*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 30466 ***
WILD ORANGES
King Vidor’s “Wild Oranges.” A Goldwyn Picture.
A SCENE FROM THE PHOTOPLAY.
WILD ORANGES
BY
JOSEPH HERGESHEIMER
ILLUSTRATED WITH SCENES FROM
KING VIDOR’S PHOTOPLAY
A GOLDWYN PICTURE
GROSSET & DUNLAP
PUBLISHERS NEW YORK
Made in the United States of America
COPYRIGHT, 1918, BY
ALFRED A. KNOPF, INC.
Published, April, 1918, in a volume now out of print,
entitled “Gold and Iron,” and then reprinted twice.
First published separately, March, 1922
TO
GEORGE HORACE LORIMER
WILD ORANGES
I
THE ketch drifted into the serene inclosure of
the bay as silently as the reflections moving
over the mirrorlike surface of the water.
Beyond a low arm of land that hid the sea the
western sky was a single, clear yellow; farther on
the left the pale, incalculably old limbs of cypress,
their roots bare, were hung with gathering
shadows as delicate as their own faint foliage.
The stillness was emphasized by the ceaseless murmur
of the waves breaking on the far, seaward
bars.
John Woolfolk brought the ketch up where he
intended to anchor and called to the stooping
white-clad figure in the bow: “Let go!” There
was an answering splash, a sudden rasp of hawser,
the booms swung idle, and the yacht imperceptibly
settled into her berth. The wheel turned impotently;
and, absent-minded, John Woolfolk locked
it. He dropped his long form on a carpet-covered
folding chair near by. He was tired.
His sailor, Poul Halvard, moved about with a
noiseless and swift efficiency; he rolled and cased
the jib, and then, with a handful of canvas stops,
secured and covered the mainsail and proceeded aft
to the jigger. Unlike Woolfolk, Halvard was
short—a square figure with a smooth, deep-tanned
countenance, colorless and steady, pale blue
eyes. His mouth closed so tightly that it appeared
immovable, as if it had been carved from some obdurate
material that opened for the necessities of
neither speech nor sustenance.
Tall John Woolfolk was darkly tanned, too, and
had a grey gaze, by turns sharply focused with
bright black pupils and blankly introspective. He
was garbed in white flannels, with bare ankles and
sandals, and an old, collarless silk shirt, with
sleeves rolled back on virile arms incongruously tattooed
with gauzy green cicadas.
He stayed motionless while Halvard put the
yacht in order for the night. The day’s passage
through twisting inland waterways, the hazard of
the tides on shifting flats, the continual concentration
on details at once trivial and highly necessary,
had been more wearing than the cyclone the ketch
had weathered off Barbuda the year before.
They had been landbound since dawn; and all day
John Woolfolk’s instinct had revolted against the
fields and wooded points, turning toward the open
sea.
Halvard disappeared into the cabin; and, soon
after, a faint, hot air, the smell of scorched metal,
announced the lighting of the vapor stove, the preparations
for supper. Not a breath stirred the surface
of the bay. The water, as transparently clear
as the hardly darkened air, lay like a great amethyst
clasped by its dim corals and the arm of the land.
The glossy foliage that, with the exception of a
small silver beach, choked the shore might have
been stamped from metal. It was, John Woolfolk
suddenly thought, amazingly still. The atmosphere,
too, was peculiarly heavy, languorous. It
was laden with the scents of exotic, flowering trees;
he recognized the smooth, heavy odor of oleanders
and the clearer sweetness of orange blossoms.
He was idly surprised at the latter; he had not
known that orange groves had been planted and
survived in Georgia. Woolfolk gazed more attentively
at the shore, and made out, in back of the
luxuriant tangle, the broad white façade of a dwelling.
A pair of marine glasses lay on the deck at
his hand; and, adjusting them, he surveyed the face
of a distinguished ruin. The windows on the
stained wall were broken in—they resembled the
empty eyes of the dead; storms had battered loose the
neglected roof, leaving a corner open to sun and
rain; he could see through the foliage lower down
great columns fallen about a sweeping portico.
The house was deserted, he was certain of that—the
melancholy wreckage of a vanished and resplendent
time. Its small principality, flourishing
when commerce and communication had gone by
water, was one of the innumerable victims of progress
and of the concentration of effort into huge
impersonalities. He thought he could trace other
even more complete ruins, but his interest waned.
He laid the glasses back upon the deck. The
choked bubble of boiling water sounded from the
cabin, mingled with the irregular sputter of cooking
fat and the clinking of plates and silver as Halvard
set the table. Without, the light was fading
swiftly; the wavering cry of an owl quivered from
the cypress across the water, and the western sky
changed from paler yellow to green. Woolfolk
moved abruptly, and, securing a bucket to the
handle of which a short rope had been spliced and
finished with an ornamental Turk’s-head, he swung
it overboard and brought it up half full. In the
darkness of the bucket the water shone with a faint
phosphorescence. Then from a basin he lathered
his hands with a thick, pinkish paste, washed his
face, and started toward the cabin.
He was already in the companionway when,
glancing across the still surface of the bay, he saw
a swirl moving into view about a small point. He
thought at first that it was a fish, but the next moment
saw the white, graceful silhouette of an arm.
It was a woman swimming. John Woolfolk could
now plainly make out the free, solid mass of her
hair, the naked, smoothly turning shoulder. She
was swimming with deliberate ease, with a long,
single overarm stroke; and it was evident that she
had not seen the ketch. Woolfolk stood, his gaze
level with the cabin top, watching her assured progress.
She turned again, moving out from the
shore, then suddenly stopped. Now, he realized,
she saw him.
The swimmer hung motionless for a breath; then,
with a strong, sinuous drive, she whirled about and
made swiftly for the point of land. She was visible
for a short space, low in the water, her hair
wavering in the clear flood, and then disappeared
abruptly behind the point, leaving behind—a last
vanishing trace of her silent passage—a smooth,
subsiding wake on the surface of the bay.
John Woolfolk mechanically descended the three
short steps to the cabin. There had been something
extraordinary in the woman’s brief appearance out
of the odorous tangle of the shore, with its ruined
habitation. It had caught him unprepared, in a
moment of half weary relaxation, and his imagination
responded with a faint question to which it had
been long unaccustomed. But Halvard, in crisp
white, standing behind the steaming supper viands,
brought his thoughts again to the day’s familiar
routine.
The cabin was divided through its forward half
by the centerboard casing, and against it a swinging
table had been elevated, an immaculate cover laid,
and the yacht’s china, marked in cobalt with the
name Gar, placed in a polished and formal
order. Halvard’s service from the stove to the
table was as silent and skillful as his housing of the
sails; he replaced the hot dishes with cold, and provided
a glass bowl of translucent preserved figs.
Supper at an end, Woolfolk rolled a cigarette from
shag that resembled coarse black tea and returned
to the deck. Night had fallen on the shore, but the
water still held a pale light; in the east the sky was
filled with an increasing, cold radiance. It was the
moon, rising swiftly above the flat land. The
moonlight grew in intensity, casting inky shadows
of the spars and cordage across the deck, making
the light in the cabin a reddish blur by contrast.
The icy flood swept over the land, bringing out with
a new emphasis the close, glossy foliage and broken
façade—it appeared unreal, portentous. The odors
of the flowers, of the orange blossoms, uncoiled in
heavy, palpable waves across the water, accompanied
by the owl’s fluctuating cry. The sense of
imminence increased, of a genius loci unguessed
and troublous, vaguely threatening in the perfumed
dark.
II
JOHN Woolfolk had said nothing to Halvard
of the woman he had seen swimming in
the bay. He was conscious of no particular
reason for remaining silent about her; but the thing
had become invested with a glamour that, he felt,
would be destroyed by commonplace discussion. He
had no personal interest in the episode, he was careful
to add. Interests of that sort, serving to connect
him with the world, with society, with women,
had totally disappeared from his life. He rolled
and lighted a fresh cigarette, and in the minute
orange spurt of the match his mouth was somber
and forbidding.
The unexpected appearance on the glassy water
had merely started into being a slight, fanciful curiosity.
The women of that coast did not commonly
swim at dusk in their bays; such simplicity obtained
now only in the reaches of the highest civilization.
There were, he knew, no hunting camps here, and
the local inhabitants were mere sodden squatters.
A chart lay in its flat canvas case by the wheel;
and, in the crystal flood of the moon, he easily reaffirmed
from it his knowledge of the yacht’s position.
Nothing could be close by but scattered huts
and such wreckage as that looming palely above the
oleanders.
Yet a woman had unquestionably appeared
swimming from behind the point of land off the
bow of the Gar. The women native to the locality,
and the men, too, were fanatical in the avoidance
of any unnecessary exterior application of water.
His thoughts moved in a monotonous circle, while
the enveloping radiance constantly increased. It
became as light as a species of unnatural day, where
every leaf was clearly revealed but robbed of all
color and familiar meaning.
He grew restless, and rose, making his way
forward about the narrow deck-space outside
the cabin. Halvard was seated on a coil of
rope beside the windlass and stood erect as Woolfolk
approached. The sailor was smoking a short
pipe, and the bowl made a crimson spark in his
thick, powerful hand. John Woolfolk fingered
the wood surface of the windlass bitts and found
it rough and gummy. Halvard said instinctively:
“I’d better start scraping the mahogany tomorrow,
it’s getting white.”
King Vidor’s “Wild Oranges.” A Goldwyn Picture.
A SCENE FROM THE PHOTOPLAY.
Woolfolk nodded. Halvard was a good man.
He had the valuable quality of commonly anticipating
spoken desires. He was a Norwegian, out of
the Lofoden Islands, where sailors are surpassingly
schooled in the Arctic seas. Poul Halvard, so far as
Woolfolk could discover, was impervious to cold, to
fatigue, to the insidious whispering of mere flesh.
He was a man without temptation, with an untroubled
allegiance to a duty that involved an endless,
exacting labor; and for those reasons he was austere,
withdrawn from the community of more fragile
and sympathetic natures. At times his inflexible
integrity oppressed John Woolfolk. Halvard,
he thought, was a difficult man to live up to.
