but his eyes were still open.

“Good God! After all these years! Man, man, make your peace! Confess your awful crime!” cried the clergyman.

The other answered:

“None of that—none of that rot! I’d do the same this minute; an’ if there was anything that comed after—if I meet that damned witch in hell tomorrow I’d kill her over again, if her still had a body I could shake the life out of. Now get you gone, an’ let me pass in peace.”

The reverend gentleman departed at his best speed, but presently returned, bringing soups and cordials. With him there came a cottage woman who performed services for the sick. But when Mrs. Badger saw Noah Mundy, she knew that little remained to do.

“He’s gone,” she said, “soft an’ sweet as a baby falls to sleep. Some soap an’ water an’ a coffin be all he wants now, your honor; not this here beautiful broth, nor brandy neither. So you had best go back along, Sir, an’ send Old Mother Dawe up to help me, if you please.”

_Eden Phillpotts_.

IRON

The child Cecily waited until her brother had made a bridge from a fallen bough, and then clasping her adorably grubby hands about his neck allowed him to carry her across the stream.

“Which way, little sister?” he asked.

A dragon-fly hovered above the water and then darted away, and Cecily with a vague idea of following it chose a sunken path that almost traced the brook in its course. It was a silent little stream running through the sleepy meadows, and where it widened among the pond lilies it almost stopped. Here and there it eddied self-consciously about the yellow flowers and further on it almost rippled in shy haste. And in the golden afternoon Cecily knew that the boy, so clever at building bridges, so capable in the midst of barbed wire, and above all, so kind to her, was wonderful beyond all telling.

* * * * *

When three tiny aeroplanes flew above the trenches, it reminded the boy of the dragon-flies over the brook at home, and once when he crawled through the mud and helped cut away some barbed wire, the barbed wire made him think of a bit of the brook which ran through the pasture. He remembered the wire had made a breakwater of drifting leaves and that Cecily had thrown stones at the leaves until they had slowly floated away in a great clump. And because he imagined himself a victim of unmanly sentiment, he detested these memories; so that after a while they returned no more.

At the training camp he had learned, or thought he had learned, the trick of withdrawing a bayonet after a supposedly unparried lunge. But here as he slipped in the wet snow trying to release the driven bayonet, the thing caught and tore and ripped the flesh. And to keep from falling he crushed and mangled the face beneath him with his heel. . .

* * * * *

Cecily in the twilight pressed her face against the window pane. The gaunt branch of a tree waved and pointed across the snow, but the little frozen stream was hidden away.

The child thought that when the boy returned he would still be wonderful.

_Randolph Edgar_.

THE PERFECT INTERVAL

The sound of the telephone bell brought the tuner’s mild blue eyes from his plate.

“F sharp,” he remarked. “Same pitch as the bell in my shop.”

“How extraordinary that you can name the pitch of a sound offhand!” exclaimed the professor, eyeing him with interest.

“All in the way of business,” replied the tuner placidly. “No, thank you, ma’arm, no cream on the pudding. I never paint the lily, as father used to say. . . . I’d not have been tuning pianos all over the world with a ‘come again’ always behind me if I hadn’t had something of an ear, would I, now?”

“But accurate to such a degree! I thought one tuned by chords and melodies and—and that sort of thing.”

“Chords! Melodies!” repeated the tuner with professional scorn. “Of course some do muddle along that way, but there’s nothing in it. The octave, there’s the interval to give the test to a man’s ear.”

“You’re Greek in your preferences,” commented the professor with a smile. “The Greeks, you know, knew nothing of harmony as we understand it. Their only interval was the octave—they called it magadizing.”

“Well now, to think of it!” said the tuner. “I wish I’d known. There was a Greek sailor on the Silvershell, and I might have had a chat with him about his music.”

“I was referring to the ancient Greeks,” the professor explained. “I am not familiar with modern Greek music, but I imagine it is very much like modern music everywhere.”

“Of course,” agreed the tuner cynically. “Comic operas, chords that give all ten fingers something to do—that’s music as they write it now. And I’m not saying that it hasn’t its place,” he went on. “It’s human, at least. Professionally, I admire the octave, but when I sit down in the evening for a bit of a rest and me daughter Nora plays ‘Vesper Chimes,’ the way those chords pile up on each other don’t hurt me the way it would some. After all, perfection’s apt to be a bit bleak, isn’t it? There was Cartwright, for instance. The octave came to be the only perfect interval for him—poor Cartwright!”

“Cartwright?” repeated the professor curiously.

“Haven’t I ever told you about Cartwright? Hm! Well!” He pushed his chair back a little from the table, fixed his eyes thoughtfully on the antics of a pair of orioles building a nest outside the window, and meditated for a moment. We were too wise to break the silence, for we knew that the tuner was digging up from the storehouse of a rich memory some fresh chapter in the Odyssey of his wanderings. After a little he began his tale.

* * * * *

What the professor here said about the Greeks and their octaves set me thinking about Cartwright. I haven’t often spoken of him, for there’s not much to tell that most people would understand. Molly, now, she always speaks of him as that poor crazy Mr. Cartwright. The perfect interval is nonsense, Molly says. Red Wing’s good enough for her. . . but I’d better begin at the beginning.

It was the time Molly and I were taking our wedding trip on the tramp schooner Silvershell, and we were cruising about the Pacific after copra and vanilla and all those cargoes that sound so romantic when one’s young. One of the ports we were bound for was a place called Taku, down in the Dangerous Archipelago. The captain warned us that it would be a bad trip.

“But you ought to make your fortune there,” he says, “for I’ll lay a wager you’re the first tuner that’s ever visited the place. Whether you get home to spend your money or not, that’s another matter. That’s on the knees of the gods,” says the captain, who was an Oxford man and had picked up some of his expressions there.

When we got in among the islands I saw what he meant. Coral they were, and reefs above water and below. Molly and I slept in our life preservers night after night, and daytime we could scarcely go down to meals for wondering how we’d get through that boiling sea of breakers and hidden peaks of coral. We’d some narrow shaves, too, but we made Taku, and anchored one evening in a lagoon that looked as if it might have been painted on a colored calendar, palms and parrots and native huts and all.

The Silvershell was to be in port some time, and the captain told us to look about as much as we liked.

“There’s an organ up at the mission,” he says. “It’s got asthma or something. If you can cure it, I’ll gladly foot the bill. I’m a church-going man when I’m ashore,” says the captain, who liked his joke, “but that organ puts me clean off religion.”

Well, I made a good job of the organ, and very grateful the ladies were for it, too. Then I went up to the British commissioner’s, where I was told there was a piano needing attention. Davidson, the commissioner, was an uncommonly decent chap, and he put me in the way of two or three more odd bits of tuning and repairing, besides having his own instrument put into shape. The missionary ladies had suggested that Molly and I stay with them while the Silvershell was in port, so I could put in a tidy bit of work in a day. But there were only twenty white families in the place, and I’d about gone through the work when one afternoon Davidson stopped me as I was going back to the mission, and asked me to step up to the house with him, as a friend of his wanted to talk with me about rather a large job of repairing he wished done.

The friend was Cartwright. I shall never forget that first sight of him, not to my dying day. He was standing in the big music room where I’d been working for Davidson two or three days before, and as we came in he turned and gave us such a look!

“Oh, it’s you!” he said, as if he’d expected something terrible to come in the door. And then, as Davidson introduced us, he nodded in an offhand sort of way. He was the only man I’ve ever called beautiful. Beautiful was the only word to describe him. “Golden lads,”—I once heard an actor spout about them at a play, and now, when I remember that expression, I think of Cartwright. He was a golden lad, for all his haunted, unhappy face.

“I’ve a piano at home that wants looking after,” he says to me after a moment. “Rather a large job, but if you are willing to go back with me in the morning I’ll make it worth your while.”

“If it isn’t too far away,” I said. “I’m only stopping here while the Silvershell is in port.”

“Not so far,” says Cartwright. “I could have you back here in three or four days. And I’ll make it worth your while.” In spite of his off-handedness, it was plain he was keen on having me come.

Of course I said I’d go, and then Cartwright nodded and said something about my being at the wharf about five, and left us, just like that.

“But he never told me what was needed for the piano,” I said to Davidson.

“About everything, I fancy,” Davidson answers gruffly. “It hasn’t been touched in ten years.”

“Ten years!” I said. “He’s no business having a piano if he cares no more for it than that.”