He turned and absently surveyed the land. His
restlessness increased. He felt a strong desire for
a larger freedom of space than that offered by the
Gar, and it occurred to him that he might go ashore
in the tender. He moved aft with this idea growing
to a determination. In the cabin, on the shelf
above the berths built against the sides of the ketch,
he found an old blue flannel coat, with crossed
squash rackets and a monogram embroidered in
yellow on the breast pocket. Slipping it on, he
dropped over the stern of the tender.
Halvard came instantly aft, but Woolfolk declined
the mutely offered service. The oars made
a silken swish in the still bay as he pulled away from
the yacht. The latter’s riding light, swung on the
forestay, hung without a quiver, like a fixed yellow
star. He looked once over his shoulder, and then
the bow of the tender ran with a soft shock upon the
beach. Woolfolk bedded the anchor in the sand
and then stood gazing curiously before him.
On his right a thicket of oleanders drenched the
air with the perfume of their heavy poisonous
flowering, and behind them a rough clearing of saw
grass swept up to the débris of the fallen portico.
To the left, beyond the black hole of a decaying
well, rose the walls of a second brick building,
smaller than the dwelling. A few shreds of rotten
porch clung to its face; and the moonlight, pouring
through a break above, fell in a livid bar across the
obscurity of a high single chamber.
Between the crumbling piles there was the faint
trace of a footway, and Woolfolk advance to where,
inside a dilapidated sheltering fence, he came upon
a dark, compact mass of trees and smelled the increasing
sweetness of orange blossoms. He struck
the remains of a board path, and progressed with the
cold, waxen leaves of the orange trees brushing his
face. There was, he saw in the grey brightness,
ripe fruit among the branches, and he mechanically
picked an orange and then another. They
were small but heavy, and had fine skins.
He tore one open and put a section in his mouth.
It was at first surprisingly bitter, and he involuntarily
flung away what remained in his hand.
But after a moment he found that the oranges
possessed a pungency and zestful flavor that he had
tasted in no others. Then he saw, directly before
him, a pale, rectangular light which he recognized
as the opened door of a habitation.
III
HE advanced more slowly, and a low, irregular
house detached itself from the
tangled growth pressing upon it from all
sides. The doorway, dimly lighted by an invisible
lamp from within, was now near by; and John
Woolfolk saw a shape cross it, so swiftly furtive
that it was gone before he realized that a man had
vanished into the hall. There was a second stir on
the small covered portico, and the slender, white-clad
figure of a woman moved uncertainly forward.
He stopped just at the moment in which a low, clear
voice demanded: “What do you want?”
The question was directly put, and yet the tone
held an inexplicably acute apprehension. The
woman’s voice bore a delicate, bell-like shiver of
fear.
“Nothing,” he hastened to assure her. “When I
came ashore I thought no one was living here.”
“You’re from the white boat that sailed in at
sunset?”
“Yes,” he replied, “and I am returning
immediately.”
“It was like magic!” she continued. “Suddenly,
without a sound, you were anchored in the bay.”
Even this quiet statement bore the shadowy alarm.
John Woolfolk realized that it had not been caused
by his abrupt appearance; the faint accent of dread
was fixed in the illusive form before him.
“I have robbed you too,” he continued in a
lighter tone. “Your oranges are in my pocket.”
“You won’t like them,” she returned indirectly;
“they’ve run wild. We can’t sell them.”
“They have a distinct flavor of their own,” he
assured her. “I should be glad to have some on
the Gar.”
“All you want.”
“My man will get them and pay you.”
“Please don’t—” She stopped abruptly, as if
a sudden consideration had interrupted a liberal
courtesy. When she spoke again the apprehension,
Woolfolk thought, had increased to palpable fright.
“We would charge you very little,” she said finally.
“Nicholas attends to that.”
Silence fell upon them. She stood with her hand
resting lightly against an upright support, coldly
revealed by the moon. John Woolfolk saw that,
although slight, her body was delicately full, and
that her shoulders held a droop which somehow
resembled the shadow on her voice. She bore an
unmistakable refinement of being, strange in that
locality of meager humanity. Her speech totally
lacked the unintelligible, loose slurring of the
natives.
“Won’t you sit down,” she at last broke the
silence. “My father was here when you came up,
but he went in. Strangers disturb him.”
Woolfolk moved to the portico, elevated above
the ground, where he found a momentary place.
The woman sank back into a low chair. The stillness
gathered about them once more, and he
mechanically rolled a cigarette. Her white dress,
although simply and rudely made, gained distinction
from her free, graceful lines; her feet, in
black, heelless slippers, were narrow and sharply
cut. He saw that her countenance bore an even
pallor on which her eyes made shadows like those
on marble.
These details, unremarkable in themselves, were
charged with a peculiar intensity. John Woolfolk,
who long ago had put such considerations from his
existence, was yet clearly conscious of the disturbing
quality of her person. She possessed the indefinable
property of charm. Such women, he knew,
stirred life profoundly, reanimating it with extraordinary
efforts and desires. Their mere passage,
the pressure of their fingers, were more imperative
than the life service of others; the flutter of
their breath could be more tyrannical that the most
poignant memories and vows.
John Woolfolk thought these things in a manner
absolutely detached. They touched him at no
point. Nevertheless, the faint curiosity stirred
within him remained. The house unexpectedly
inhabited behind the ruined façade on the water, the
magnetic woman with the echo of apprehension in
her cultivated voice, the parent, so easily disturbed,
even the mere name “Nicholas,” all held a marked
potentiality of emotion; they were set in an almost
hysterical key.
He was suddenly conscious of the odorous
pressure of the flowering trees, of the orange
blossoms and the oleanders. It was stifling. He
felt that he must escape at once, from all the cloying
and insidious scents of the earth, to the open and
sterile sea. The thick tangle in the colorless light
of the moon, the dimmer portico with its enigmatic
figure, were a cunning essence of the existence from
which he had fled. Life’s traps were set with just
such treacheries—perfume and mystery and the
veiled lure of sex.
He rose with an uncouth abruptness, a meager
commonplace, and hurried over the path to the
beach, toward the refuge, the release, of the Gar.
John Woolfolk woke at dawn. A thin, bluish
light filled the cabin; above, Halvard was washing
the deck. The latter was vigorously swabbing the
cockpit when Woolfolk appeared, but he paused.
“Perhaps,” the sailor said, “you will stay here
for a day or two. I’d like to unship the propeller,
and there’s the scraping. It’s a good anchorage.”
“We’re moving on south,” Woolfolk replied, stating
the determination with which he had retired.
Then the full sense of Halvard’s words penetrated
his waking mind. The propeller, he knew, had not
opened properly for a week; and the anchorage was
undoubtedly good. This was the last place, before
entering the Florida passes, for whatever minor
adjustments were necessary.
The matted shore, flushed with the rising sun,
was starred with white and deep pink blooms; a
ray gilded the blank wall of the deserted mansion.
The scent of the orange blossoms was not so insistent
as it had been on the previous evening. The
land appeared normal; it exhibited none of the disturbing
influence of which he had been first conscious.
Last night’s mood seemed absurd.
“You are quite right,” he altered his pronouncement;
“we’ll put the Gar in order here. People
are living behind the grove, and there’ll be water.”
He had, for breakfast, oranges brought down the
coast, and he was surprised at their sudden insipidity.
They were little better than faintly sweetened
water. He turned and in the pocket of his
flannel coat found one of those he had picked the
night before. It was as keen as a knife; the peculiar
aroma had, without doubt, robbed him of all
desire for the cultivated oranges of commerce.
Halvard was in the tender, under the stern of the
ketch, when it occurred to John Woolfolk that it
would be wise to go ashore and establish his assertion
of an adequate water supply. He explained
this briefly to the sailor, who put him on the small
shingle of sand. There he turned to the right,
moving idly in a direction away from that he had
taken before.
He crossed the corner of the demolished abode,
made his way through a press of sere cabbage
palmettos, and emerged suddenly on the blinding
expanse of the sea. The limpid water lay in a
bright rim over corrugated and pitted rock,
where shallow ultramarine pools spread gardens of
sulphur-yellow and rose anemones. The land
curved in upon the left; a ruined landing extended
over the placid tide, and, seated there with her back
toward him, a woman was fishing.
It was, he saw immediately, the woman of the
portico. At the moment of recognition she turned,
and after a brief inspection, slowly waved her hand.
He approached, crossing the openings in the precarious
boarding of the landing, until he stood over
her. She said:
“There’s an old sheepshead under here I’ve been
after for a year. If you’ll be very still you can
see him.”
She turned her face up to him, and he saw that
her cheeks were without trace of color. At the
same time he reaffirmed all that he felt before with
regard to the potent quality of her being. She had
a lustrous mass of warm brown hair twisted into
a loose knot that had slid forward over a broad,
low brow; a pointed chin; and pale, disturbing
lips. But her eyes were her most notable feature—they
were widely opened and extraordinary in
color; the only similitude that occurred to John
Woolfolk was the grey greenness of olive leaves.
In them he felt the same foreboding that had shadowed
her voice. The fleet passage of her gaze left
an indelible impression of an expectancy that was
at once a dread and a strangely youthful candor.
She was, he thought, about thirty.
She wore now a russet skirt of thin, coarse texture
that, like the dress of the evening, took a slim
grace from her fine body, and a white waist, frayed
from many washings, open upon her smooth, round
throat.
“He’s usually by this post,” she continued, pointing
down through the clear gloom of the water.
Woolfolk lowered himself to a position at her
side, his gaze following her direction. There,
after a moment, he distinguished the sheepshead,
barred in black and white, wavering about the piling.
His companion was fishing with a short,
heavy rod from which time had dissolved the varnish,
an ineffectual brass reel that complained
shrilly whenever the lead was raised or lowered,
and a thick, freely-knotted line.
“You should have a leader,” he told her. “The
old gentleman can see your line too plainly.”
There was a sharp pull, she rapidly turned the
handle of the protesting reel, and drew up a gasping,
bony fish with extended red wings.
“Another robin!” she cried tragically. “This
is getting serious. Dinner,” she informed him,
“and not sport, is my object.”