“He cared too much for it, perhaps,” Davidson said in a peculiar tone. He took out his pipe and fussed with it, then he went on. “Perhaps I ought to tell you. He hasn’t touched the piano since the night his wife drowned herself. . . . I was there at the time. Cartwright and Charlotte had been singing together.”

“Was Charlotte his wife?”

“His cousin, Sir John Brooke’s daughter. Sir John is my chief, you know. They are expected back from England almost any day now.”

Davidson’s face had gone quite red at the mention of the girl’s name, and all at once I guessed why he had been so keen about having his piano in shape. I wondered if it was for this Charlotte’s sake that Cartwright, too, was preparing.

“Cartwright’s wife was the daughter of old Miakela, the native chief,” was the surprising information Davidson offered me next. “She had been educated at a convent in Manila, and she was very beautiful in a cold, foreign way. I think, though, it was her voice that first attracted Cartwright. It was perfect; it made other quite nice voices sound coarse and shrill. Cartwright had come out to Taku to visit his uncle, and he met the girl here the evening she came back from Manila. The next day he married her—rode over the mountains to ask her father’s permission. That old savage—fancy! There was a huge row with Sir John, and Cartwright took the girl and went to live on a little atoll about forty miles from here. . . . Miss Charlotte hadn’t come out from school in England then. She came back the next year. . . That’s how it happened.”

As a matter of fact he really hadn’t told me how it happened at all, but he began to talk of other things, and after a bit I said good-night, and went back to tell Molly about my new job.

I wish you could have seen the lagoon the next morning when I went down to meet Cartwright. The old coral wharf was flushed with pink that shaded into mauve below the water, and the mauve went amethyst, and then violet blue out where the Silvershell slept at her anchor in the middle of the lagoon. And still! Not a ripple anywhere until a high-prowed native canoe slipped out from a pool of shadow under the palms along the shore, cutting through the glassy water like a boat in a dream. As she neared the wharf the sun jumped up from the sea, and Cartwright, all in white, stood up in the stern and shaded his eyes with his hand. He was a picture, his haunted beauty above the bronzed backs of the rowers.

He apologized for bringing me out so early, then seemed to forget all about me and sat silent, his eyes on the horizon line. Not that I minded. I wanted to be let alone, so I could look about me as we slipped along over a sea that seemed to have no end.

Once outside the lagoon, the men bent to their paddles with a will, breaking into a melody that reminded me of some hymn tune. They gave it a foreign twist by ending each line on the octave.

“Wonderful pitch!” I said.

“What’s that?” asked Cartwright, jerking his head round. I repeated what I’d said. He glared at me wildly, then seemed to pull himself together, and muttered some sort of reply.

“Well, if a simple speech has that effect on you, my lad, I’ll sit silent,” I said to myself, and silent I did sit the rest of the trip.

About the middle of the morning a bunch of what looked like feather clusters rose out of the sea in front of us. Pretty soon I could see a pinky ridge below, then a line of white. The men put up a brown sail, and in another hour we slid between two lines of breakers into the tiniest lagoon I ever saw, lying in the arms of a crescent-shaped atoll. The whole thing could not have been more than four or five miles long and fifty feet high at the ridge. There was a group of native huts on the beach and a rambling house above, set in a grove of breadfruit and citron and scarlet flame trees. The rest of the island was bare except for a brush of pandanus along the crest and a group of coconut palms on the point, their trunks leaning seaward, as if they were looking for something on the horizon. A lonely spot, yet with a sharp, gemlike beauty of its own.

“Won’t you come up and rest a bit?” Cartwright asked. “You had an early start this morning.”

I said I’d rather go right to work. I hadn’t forgotten the way he glared at me in the boat, and I wasn’t going to put myself in the way of another look like that.

“Right, then; I’ll show you the piano,” he says. But he didn’t move, only stood staring at me with the look of a small boy that had got himself into some trouble, and was wondering if I could help him out.

Suddenly he started off almost on a run, and led me around the shore to the point below the coconut palms, where a pavilion stood in a thick clump of trees. The place looked as if it hadn’t been visited for years. The path was choked with undergrowth, and the doorway was almost hidden by twisted ropes of lianas, growing down serpent fashion from the branches overhead.

“A sweet place to keep a piano,” I thought to myself. I could hardly believe it was the piano he was bringing me to. But as we reached the door I saw it in its wrapping of tarpaulin, half hid under forest rubbish that had filtered through the broken thatch of the roof. As I lifted one corner of the cover, something jumped up with a rush of wings and went screaming past my head. It gave me a proper fright.

“Just a parrot,” Cartwright said. “You’ve upset her nest, you see. Be careful when you lift the lid. There may be centipedes inside.”

“If you’ll clear the live stock off the outside, I’ll see to the inside,” I said. “I should think a cheaper piano would have done the parrots to nest in, sir.

“It seems odd to you,” he said meekly, wrinkling his forehead a little. “I wish I could explain—”

He caught himself up, and I answered never a word, but began examining the piano. It was a Broadwood grand, but the state it was in! I’d hard work not to give him a further piece of my mind.

For three days I worked at the poor thing. Hammers eaten off by the white ants, wires that the sea rust had done for, cracked keys, nothing really in shape but the sounding board. And all the time I was working the parrots kept screaming over my head, the trades blew through the torn thatch of palms, the surf beat on the pink and purple reefs beyond the point, and I kept thinking what a queer start it all was and how much I’d have to tell Molly when I got back.

Now and again Cartwright would stop a few minutes in the doorway and make jerky conversation, eyeing the piano like a starving man the while. He stopped quite a time the third morning. I was busy tuning and hadn’t much to say, but gradually he came nearer.

“How’s it coming on?” he asked.

“All in shape but one string,” I said. “Try the tone of it, sir.”

“I mustn’t touch it, I mustn’t touch it,” he says to himself, but all the time he was coming closer, as if something was pulling him on. He put out his hand and struck B flat octave.

“The upper B is mute!” he cries.

I explained that the string had broken twice, and I hadn’t got around to putting another in.

“Broken!” he says wildly. “She’s not going to have it there. And now I’ll not get the sound out of my head again!”

I suppose he saw something in my face that made him recollect himself. It was pitiful to see him pull himself together.

“Do your best with it, old chap,” he says hurriedly. “I’m depending on you. My uncle and cousin are to be back from England soon. I—I want everything right when my cousin Charlotte comes.”

He spoke the girl’s name as if it were a charm.

That evening, as we were smoking, he began to talk of his cousin again. She’d stayed with his people while she was going to school, he told me, and she and Cartwright had been great friends.

“She was comforting,” he said. “She made one feel happy and—and normal.” Then he said, in a tone that sounded as if he expected me to contradict him: “She had a good ear for music, too. Not perfect, of course. . . . Did you ever know any one with an ear so perfect that only the eighth interval satisfied them?”

“One or two,” I said, wondering what he was driving at now. “They were cranks, though. One should love music in reason, in my opinion.”

“In reason, that’s it,” Cartwright repeated in a low tone. “My cousin loved it in reason. I couldn’t. Perfection—I was tortured with the idea.”

I waited, and after a little he went on.

“I’ve never been able to care for things in reason. I wanted perfection. Music, love, I longed to lose myself in them, but couldn’t, because always something jarred, and then I grew cold. My cousin Charlotte used to laugh at me. She had a sweet voice. Not perfect, though, and sometimes it would irritate me to madness to hear the flaws that most people didn’t even notice. And yet even at sixteen Charlotte was dearer to me than any other creature on earth.

“Then I came out to Taku, and I met Lulukuila. She was beautiful beyond anything I had ever dreamed. She made other women look clumsy beside her. She stayed overnight at my uncle’s, and next day an escort came from the old chief, her father—six savages in pandanus kilts and necklaces. Those creatures came to take the very flower of womanhood back to uncivilized surroundings. I can’t tell you how horrible it seemed to me. And so I married her.”

Cartwright jumped up, and began walking up and down. After a while he switched off on another tack.

“Her voice was as perfect as her face,” he said, “and her sense of pitch was absolute. Those first days we used to go out to the point where the pavilion stands, and sit looking out over the reefs, and I thought I’d found happiness at last. I liked to hear her answer a certain note that the sea sounds in the reefs yonder when the tide is right. She would take up the note an octave higher, and it was thrilling, the perfection of her pitch. I sent home for the piano, imagining that it would be a bond between us. I thought I’d teach her the songs Charlotte and I used to sing together.