He looked out to where a channel made a deep
blue stain through the paler cerulean of the sea.
The tide, he saw from the piling, was low.
“There should be a rockfish in the pass,” he
pronounced.
“What good if there is?” she returned. “I
couldn’t possibly throw out there. And if I could,
why disturb a rock with this?” She shook the
short awkward rod, the knotted line.
He privately acknowledged the palpable truth of
her objections, and rose.
“I’ve some fishing things on the ketch,” he said,
moving away. He blew shrilly on a whistle from
the beach, and Halvard dropped over the Gar’s
side into the tender.
Woolfolk was soon back on the wharf, stripping
the canvas cover from the long cane tip of a fishing
rod brilliantly wound with green and vermilion,
and fitting it into a dark, silver-capped butt. He
locked a capacious reel into place, and, drawing a
thin line through agate guides, attached a glistening
steel leader and chained hook. Then, adding a
freely swinging lead, he picked up the small mullet
that lay by his companion.
“Does that have to go?” she demanded. “It’s
such a slim chance, and it is my only mullet.”
He ruthlessly sliced a piece from the silvery side;
and, rising and switching his reel’s gear, he cast.
The lead swung far out across the water and fell
on the farther side of the channel.
“But that’s dazzling!” she exclaimed; “as
though you had shot it out of a gun.”
He tightened the line, and sat with the rod resting
in a leather socket fastened to his belt.
“Now,” she stated, “we will watch at the vain
sacrifice of an only mullet.”
The day was superb, the sky sparkled like a great
blue sun; schools of young mangrove snappers
swept through the pellucid water. The woman
said:
“Where did you come from and where are you
going?”
“Cape Cod,” he replied; “and I am going to the
Guianas.”
“Isn’t that South America?” she queried. “I’ve
traveled far—on maps. Guiana,” she repeated the
name softly. For a moment the faint dread in her
voice changed to longing. “I think I know all the
beautiful names of places on the earth,” she continued:
“Tarragona and Seriphos and Cambodia.”
“Some of them you have seen?”
“None,” she answered simply. “I was born
here, in the house you know, and I have never been
fifty miles away.”
This, he told himself, was incredible. The mystery
that surrounded her deepened, stirring more
strongly his impersonal curiosity.
“You are surprised,” she added; “it’s mad, but
true. There—there is a reason.” She stopped
abruptly, and, neglecting her fishing rod, sat with
her hands clasped about slim knees. She gazed
at him slowly, and he was impressed once more by
the remarkable quality of her eyes, grey-green like
olive leaves and strangely young. The momentary
interest created in her by romantic and far
names faded, gave place to the familiar trace of fear.
In the long past he would have responded immediately
to the appeal of her pale, magnetic countenance....
He had broken all connection with society,
with—
There was a sudden, impressive jerk at his line,
the rod instantly assumed the shape of a bent bow,
and, as he rose, the reel spindle was lost in a grey
blur and the line streaked out through the dipping
tip. His companion hung breathless at his
shoulder.
“He’ll take all your line,” she lamented as
the fish continued his straight, outward course,
while Woolfolk kept an even pressure on the
rod.
“A hundred yards,” he announced as he felt a
threaded mark wheel from under his thumb.
Then: “A hundred and fifty. I’m afraid it’s a
shark.” As he spoke the fish leaped clear of the
water, a spot of molten silver, and fell back in a
sparkling blue spray. “It’s a rock,” he added.
He stopped the run momentarily; the rod bent perilously
double, but the fish halted. Woolfolk reeled
in smoothly, but another rush followed, as strong
as the first. A long, equal struggle ensued, the thin
line was drawn as rigid as metal, the rod quivered
and arched. Once the rockfish was close enough
to be clearly distinguishable—strongly built, heavy-shouldered,
with black stripes drawn from gills to
tail. But he was off again with a short, blundering
rush.
“If you will hold the rod,” Woolfolk directed
his companion, “I’ll gaff him.” She took the rod
while he bent over the wharf’s side. The fish,
on the surface of the water, half turned; and, striking
the gaff through a gill, Woolfolk swung him
up on the boarding.
“There,” he pronounced, “are several dinners.
I’ll carry him to your kitchen.”
“Nicholas would do it, but he’s away,” she told
him; “and my father is not strong enough. That’s
a leviathan.”
John Woolfolk placed a handle through the rockfish’s
gills, and, carrying it with an obvious effort,
he followed her over a narrow, trampled path
through the rasped palmettos. They approached
the dwelling from behind the orange grove; and,
coming suddenly to the porch, surprised an incredibly
thin, grey man in the act of lighting a small
stone pipe with a reed stem. He was sitting, but,
seeing Woolfolk, he started sharply to his feet, and
the pipe fell, shattering the bowl.
“My father,” the woman pronounced: “Lichfield
Stope.”
“Millie,” he stuttered painfully, “you know—I—strangers—”
John Woolfolk thought, as he presented himself,
that he had never before seen such an immaterial
living figure. Lichfield Stope was like the shadow
of a man draped with unsubstantial, dusty linen.
Into his waxen face beat a pale infusion of blood,
as if a diluted wine had been poured into a semi-opaque
goblet; his sunken lips puffed out and collapsed;
his fingers, dust-colored like his garb,
opened and shut with a rapid, mechanical rigidity.
“Father,” Millie Stope remonstrated, “you must
manage yourself better. You know I wouldn’t
bring any one to the house who would hurt us.
And see—we are fetching you a splendid rockfish.”
The older man made a convulsive effort to regain
his composure.
“Ah, yes,” he muttered; “just so.”
The flush receded from his indeterminate countenance.
Woolfolk saw that he had a goatee laid
like a wasted yellow finger on his chin, and that
his hands hung on wrists like twisted copper wires
from circular cuffs fastened with large mosaic buttons.
“We are alone here,” he proceeded in a fluctuating
voice, the voice of a shadow; “the man is
away. My daughter—I—” He grew inaudible,
although his lips maintained a faint movement.
The fear that lurked illusively in the daughter
was in the parent magnified to an appalling panic,
an instinctive, acute agony that had crushed everything
but a thin, tormented spark of life. He
passed his hand over a brow as dry as the spongy
limbs of the cypress, brushing a scant lock like
dead, bleached moss.
“The fish,” he pronounced; “yes ... acceptable.”
“If you will carry it back for me,” Millie Stope
requested; “we have no ice; I must put it in water.”
He followed her about a bay window with ornamental
fretting that bore the shreds of old, variegated
paint. He could see, amid an incongruous
wreckage within, a dismantled billiard table, its
torn cloth faintly green beneath a film of dust.
They turned and arrived at the kitchen door.
“There, please.” She indicated a bench on the
outside wall, and he deposited his burden.
“You have been very nice,” she told him, making
her phrase less commonplace by a glance of her
wide, appealing eyes. “Now, I suppose, you will
go on across the world?”
“Not tonight,” he replied distantly.
“Perhaps, then, you will come ashore again.
We see so few people. My father would be benefited.
It was only at first, so suddenly—he was
startled.”
“There is a great deal to do on the ketch,” he
replied indirectly, maintaining his retreat from the
slightest advance of life. “I came ashore to discover
if you had a large water supply and if I might
fill my casks.”
“Rain water,” she informed him; “the cistern is
full.”
“Then I’ll send Halvard to you.” He withdrew
a step, but paused at the incivility of his leaving.
A sudden weariness had settled over the shoulders
of Millie Stope; she appeared young and very
white. Woolfolk was acutely conscious of her
utter isolation with the shivering figure on the
porch, the unmaterialized Nicholas. She had delicate
hands.
“Good-by,” he said, bowing formally. “And
thank you for the fishing.”
He whistled sharply for the tender.
King Vidor’s “Wild Oranges.” A Goldwyn Picture.
A SCENE FROM THE PHOTOPLAY.
IV
THROUGHOUT the afternoon, with a triangular
scraping iron, he assisted Halvard in
removing the whitened varnish from the
yacht’s mahogany. They worked silently, with
only the shrill note of the edges drawing across the
wood, while the westering sun plunged its diagonal
rays far into the transparent depths of the bay.
The Gar floated motionless on water like a pale evening
over purple and silver flowers threaded by
fish painted the vermilion and green of parrakeets.
Inshore the pallid cypresses seemed, as John Woolfolk
watched them, to twist in febrile pain. With
the waning of day the land took on its air of unhealthy
mystery; the mingled, heavy scents floated
out in a sickly tide; the ruined façade glimmered
in the half light.
Woolfolk’s thoughts turned back to the woman
living in the miasma of perfume and secret fear.
He heard again her wistful voice pronounce the
names of far places, of Tarragona and Seriphos, investing
them with the accent of an intense hopeless
desire. He thought of the inexplicable place of her
birth and of the riven, unsubstantial figure of the
man with the blood pulsing into his ocherous face.
Some old, profound error or calamity had laid its
blight upon him, he was certain; but the most lamentable
inheritance was not sufficient to account for
the acute apprehension in his daughter’s tones.
This was different in kind from the spiritual collapse
of the aging man. It was actual, he realized
that; proceeding—in part at least—from without.
He wondered, scraping with difficulty the under-turning
of a cathead, if whatever dark tide was centered
above her would, perhaps, descend through
the oleander-scented night and stifle her in the stagnant
dwelling. He had a swift, vividly complete
vision of the old man face down upon the floor in
a flickering, reddish light.
He smiled in self-contempt at this neurotic fancy;
and, straightening his cramped muscles, rolled a
cigarette. It might be that the years he had spent
virtually alone on the silence of various waters had
affected his brain. Halvard’s broad, concentrated
countenance, the steady, grave gaze and determined
mouth, cleared Woolfolk’s mind of its phantoms.
He moved to the cockpit and from there said:
“That will do for today.”
Halvard followed, and commenced once more
the familiar, ordered preparations for supper.
John Woolfolk, smoking while the sky turned to
malachite, became sharply aware of the unthinkable
monotony of the universal course, of the centuries
wheeling in dull succession into infinity.
Life seemed to him no more varied than the wire
drum in which squirrels raced nowhere. His own
lot, he told himself grimly, was no worse than another.