“But she hated the piano,” Cartwright brought out in a muffled voice. “I suppose I was rather a fool over it at first. I was so hungry for familiar music. Lulukuila couldn’t bear the music I’d grown up with. It brought out alien traits in her, gusts of passion, fits of moodiness. Octaves, those she’d listen to. Once when I filled in an octave she jumped up and caught my hands. I remember yet how she looked.

“‘You are drawn by the many voices,’ she said. ‘There should, be only one for you.’

“She went off to the pavilion then, and when I went to find her she was singing, following that sound the surf made on the reefs. The perfection of her pitch made me shiver. I began to hate it then. I saw that Lulukuila was going to destroy my pleasure in the music I had loved. She was robbing me—”

I don’t believe Cartwright was talking to any one in particular by this time. His voice dropped, and I missed a lot till I heard him mention his cousin. He stopped then, and looked at me for the first time.

“My uncle threw me over when I married Lulukuila,” he said, “but when my cousin Charlotte came out from England she made her father come over with her. She brought Davidson too—good sort, Davidson.

“I must have been homesick, for the sight of them seemed to wake me from a nightmare. I remember we were very jolly at dinner. Afterward Charlotte and I sang. I was thinking how good it was to hear the music of home again, when I caught sight of Lulukuila’s face in a shaft of light that reached out to where the rest were sitting. Her face was white, and her teeth were biting her lip.

“Charlotte stopped playing just then, and asked me why I had broken into the octave. The chord, she said, was so much prettier. I couldn’t tell her that it was Lulukuila’s interval haunting me. I hadn’t even known I was singing an octave,” Cartwright added with a sudden laugh. Then he went on.

“We didn’t sing any more, but went out to join the others. Lulukuila wasn’t there. I was just asking Davidson where she had gone, when I heard a splash down by the lagoon. All in a flash I remembered how her face had looked in the lamplight, and I started off down the path. . . . I got there too late.”

After a while he began muttering in a disconnected sort of way. “She had her way. I’ve never touched the piano since. Surely I have the right now, though, now Charlotte’s coming back—a little happiness.”

“That’s the thing to think of now, sir,” I says, wondering if I should call his man or leave him to talk himself out. “You weren’t to blame for what happened. Think of your cousin now.”

“My cousin, yes,” Cartwright murmured. He pulled himself up with a sharp breath.

“I’m afraid I’ve been talking an uncommon lot,” he said in his ordinary tone. “It’s late. You must be wanting to turn in.”

We commented on the sultriness of the night as we parted. The stars were hidden in a sort of murk, and the air had grown so still that the beetles bumping against the banana leaves overhead startled one like the crack of artillery.

Inside I found Simmons, Cartwright’s servant, tapping the barometer.

“It’s fallen uncommonly fast,” Simmons said to me. “Just as it did before the hurricane five years ago.

“The hurricane!” I said. “Did it do much damage?”

“Not to speak of,” Simmons said. “Some of the native huts were swept away when the water backed up into the lagoon, but the people had time to get up here. There’s no saying what might have happened if the water had come up two feet higher.”

“I hope there isn’t going to be a hurricane this time,” I said, thinking of Molly.

“I hope so, I’m sure,” says Simmons, in an undertaker’s voice.

It took more than a falling barometer to put me off sleep those days, and I was off sounder than usual that night. I waked at last in a bedlam of sound, wailing of wind, cracking of branches, and the thunder of surf from the barrier reef.

“It’s the hurricane that owl Simmons was wishing on us,” I thought. I struck a match to find my clothes, but a gust of wind puffed it out. I was just trying for the third time, when Simmons came in, carrying one of the two ship’s lanterns Cartwright kept by the outer door.

“Do you know where Mr. Cartwright is?” Simmons says.

“I? No. Isn’t he in bed?”

Simmons shook his head. “I’m afraid he’s gone down to the pavilion. He began to worry about the piano. I see the other lantern’s gone. I must go after him.”

“I’ll come with you, then,” I said. “Just hold the light while I find my clothes.”

Ordinarily that Yorkshire face of Simmons had no more expression than a granite slab, but he looked human enough now. If he cared for any earthly creature it was Cartwright. I’d not been in the house three days without finding that out.