Existence was all of the same drab piece.
It had seemed gay enough when he was young,
worked with gold and crimson threads, and
then—
His thoughts were broken by Halyard’s appearance
in the companionway, and he descended to his
solitary supper in the contracted, still cabin.
Again on deck his sense of the monotony of life
trebled. He had been cruising now about the edges
of continents for twelve years. For twelve years
he had taken no part in the existence of the cities
he had passed, as often as possible without stopping,
and of the villages gathered invitingly under their
canopies of trees. He was—yes, he must be—forty-six.
Life was passing away; well, let it ...
worthless.
The growing radiance of the moon glimmered
across the water and folded the land in a gossamer
veil. The same uneasiness, the inchoate desire to
go ashore that had seized upon him the night before,
reasserted its influence. The face of Millie Stope
floated about him like a magical gardenia in the
night of the matted trees. He resisted the pressure
longer than before; but in the end he was seated in
the tender, pulling toward the beach.
He entered the orange grove and slowly approached
the house beyond. Millie Stope advanced
with a quick welcome.
“I’m glad,” she said simply. “Nicholas is back.
The fish weighed—”
“I think I’d better not know,” he interrupted.
“I might be tempted to mention it in the future,
when it would take on the historic suspicion of
the fish story.”
“But it was imposing,” she protested. “Let’s go
to the sea; it’s so limitless in the moonlight.”
He followed her over the path to where the remains
of the wharf projected into a sea as black,
and as solid apparently, as ebony, and across which
the moon flung a narrow way like a chalk mark.
Millie Stope seated herself on the boarding and he
found a place near by. She leaned forward, with
her arms propped up and her chin couched on her
palms. Her potency increased rather than diminished
with association; her skin had a rare texture;
her movements, the turn of the wrists, were
distinguished. He wondered again at the strangeness
of her situation.
She looked about suddenly and surprised his
palpable questioning.
“You are puzzled,” she pronounced. “Perhaps
you are setting me in the middle of romance.
Please don’t! Nothing you might guess—” She
broke off abruptly, returned to her former pose.
“And yet,” she added presently, “I have a perverse
desire to talk about myself. It’s perverse because,
although you are a little curious, you have no real
interest in what I might say. There is something
about you like—yes, like the cast-iron dog that
used to stand in our lawn. It rusted away, cold to
the last and indifferent, although I talked to it by
the hour. But I did get a little comfort from its
stolid painted eye. Perhaps you’d act in the same
way.
“And then,” she went on when Woolfolk had
somberly failed to comment, “you are going
away, you will forget, it can’t possibly matter. I
must talk, now that I have urged myself this far.
After all, you needn’t have come back. But where
shall I begin? You should know something of the
very first. That happened in Virginia.... My
father didn’t go to war,” she said, sudden and clear.
She turned her face toward him, and he saw that it
had lost its flower-like quality; it looked as if it had
been carved in stone.
“He lived in a small, intensely loyal town,” she
continued; “and when Virginia seceded it burned
with a single high flame of sacrifice. My father
had been always a diffident man; he collected
mezzotints and avoided people. So, when the
enlistment began, he shrank away from the crowds
and hot speeches, and the men went off without him.
He lived in complete retirement then, with his
prints, in a town of women. It wasn’t impossible
at first; he discussed the situation with the few old
tradesmen that remained, and exchanged bows with
the wives and daughters of his friends. But when
the dead commenced to be brought in from the front
it got worse. Belle Semple—he had always
thought her unusually nice and pretty—mocked at
him on the street. Then one morning he found an
apron tied to the knob of the front door.
“After that he went out only at night. His
servants had deserted him, and he lived by himself
in a biggish, solemn house. Sometimes the news
of losses and deaths would be shouted through his
windows; once stones were thrown in, but mostly he
was let alone. It must have been frightful in his
empty rooms when the South went from bad to
worse.” She paused, and John Woolfolk could
see, even in the obscurity, the slow shudder that
passed over her.
“When the war was over and what men were left
returned—one with hands gone at the wrists,
another without legs in a shabby wheelchair—the
life of the town started once more, but my father
was for ever outside of it. Little subscriptions
for burials were made up, small schemes for getting
the necessities, but he was never asked. Men
spoke to him again, even some of the women.
That was all.
“I think it was then that a curious, perpetual
dread fastened on his mind—a fear of the wind in
the night, of breaking twigs or sudden voices. He
ordered things to be left on the steps, and he would
peer out from under the blind to make sure that the
walk was empty before he opened the door.
“You must realize,” she said in a sharper voice,
“that my father was not a pure coward at first.
He was an extremely sensitive man who hated the
rude stir of living and who simply asked to be left
undisturbed with his portfolios. But life’s not like
that. The war hunted him out and ruined him; it
destroyed his being, just as it destroyed the fortunes
of others.
“Then he began to think—it was absolute fancy—that
there was a conspiracy in the town to kill
him. He sent some of his things away, got together
what money he had, and one night left his
home secretly on foot. He tramped south for
weeks, living for a while in small place after place,
until he reached Georgia, and then a town about
fifty miles from here—”
She broke off, sitting rigidly erect, looking out
over the level black sea with its shifting, chalky
line of light, and a long silence followed. The
antiphonal crying of the owls sounded over the
bubbling swamp, the mephitic perfume hung like a
vapor on the shore. John Woolfolk shifted his
position.
“My mother told me this,” his companion said
suddenly. “Father repeated it over and over
through the nights after they were married. He
slept only in snatches, and would wake with a gasp
and his heart almost bursting. I know almost
nothing about her, except that she had a brave heart—or
she would have gone mad. She was English
and had been a governess. They met in the little
hotel where they were married. Then father bought
this place, and they came here to live.”
Woolfolk had a vision of the tenuous figure of
Lichfield Stope; he was surprised that such acute
agony had left the slightest trace of humanity; yet
the other, after forty years of torment, still survived
to shudder at a chance footfall, the advent of a
casual and harmless stranger.
This, then, was by implication the history of the
woman at his side; it disposed of the mystery that
had veiled her situation here. It was surprisingly
clear, even to the subtle influence that, inherited
from her father, had set the shadow of his own
obsession upon her voice and eyes. Yet, in the
moment that she had been made explicable, he recalled
the conviction that the knowledge of an
actual menace lurked in her mind; he had seen it in
the tension of her body, in the anxiety of fleet backward
glances.
The latter, he told himself, might be merely a
symptom of mental sickness, a condition natural to
the influences under which she had been formed.
He tested and rejected that possibility—there could
be no doubt of her absolute sanity. It was patent
in a hundred details of her carriage, in her mentality
as it had been revealed in her restrained, balanced
narrative.
There was, too, the element of her mother to be
considered. Millie Stope had known very little
about her, principally the self-evident fact of the
latter’s “brave heart.” It would have needed that
to remain steadfast through the racking recitals of
the long, waking darks; to accompany to this desolate
and lonely refuge the man who had had an
apron tied to his doorknob. In the degree that the
daughter had been a prey to the man’s fear she
would have benefited from the stiffer qualities of
the English governess. Life once more assumed its
enigmatic mask.
His companion said:
“All that—and I haven’t said a word about myself,
the real end of my soliloquy. I’m permanently
discouraged; I have qualms about boring
you. No, I shall never find another listener as satisfactory
as the iron dog.”
A light glimmered far at sea. “I sit here a great
deal,” she informed him, “and watch the ships, a
thumbprint of blue smoke at day and a spark at
night, going up and down their water roads. You
are enviable—getting up your anchor, sailing
where you like, safe and free.” Her voice took on
a passionate intensity that surprised him; it was
sick with weariness and longing, with sudden revolt
from the pervasive apprehension.
“Safe and free,” he repeated thinly, as if satirizing
the condition implied by those commonplace,
assuaging words. He had, in his flight from
society, sought simply peace. John Woolfolk now
questioned all his implied success. He had found
the elemental hush of the sea, the iron aloofness of
rocky and uninhabited coasts, but he had never been
able to still the dull rebellion within, the legacy of
the past. A feeling of complete failure settled over
him. His safety and freedom amounted to this—that
life had broken him and cast him aside.
A long, hollow wail rose from the land, and
Millie Stope moved sharply.
“There’s Nicholas,” she exclaimed, “blowing on
the conch! They don’t know where I am; I’d
better go in.”
A small, evident panic took possession of her;
the shiver in her voice swelled.
“No, don’t come,” she added. “I’ll be quicker
without you.” She made her way over the wharf to
the shore, but there paused, “I suppose you’ll be
going soon?”
“Tomorrow probably,” he answered.
On the ketch Halvard had gone below for the
night. The yacht swayed slightly to an unseen
swell; the riding light moved backward and forward,
its ray flickering over the glassy water. John
Woolfolk brought his bedding from the cabin and,
disposing it on deck, lay with his wakeful dark face
set against the far, multitudinous worlds.
V
IN the morning Halvard proposed a repainting
of the engine.
“The Florida air,” he said, “eats metal overnight.”
And the ketch remained anchored.
Later in the day Woolfolk sounded the water
casks cradled in the cockpit, and, when they
answered hollow, directed his man with regard to
their refilling. They drained a cask. Halvard
put it on the tender and pulled in to the beach.
There he shouldered the empty container and disappeared
among the trees.
Woolfolk was forward, preparing a chain
hawser for coral anchorages, when he saw Halvard
tramping shortly back over the sand. He entered
the tender and, with a vicious shove, rowed
with a powerful, vindictive sweep toward the ketch.
The cask evidently had been left behind. He made
the tender fast and swung aboard with his notable
agility.
“There’s a damn idiot in that house,” he declared,
in a surprising departure from his customary detached
manner.
“Explain yourself,” Woolfolk demanded shortly.
“But I’m going back after him,” the sailor stubbornly
proceeded. “I’ll turn any knife out of his
hand.” It was evident that he was laboring under
an intense growing excitement and anger.
“The only idiot’s not on land,” Woolfolk told
him. “Where’s the water cask you took ashore?”
“Broken.”
“How?”
“I’ll tell you fast enough. There was nobody
about when I went up to the house, although there
was a chair rocking on the porch as if a person had
just left. I knocked at the door; it was open, and
I was certain that I heard someone inside, but nobody
answered. Then after a bit I went around
back. The kitchen was open, too, and no one in
sight. I saw the water cistern and thought I’d fill
up, when you could say something afterward. I
did, and was rolling the cask about the house when
this—loggerhead came out of the bushes. He
wanted to know what I was getting away with, and
I explained, but it didn’t suit him. He said I
might be telling facts and again I mightn’t. I saw
there was no use talking, and started rolling the
cask again; but he put his foot on it, and I pushed
one way and he the other—”
“And between you, you stove in the cask,” Woolfolk
interrupted.
“That’s it,” Poul Halvard answered concisely.
“Then I got mad, and offered to beat in his face,
but he had a knife. I could have broken it out of
his grip—I’ve done it before in a place or two—but
I thought I’d better come aboard and report before
anything general began.”
John Woolfolk was momentarily at a loss to establish
the identity of Halvard’s assailant.
He soon realized, however, that it must be Nicholas,
whom he had never seen, and who had blown
such an imperative summons on the conch the night
before. Halvard’s temper was communicated to
him; he moved abruptly to where the tender was
fastened.
“Put me ashore,” he directed. He would make
it clear that his man was not to be interrupted in
the execution of his orders, and that his property
could not be arbitrarily destroyed.
When the tender ran upon the beach and had
been secured, Halvard started to follow him, but
Woolfolk waved him back. There was a stir on
the portico as he approached, the flitting of an unsubstantial
form; but, hastening, John Woolfolk
arrested Lichfield Stope in the doorway.
“Morning,” he nodded abruptly. “I came to
speak to you about a water cask of mine.”
The other swayed like a thin, grey column of
smoke.
“Ah, yes,” he pronounced with difficulty. “Water
cask—”
“It was broken here a little while back.”
At the suggestion of violence such a pitiable panic
fell upon the older man that Woolfolk halted.
Lichfield Stope raised his hands as if to ward off
the mere impact of the words themselves; his face
was stained with the thin red tide of congestion.
“You have a man named Nicholas,” Woolfolk
proceeded. “I should like to see him.”
The other made a gesture as tremulous and
indeterminate as his speech and appeared to dissolve
into the hall. John Woolfolk stood for a
moment undecided and then moved about the house
toward the kitchen. There, he thought, he might
obtain an explanation of the breaking of the cask.
A man was walking about within and came to the
door as Woolfolk approached.
The latter told himself that he had never seen
a blanker countenance. In profile it showed a
narrow brow, a huge, drooping nose, a pinched
mouth and insignificant chin. From the front the
face of the man in the doorway held the round,
unscored cheeks of a fat and sleepy boy. The eyes
were mere long glimmers of vision in thick folds
of flesh; the mouth, upturned at the corners, lent a
fixed, mechanical smile to the whole. It was a
countenance on which the passage of time and
thoughts had left no mark; its stolidity had been
moved by no feeling. His body was heavy and
sagging. It possessed, Woolfolk recognized, a
considerable unwieldy strength, and was completely
covered by a variously spotted and streaked apron.
“Are you Nicholas?” John Woolfolk demanded.
The other nodded.
“Then, I take it, you are the man who broke my
water cask.”
“It was full of our water,” Nicholas replied in a
thick voice.
“That,” said Woolfolk, “I am not going to argue
with you. I came ashore to instruct you to let
my man and my property alone.”
“Then leave our water be.”
John Woolfolk’s temper, the instinctive arrogance
of men living apart from the necessary submissions
of communal life, in positions—however
small—of supreme command, flared through his
body.
“I told you,” he repeated shortly, “that I would
not discuss the question of the water. I have no
intention of justifying myself to you. Remember—your
hands off.”
The other said surprisingly: “Don’t get me
started!” A spasm of emotion made a faint, passing
shade on his sodden countenance; his voice
held almost a note of appeal.
“Whether you ‘start’ or not is without the slightest
significance,” Woolfolk coldly responded.
“Mind,” the man went on, “I spoke first.”
A steady twitching commenced in a muscle at
the flange of his nose. Woolfolk was aware of an
increasing tension in the other, that gained a
peculiar oppressiveness from the lack of any corresponding
outward expression. His heavy, blunt
hand fumbled under the maculate apron; his chest
heaved with a sudden, tempestuous breathing.
“Don’t start me,” he repeated in a voice so blurred
that the words were hardly recognizable. He swallowed
convulsively, his emotion mounting to an
inchoate passion, when suddenly a change was
evident. He made a short, violent effort to regain
his self-control, his gaze fastened on a point behind
Woolfolk.
The latter turned and saw Millie Stope approaching,
her countenance haggard with fear. “What
has happened?” she cried breathlessly while yet a
little distance away. “Tell me at once—”
“Nothing,” Woolfolk promptly replied, appalled
by the agony in her voice. “Nicholas and
I had a small misunderstanding. A triviality,” he
added, thinking of the other’s hand groping beneath
the apron.
King Vidor’s “Wild Oranges.” A Goldwyn Picture.
A SCENE FROM THE PHOTOPLAY.
VI
ON the morning following the breaking of
his water cask John Woolfolk saw the slender
figure of Millie on the beach. She
waved and called, her voice coming thin and clear
across the water:
“Are visitors—encouraged?”
He sent Halvard in with the tender, and as they
approached, dropped a gangway over the Gar’s
side. She stepped lightly down into the cockpit
with a naïve expression of surprise at the yacht’s
immaculate order. The sails lay precisely housed,
the stays, freshly tarred, glistened in the sun, the
brasswork and newly varnished mahogany shone,
the mathematically coiled ropes rested on a deck as
spotless as wood could be scraped.
“Why,” she exclaimed, “it couldn’t be neater if
you were two nice old ladies!”
“I warn you,” Woolfolk replied, “Halvard will
not regard that particularly as a compliment. He
will assure you that the order of a proper yacht
is beyond the most ambitious dream of a mere
housekeeper.”
She laughed as Halvard placed a chair for her.
She was, Woolfolk thought, lighter in spirit on the
ketch than she had been on shore; there was
the faintest imaginable stain on her petal-like
cheeks; her eyes, like olive leaves, were almost gay.
She sat with her slender knees crossed, her fine
arms held with hands clasped behind her head, and
clad in a crisply ironed, crude white dress, into the
band of which she had thrust a spray of orange
blossoms.
John Woolfolk was increasingly conscious of her
peculiar charm. Millie Stope, he suddenly realized,
was like the wild oranges in the neglected grove
at her door. A man brought in contact with her
magnetic being charged with appealing and mysterious
emotions, in a setting of exotic night and black
sea, would find other women, the ordinary concourse
of society, insipid—like faintly sweetened water.
She was entirely at home on the ketch, sitting
against the immaculate rim of deck and the sea. He
resented that familiarity as an unwarranted intrusion
of the world he had left. Other people,
women among them, had unavoidably crossed his
deck, but they had been patently alien, momentary;
but Millie, with her still delight at the yacht’s compact
comfort, her intuitive comprehension of its
various details—the lamps set in gimbals, the
china racks and chart cases slung overhead—entered
at once into the spirit of the craft that was
John Woolfolk’s sole place of being.
He was now disturbed by the ease with which
she had established herself both in the yacht and in
his imagination. He had thought, after so many
years, to have destroyed all the bonds which ordinarily
connect men with life; but now a mere curiosity
had grown into a tangible interest, and the interest
showed unmistakable signs of becoming sympathy.
She smiled at him from her position by the wheel;
and he instinctively responded with such an unaccustomed,
ready warmth that he said abruptly, seeking
refuge in occupation:
“Why not reach out to sea? The conditions
are perfect.”
“Ah, please!” she cried. “Just to take up the
anchor would thrill me for months.”
A light west wind was blowing; and deliberate,
exactly spaced swells, their tops laced with iridescent
spray, were sweeping in from a sea like a
glassy blue pavement. Woolfolk issued a short
order, and the sailor moved forward with his
customary smooth swiftness. The sails were shaken
loose, the mainsail slowly spread its dazzling expanse
to the sun, the jib and jigger were trimmed,
and the anchor came up with a short rush.
Millie rose with her arms outspread, her chin
high and eyes closed.
“Free!” she proclaimed with a slow, deep breath.
The sails filled and the ketch forged ahead.
John Woolfolk, at the wheel, glanced at the chart
section beside him.
“There’s four feet on the bar at low water,” he
told Halvard. “The tide’s at half flood now.”
The Gar increased her speed, slipping easily out
of the bay, gladly, it seemed to Woolfolk, turning
toward the sea. The bow rose, and the ketch dipped
forward over a spent wave. Millie Stope grasped
the wheelbox. “Free!” she said again with shining
eyes.
The yacht rose more sharply, hung on a wave’s
crest and slid lightly downward. Woolfolk, with
a sinewy, dark hand directing their course, was
intent upon the swelling sails. Once he stopped,
tightening a halyard, and the sailor said:
“The main peak won’t flatten, sir.”
The swells grew larger. The Gar climbed their
smooth heights and coasted like a feather beyond.
Directly before the yacht they were unbroken, but
on either side they foamed into a silver quickly reabsorbed
in the deeper water within the bar.
Woolfolk turned from his scrutiny of the ketch
to his companion, and was surprised to see her, with
all the joy evaporated from her countenance, clinging
rigidly to the rail. He said to himself, “Seasick.”
Then he realized that it was not a physical
illness that possessed her, but a profound, increasing
terror. She endeavored to smile back at his questioning
gaze, and said in a small, uncertain voice:
“It’s so—so big!”
For a moment he saw in her a clear resemblance
to the shrinking figure of Lichfield Stope. It was
as though suddenly she had lost her fine profile
and become indeterminate, shadowy. The grey
web of the old deflection in Virginia extended
over her out of the past—of the past that,
Woolfolk thought, would not die.
The Gar rose higher still, dropped into the deep,
watery valley, and the woman’s face was drawn and
wet, the back of her straining hand was dead white.
Without further delay John Woolfolk put the wheel
sharply over and told his man, “We’re going about.”
Halvard busied himself with the shaking sails.
“Really—I’d rather you didn’t,” Millie gasped.
“I must learn ... no longer a child.”
But Woolfolk held the ketch on her return course;
his companion’s panic was growing beyond her control.
They passed once more between the broken
waves and entered the still bay with its border of
flowering earth. There, when the yacht had been
anchored, Millie sat gazing silently at the open sea
whose bigness had so unexpectedly distressed her.
Her face was pinched, her mouth set in a straight,
hard line. That, somehow, suggested to Woolfolk
the enigmatic governess; it was in contradiction
to the rest.
“How strange,” she said at last in an insuperably
weary voice, “to be forced back to this place
that I loathe, by myself, by my own cowardice.
It’s exactly as if my spirit were chained—then the
body could never be free. What is it,” she demanded
of John Woolfolk, “that lives in our own
hearts and betrays our utmost convictions and efforts,
and destroys us against all knowledge and desire?”
“It may be called heredity,” he replied; “that is
its simplest phase. The others extend into the
realms of the fantastic.”
“It’s unjust,” she cried bitterly, “to be condemned
to die in a pit with all one’s instinct in the sky!”
The old plea of injustice quivered for a moment
over the water and then died away. John Woolfolk
had made the same passionate protest, he had
cried it with clenched hands at the withdrawn stars,
and the profound inattention of Nature had appalled
his agony. A thrill of pity moved him for
the suffering woman beside him. Her mouth was
still unrelaxed. There was in her the material for
a struggle against the invidious past.
In her slender frame the rebellion took on an accent
of the heroic. Woolfolk recalled how utterly
he had gone down before mischance. But his case
had been extreme, he had suffered an unendurable
wrong at the hand of Fate. Halvard diverted
his thoughts by placing before them a tray of sugared
pineapple and symmetrical cakes. Millie,
too, lost her tension; she showed a feminine pleasure
at the yacht’s fine napkins, approved the polish of
the glass.
“It’s all quite wonderful,” she said.
“I have nothing else to care for,” Woolfolk told
her.
“No place nor people on land?”
“None.”
“And you are satisfied?”
“Absolutely,” he replied with an unnecessary
emphasis. He was, he told himself aggressively;
he wanted nothing more from living and had nothing
to give. Yet his pity for Millie Stope mounted
obscurely, bringing with it thoughts, dim obligations
and desires, to which he had declared himself dead.
“I wonder if you are to be envied?” she queried.
A sudden astounding willingness to speak of himself,
even of the past, swept over him.
“Hardly,” he replied. “All the things that men
value were killed for me in an instant, in the flutter
of a white skirt.”
“Can you talk about it?”
“There’s almost nothing to tell; it was so unrelated,
so senseless and blind. It can’t be dressed
into a story, it has no moral—no meaning. Well—it
was twelve years ago. I had just been
married, and we had gone to a property in the
country. After two days I had to go into town,
and when I came back Ellen met me in a breaking
cart. It was a flag station, buried in maples, with
a white road winding back to where we were
staying.
“Ellen had trouble in holding the horse when the
train left, and the beast shied going from the
station. It was Monday, clothes hung from a line
in a side yard and a skirt fluttered in a little breeze.
The horse reared, the strapped back of the seat
broke, and Ellen was thrown—on her head. It
killed her.”
He fell silent. Millie breathed sharply, and a
ripple struck with a faint slap on the yacht’s side.
Then: “One can’t allow that,” he continued in a
lower voice, as if arguing with himself; “arbitrary,
wanton; impossible to accept such conditions—
“She was young,” he once more took up the
narrative; “a girl in a tennis skirt with a gay scarf
about her waist—quite dead in a second. The
clothes still fluttered on the line. You see,” he
ended, “nothing instructive, tragic—only a crude
dissonance.”
“Then you left everything?”
He failed to answer, and she gazed with a new
understanding and interest over the Gar. Her
attention was attracted to the beach, and, following
her gaze, John Woolfolk saw the bulky figure of
Nicholas gazing at them from under his palm. A
palpable change, a swift shadow, enveloped Millie
Stope.
“I must go back,” she said uneasily; “there will
be dinner, and my father has been alone all
morning.”
But Woolfolk was certain that, however convincing
the reasons she put forward, it was none of
these that was taking her so hurriedly ashore. The
dread that for the past few hours had almost
vanished from her tones, her gaze, had returned
multiplied. It was, he realized, the objective fear;
her entire being was shrinking as if in anticipation
of an imminent calamity, a physical blow.
Woolfolk himself put her on the beach; and,
with the tender canted on the sand, steadied her
spring. As her hand rested on his arm it gripped
him with a sharp force; a response pulsed through
his body; and an involuntary color rose in her pale,
fine cheeks.
Nicholas, stolidly set with his shoes half buried
in the sand, surveyed them without a shade of
feeling on his thick countenance. But Woolfolk
saw that the other’s fingers were crawling toward his
pocket. He realized that the man’s dully smiling
mask concealed sultry, ungoverned emotions, blind
springs of hate.
VII
AGAIN on the ketch the inevitable reaction
overtook him. He had spoken of Ellen’s
death to no one until now, through all the
years when he had been a wanderer on the edge of
his world, and he bitterly regretted his reference
to it. In speaking he had betrayed his resolution
of solitude. Life, against all his instinct, his
wishes, had reached out and caught him, however
lightly, in its tentacles.
The least surrender, he realized, the slightest
opening of his interest, would bind him with a
multitude of attachments; the octopus that he
dreaded, uncoiling arm after arm, would soon hold
him again, a helpless victim for the fury Chance.
He had made a disastrous error in following his
curiosity, the insistent scent of the wild oranges, to
the house where Millie had advanced on the dim
portico. His return there had been the inevitable
result of the first mistake, and the rest had followed
with a fatal ease. Whatever had been the deficiences
of the past twelve years he had been free
from new complications, fresh treacheries. Now,
with hardly a struggle, he was falling back into the
old trap.
The wind died away absolutely, and a haze
gathered delicately over the sea, thickening through
the afternoon, and turned rosy by the declining sun.
The shore had faded from sight.
A sudden energy leaped through John Woolfolk
and rang out in an abrupt summons to Halvard.
“Get up anchor,” he commanded.
Poul Halvard, at the mainstay, remarked
tentatively: “There’s not a capful of wind.”
The wide calm, Woolfolk thought, was but a
part of a general conspiracy against his liberty, his
memories. “Get the anchor up,” he repeated
harshly. “We’ll go under the engine.” The
sudden jarring of the Gar’s engine sounded muffled
in a shut space like the flushed heart of a shell.
The yacht moved forward, with a wake like folded
gauze, into a shimmer of formless and pure color.
John Woolfolk sat at the wheel, motionless except
for an occasional scant shifting of his hands.
He was sailing by compass; the patent log, trailing
behind on its long cord, maintained a constant,
jerking register on its dial. He had resolutely
banished all thought save that of navigation.
Halvard was occupied forward, clearing the deck
of the accumulations of the anchorage. When he
came aft Woolfolk said shortly: “No mess.”
The haze deepened and night fell, and the sailor
lighted and placed the port and starboard lights.
The binnacle lamp threw up a dim, orange radiance
on Woolfolk’s somber countenance. He continued
for three and four and then five hours at the wheel,
while the smooth clamor of the engine, a slight
quiver of the hull, alone marked their progress
through an invisible element.
Once more he had left life behind. This had
more the aspect of a flight than at any time previous.
It was, obscurely, an unpleasant thought, and he
endeavored—unsuccessfully—to put it from him.
He was but pursuing the course he had laid out, following
his necessary, inflexible determination.
His mind for a moment turned independently
back to Millie with her double burden of fear. He
had left her without a word, isolated with Nicholas,
concealing with a blank smile his enigmatic
being, and with her impotent parent.
Well, he was not responsible for her, he had paid
for the privilege of immunity; he had but listened to
her story, volunteering nothing. John Woolfolk
wished, however, that he had said some final, useful
word to her before going. He was certain that,
looking for the ketch and unexpectedly finding the
bay empty, she would suffer a pang, if only of loneliness.
In the short while that he had been there she
had come to depend on him for companionship,
for relief from the insuperable monotony of her surroundings;
for, perhaps, still more. He wondered
what that more might contain. He thought of
Millie at the present moment, probably lying awake,
steeped in dread. His flight now assumed the aspect
of an act of cowardice, of desertion. He rehearsed
wearily the extenuations of his position, but
without any palpable relief.
An even more disturbing possibility lodged in his
thoughts—he was not certain that he did not wish
to be actually back with Millie again. He felt the
quick pressure of her fingers on his arm as she
jumped from the tender; her magnetic personality
hung about him like an aroma. Cloaked in mystery,
pale and irresistible, she appealed to him from
the edge of the wild oranges.
This, he told himself again, was but the manner
in which a ruthless Nature set her lures; it was the
deceptive vestment of romance. He held the ketch
relentlessly on her course, with—now—all his
thoughts, his inclinations, returning to Millie Stope.
In a final, desperate rally of his scattering resolution
he told himself that he was unfaithful
to the tragic memory of Ellen. This last stay
broke abruptly, and left him defenseless against
the tyranny of his mounting desires. Strangely
he felt the sudden pressure of a stirring
wind upon his face; and, almost with an oath,
he put the wheel sharply over and the Gar swung
about.
Poul Halvard had been below, by inference
asleep; but when the yacht changed her course he
immediately appeared on deck. He moved aft, but
Woolfolk made no explanation, the sailor put no
questions. The wind freshened, grew sustained.
Woolfolk said:
“Make sail.”
Soon after, the mainsail rose, a ghostly white expanse
on the night. John Woolfolk trimmed the
jigger, shut off the engine; and, moving through a
sudden, vast hush, they retraced their course. The
bay was ablaze with sunlight, the morning well advanced,
when the ketch floated back to her anchorage
under the oleanders.
VIII
WHETHER he returned or fled, Woolfolk
thought, he was enveloped in an
atmosphere of defeat. He relinquished
the wheel, but remained seated, drooping at his post.
The indefatigable Halvard proceeded with the
efficient discharge of his narrow, exacting duties.
After a short space John Woolfolk descended to the
cabin, where, on an unmade berth, he fell immediately
asleep.
He woke to a dim interior and twilight gathering
outside. He shaved—without conscious purpose—with
meticulous care, and put on the blue flannel
coat. Later he rowed himself ashore and proceeded
directly through the orange grove to the house
beyond.
Millie Stope was seated on the portico, and
laid a restraining hand on her father’s arm as he
rose, attempting to retreat at Woolfolk’s approach.
The latter, with a commonplace greeting, resumed
his place.
Millie’s face was dim and potent in the gloom,
and Lichfield Stope more than ever resembled
an uneasy ghost. He muttered an indistinct response
to a period directed at him by Woolfolk and
turned with a low, urgent appeal to his daughter.
The latter, with a hopeless gesture, relinquished his
arm, and the other vanished.
“You were sailing this morning,” Millie commented
listlessly.
“I had gone,” he said without explanation.
Then he added: “But I came back.”
A silence threatened them which he resolutely
broke: “Do you remember, when you told me about
your father, that you wanted really to talk about
yourself? Will you do that now?”
“Tonight I haven’t the courage.”
“I am not idly curious,” he persisted.
“Just what are you?”
“I don’t know,” he admitted frankly. “At the
present moment I’m lost, fogged. But, meanwhile,
I’d like to give you any assistance in my power.
You seem, in a mysterious way, needful of help.”
She turned her head sharply in the direction of
the open hall and said in a high, clear voice, that
yet rang strangely false: “I am quite well cared
for by my father and Nicholas.” She moved closer
to him, dragging her chair across the uneven porch,
in the rasp of which she added, quick and low:
“Don’t—please.”
A mounting exasperation seized him at the secrecy
that veiled her, hid her from him, and he
answered stiffly: “I am merely intrusive.”
King Vidor’s “Wild Oranges.” A Goldwyn Picture.
A SCENE FROM THE PHOTOPLAY.
She was seated above him, and she leaned forward
and swiftly pressed his fingers, loosely
clasped about a knee. Her hand was as cold as
salt. His irritation vanished before a welling pity.
He got now a sharp, recognized happiness from her
nearness; his feeling for her increased with the accumulating
seconds. After the surrender, the admission,
of his return he had grown elemental, sensitized
to emotions rather than to processes of intellect.
His ardor had the poignancy of the period
beyond youth. It had a trace of the consciousness
of the fatal waning of life which gave it a depth
denied to younger passions. He wished to take
Millie Stope at once from all memory of the troublous
past, to have her alone in a totally different
and thrilling existence.
It was a personal and blind desire, born in the
unaccustomed tumult of his newly released feelings.
They sat for a long while, silent or speaking in
trivialities, when he proposed a walk to the sea; but
she declined in that curiously loud and false tone.
It seemed to Woolfolk that, for the moment, she had
addressed someone not immediately present; and
involuntarily he looked around. The light of the
hidden lamp in the hall fell in a pale, unbroken
rectangle on the irregular porch. There was not the
shifting of a pound’s weight audible in the stillness.
Millie breathed unevenly; at times he saw she
shivered uncontrollably. At this his feeling
mounted beyond all restraint. He said, taking her
cold hand: “I didn’t tell you why I went last night—it
was because I was afraid to stay where you
were; I was afraid of the change you were bringing
about in my life. That’s all over now, I—”
“Isn’t it quite late?” she interrupted him uncomfortably.
She rose and her agitation visibly increased.
He was about to force her to hear all that he
must say, but he stopped at the mute wretchedness
of her pallid face. He stood gazing up at her
from the rough sod. She clenched her hands, her
breast heaved sharply, and she spoke in a level,
strained voice:
“It would have been better if you had gone—without
coming back. My father is unhappy with
anyone about except myself—and Nicholas. You
see—he will not stay on the porch nor walk about
his grounds. I am not in need of assistance, as you
seem to think. And—thank you. Good night.”
He stood without moving, his head thrown back,
regarding her with a searching frown. He listened
again, unconsciously, and thought he heard
the low creaking of a board from within. It could
be nothing but the uneasy peregrination of Lichfield
Stope. The sound was repeated, grew louder,
and the sagging bulk of Nicholas appeared in the
doorway.
The latter stood for a moment, a dark, magnified
shape; and then, moving across the portico to
the farthest window, closed the shutters. The
hinges gave out a rasping grind, as if they had not
been turned for months, and there was a faint rattle
of falling particles of rusted iron. The man
forced shut a second set of shutters with a sudden
violence and went slowly back into the house. Millie
Stope said once more:
“Good night.”
It was evident to Woolfolk that he could gain
nothing more at present; and stifling an angry protest,
an impatient troop of questions, he turned and
strode back to the tender. However, he hadn’t the
slightest intention of following Millie’s indirectly
expressed wish for him to leave. He had the odd
conviction that at heart she did not want him to go;
the evening, he elaborated this feeling, had been all
a strange piece of acting. Tomorrow he would tear
apart the veil that hid her from him; he would ignore
her every protest and force the truth from her.
He lifted the tender’s anchor from the sand and
pulled sharply across the water to the Gar. A reddish,
misshapen moon hung in the east, and when
he had mounted to his deck it was suddenly obscured
by a high, racing scud of cloud; the air had
a damper, thicker feel. He instinctively moved to
the barometer, which he found depressed. The
wind, that had continued steadily since the night before,
increased, and there was a corresponding stir
among the branches ashore, a slapping of the
yacht’s cordage against the spars. He turned forward
and half absently noted the increasing strain
on the hawser disappearing into the dark tide. The
anchor was firmly bedded. The pervasive far murmur
of the waves on the outer bars grew louder.
The yacht swung lightly over the choppy water,
and a strong affection for the ketch that had been
his home, his occupation, his solace through the
past dreary years expanded his heart. He knew
the Gar’s every capability and mood, and they were
all good. She was an exceptional boat. His feeling
was acute, for he knew that the yacht had been
superseded. It was already an element of the past,
of that past in which Ellen lay dead in a tennis
skirt, with a bright scarf about her young waist.
He placed his hand on the mainmast, in the manner
in which another might drop a palm on the
shoulder of a departing faithful companion, and the
wind in the rigging vibrated through the wood
like a sentient and affectionate response. Then he
went resolutely down into the cabin, facing the future.
John Woolfolk woke in the night, listened for a
moment to the straining hull and wind shrilling
aloft, and then rose and went forward again to examine
the mooring. A second hawser now reached
into the darkness. Halvard had been on deck and
put out another anchor. The wind beat salt
and stinging from the sea, utterly dissipating the
languorous breath of the land, the odors of the
exotic, flowering trees.
IX
IN the morning a storm, driving out of the east,
enveloped the coast in a frigid, lashing rain.
The wind mounted steadily through the middle
of the day with an increasing pitch accompanied by
the basso of the racing seas. The bay grew opaque
and seamed with white scars. After the meridian
the rain ceased, but the wind maintained its volume,
clamoring beneath a leaden pall.
John Woolfolk, in dripping yellow oilskins, occasionally
circled the deck of his ketch. Halvard
had everything in a perfection of order. When the
rain stopped, the sailor dropped into the tender and
with a boat sponge bailed vigorously. Soon after,
Woolfolk stepped out upon the beach. He was
without any plan but the determination to put aside
whatever obstacles held Millie from him. This
rapidly crystallized into the resolve to take her
with him before another day ended. His feeling
for her, increasing to a passionate need, had destroyed
the suspension, the deliberate calm of his
life, as the storm had dissipated the sunny peace
of the coast.
He paused before the ruined façade, weighing her
statement that it would have been better if he had
not returned; and he wondered how that would affect
her willingness, her ability, to see him today.
He added the word “ability” instinctively and without
explanation. And he decided that, in order to
have any satisfactory speech with her, he must come
upon her alone, away from the house. Then he
could force her to hear to the finish what he wanted
to say; in the open they might escape from the inexplicable
inhibition that lay upon her expression
of feeling, of desire. It would be necessary,
at the same time, to avoid the notice of anyone who
would warn her of his presence. This precluded
his waiting at the familiar place on the rotting
wharf.
Three marble steps, awry and moldy, descended
to the lawn from a French window in the side of
the desolate mansion. They were screened by a
tangle of rose-mallow, and there John Woolfolk
seated himself—waiting.
The wind shrilled about the corner of the house;
there was a mournful clatter of shingles from above
and the frenzied lashing of boughs. The noise was
so great that he failed to hear the slightest indication
of the approach of Nicholas until that individual
passed directly before him. Nicholas stopped
at the inner fringe of the beach and, from a point
where he could not be seen from the ketch, stood
gazing out at the Gar pounding on her long anchor
chains. The man remained for an oppressively extended
period; Woolfolk could see his heavy, drooping
shoulders and sunken head; and then the other
moved to the left, crossing the rough open behind
the oleanders. Woolfolk had a momentary glimpse
of a huge nose and rapidly moving lips above an
impotent chin.
Nicholas, he realized, remained a complete
enigma to him; beyond the conviction that the man
was, in some minor way, leaden-witted, he knew
nothing.
A brief, watery ray of sunlight fell through a rift
in the flying clouds and stained the tossing foliage
pale gold; it was followed by a sudden drift of
rain, then once more the naked wind. Woolfolk
was fast determining to go up to the house and insist
upon Millie’s hearing him, when unexpectedly
she appeared in a somber, fluttering cloak, with her
head uncovered and hair blown back from her pale
brow. He waited until she had passed him, and
then rose, softly calling her name.
She stopped and turned, with a hand pressed to
her heart. “I was afraid you’d gone out,” she told
him. “The sea is like a pack of wolves.” Her
voice was a low complexity of relief and fear.
“Not alone,” he replied; “not without you.”
“Madness,” she murmured, gathering her wavering
cloak about her breast. She swayed, graceful as
a reed in the wind, charged with potency. He made
an involuntary gesture toward her with his arms;
but in a sudden accession of fear she eluded him.
“We must talk,” he told her. “There is a great
deal that needs explaining, that—I think—I have
a right to know, the right of your dependence on
something to save you from yourself. There is another
right, but only you can give that—”
“Indeed,” she interrupted tensely, “you mustn’t
stand here talking to me.”
“I shall allow nothing to interrupt us,” he returned
decidedly. “I have been long enough in the
dark.”
“But you don’t understand what you will, perhaps,
bring on yourself—on me.”
“I’m forced to ignore even that last.”
She glanced hurriedly about. “Not here then, if
you must.”
She walked from him, toward the second ruined
pile that fronted the bay. The steps to the gaping
entrance had rotted away and they were forced to
mount an insecure side piece. The interior, as
Woolfolk had seen, was composed of one high room,
while, above, a narrow, open second story hung like
a ledge. On both sides were long counters with
mounting sets of shelves behind them.
“This was the store,” Millie told him. “It was a
great estate.”
A dim and moldering fragment of cotton stuff
was hanging from a forgotten bolt; above, some tinware
was eaten with rust; a scale had crushed in the
floor and lay broken on the earth beneath; and a
ledger, its leaves a single, sodden film of grey, was
still open on a counter. A precarious stair mounted
to the flooring above, and Millie Stope made her
way upward, followed by Woolfolk.
There, in the double gloom of the clouds and a
small dormer window obscured by cobwebs, she
sank on a broken box. The decayed walls shook
perilously in the blasts of the wind. Below they
could see the empty floor, and through the doorway
the somber, gleaming greenery without.
All the patient expostulation that John Woolfolk
had prepared disappeared in a sudden tyranny of
emotion, of hunger for the slender, weary figure before
him. Seating himself at her side, he burst
into a torrential expression of passionate desire that
mounted with the tide of his eager words. He
caught her hands, held them in a painful grip, and
gazed down into her still, frightened face. He
stopped abruptly, was silent for a tempestuous
moment, and then baldly repeated the fact of his
love.
Millie Stope said:
“I know so little about the love you mean.” Her
voice trailed to silence; and in a lull of the storm
they heard the thin patter of rats on the floor below,
the stir of bats among the rafters.
“It’s quickly learned,” he assured her. “Millie,
do you feel any response at all in your heart—the
slightest return of my longing?”
“I don’t know,” she answered, turning toward him
a troubled scrutiny. “Perhaps in another surrounding,
with things different, I might care for you
very much—”
“I am going to take you into that other surrounding,”
he announced.
She ignored his interruption. “But we shall
never have a chance to learn.” She silenced his
attempted protest with a cool, flexible palm against
his mouth. “Life,” she continued, “is so dreadfully
in the dark. One is lost at the beginning. There are
maps to take you safely to the Guianas, but none
for souls. Perhaps religions are—Again I don’t
know. I have found nothing secure—only a
whirlpool into which I will not drag others.”
“I will drag you out,” he asserted.
She smiled at him, in a momentary tenderness,
and continued: “When I was young I never
doubted that I would conquer life. I pictured myself
rising in triumph over circumstance, as a gull
leaves the sea.... When I was young.... If
I was afraid of the dark then I thought, of course,
I would outgrow it; but it has grown deeper than my
courage. The night is terrible now.” A shiver
passed over her.
“You are ill,” he insisted, “but you shall be
cured.”
“Perhaps, a year ago, something might have been
done, with assistance; yes—with you. Then,
whatever is, hadn’t materialized. Why did you delay?”
she cried in a sudden suffering.
“You’ll go with me tonight,” he declared stoutly.
“In this?” She indicated the wind beating with
the blows of a great fist against the swaying sides
of the demolished store. “Have you seen the sea?
Do you remember what happened on the day I went
with you when it was so beautiful and still?”
John Woolfolk realized, wakened to a renewed
mental clearness by the threatening of all that he desired,
that—as Millie had intimated—life was too
complicated to be solved by a simple longing; love
was not the all-powerful magician of conventional
acceptance; there were other, no less profound,
depths.
He resolutely abandoned his mere inchoate wanting,
and considered the elements of the position that
were known to him. There was, in the first place,
that old, lamentable dereliction of Lichfield Stope’s,
and its aftermath in his daughter. Millie had just
recalled to Woolfolk the duration, the activity, of
its poison. Here there was no possibility of escape
by mere removal; the stain was within; and it must
be thoroughly cleansed before she could cope successfully,
happily, with life. In this, he was forced
to acknowledge, he could help her but little; it was
an affair of spirit; and spiritual values—though
they might be supported from without—had their
growth and decrease strictly in the individual they
animated.
Still, he argued, a normal existence, a sense of
security, would accomplish a great deal; and that in
turn hung upon the elimination of the second, unknown
element—the reason for her backward glances,
her sudden, loud banalities, yesterday’s mechanical
repudiation of his offered assistance and the
implied wish for him to go. He said gravely:
“I have been impatient, but you came so sharply
into my empty existence that I was upset. If you
are ill you can cure yourself. Never forget your
mother’s ‘brave heart.’ But there is something objective,
immediate, threatening you. Tell me what
it is, Millie, and together we will overcome and put
it away from you for ever.”
She gazed panic-stricken into the empty gloom
below. “No! no!” she exclaimed, rising. “You
don’t know. I won’t drag you down. You must
go away at once, tonight, even in the storm.”
“What is it?” he demanded.
She stood rigidly erect with her eyes shut and
hands clasped at her sides. Then she slid down
upon the box, lifting to him a white mask of fright.
“It’s Nicholas,” she said, hardly above her
breath.
A sudden relief swept over John Woolfolk. In
his mind he dismissed as negligible the heavy man
fumbling beneath his soiled apron. He wondered
how the other could have got such a grip on Millie
Stope’s imagination.
The mystery that had enveloped her was fast disappearing,
leaving them without an obstacle to the
happiness he proposed. Woolfolk said curtly:
“Has Nicholas been annoying you?”
She shivered, with clasped straining hands.
“He says he’s crazy about me,” she told him in a
shuddering voice that contracted his heart. “He
says that I must—must marry him, or—” Her
period trailed abruptly out to silence.
Woolfolk grew animated with determination, an
immediate purpose.
“Where would Nicholas be at this hour?” he
asked.
She rose hastily, clinging to his arm. “You
mustn’t,” she exclaimed, yet not loudly. “You
don’t know! He is watching—something frightful
would happen.”
“Nothing ‘frightful,’” he returned tolerantly,
preparing to descend. “Only unfortunate for Nicholas.”
“You mustn’t,” she repeated desperately, her
sheer weight hanging from her hands clasped about
his neck. “Nicholas is not—not human. There’s
something funny about him. I don’t mean funny,
I—”
He unclasped her fingers and quietly forced her
back to the seat on the box. Then he took a place
at her side.
“Now,” he asked reasonably, “what is this about
Nicholas?”
She glanced down into the desolate cavern of the
store; the ghostly remnant of cotton goods fluttered
in a draft like a torn and grimy cobweb; the lower
floor was palpably bare.
“He came in April,” she commenced in a voice
without any life. “The woman we had had for
years was dead; and when Nicholas asked for work
we were glad to take him. He wanted the smallest
possible wages and was willing to do everything; he
even cooked quite nicely. At first he was jumpy—he
had asked if many strangers went by; but
then when no one appeared he got easier.... He
got easier and began to do extra things for me. I
thanked him—until I understood. Then I asked
father to send him away, but he was afraid; and,
before I could get up my courage to do it, Nicholas
spoke—
“He said he was crazy about me, and would I
please try and be good to him. He had always
wanted to marry, he went on, and live right, but
things had gone against him. I told him that he
was impertinent and that he would have to go at
once; but he cried and begged me not to say that,
not to get him ‘started.’”
That, John Woolfolk recalled, was precisely what
the man had said to him.
“I went back to father and told him why he must
send Nicholas off, but father nearly suffocated. He
turned almost black. Then I got frightened and
locked myself in my room, while Nicholas sat out
on the stair and sobbed all night. It was ghastly!
In the morning I had to go down, and he went about
his duties as usual.
“That evening he spoke again, on the porch,
twisting his hands exactly as if he were making
bread. He repeated that he wanted me to be nice to
him. He said something wrong would happen if I
pushed him to it.
“I think if he had threatened to kill me it would
have been more possible than his hints and sobs.
The thing went along for a month, then six weeks,
and nothing more happened. I started again and
again to tell them at the store, two miles back in the
pines, but I could never get away from Nicholas;
he was always at my shoulder, muttering and twisting
his hands.
“At last I found something.” She hesitated,
glancing once more down through the empty
gloom, while her fingers swiftly fumbled in the
band of her waist.
“I was cleaning his room—it simply had to be
done—and had out a bureau drawer, when I saw
this underneath. He was not in the house, and I
took one look at it, then put the things back as near
as possible as they were. I was so frightened that
I slipped it in my dress—had no chance to return it.”
He took from her unresisting hand a folded rectangle
of coarse grey paper; and, opening it, found
a small handbill with the crudely reproduced photograph
of a man’s head with a long, drooping nose,
sleepy eyes in thick folds of flesh, and a lax under-lip
with a fixed, dull smile:
WANTED FOR MURDER!
The authorities of Coweta offer
THREE HUNDRED DOLLARS for the apprehension of
the below, Iscah Nicholas, convicted of the
murder of Elizabeth Slakto, an aged woman.
General description: Age about forty-eight.
Head receding, with large nose and stupid expression.
Body corpulent but strong. Nicholas
has no trade and works at general utility.
He is a homicidal maniac.
WANTED FOR MURDER!
“He told me that his name was Nicholas Brandt,”
Millie noted in her dull voice.
A new gravity possessed John Woolfolk.
“You must not go back to the house,” he decided.
“Wait,” she replied. “I was terribly frightened
when he went up to his room. When he came down
he thanked me for cleaning it. I told him he was
mistaken, that I hadn’t been in there, but I could
see he was suspicious. He cried all the time he was
cooking dinner, in a queer, choked way; and afterward
touched me—on the arm. I swam, but all
the water in the bay wouldn’t take away the feel of
his fingers. Then I saw the boat—you came
ashore.
King Vidor’s “Wild Oranges.” A Goldwyn Picture.
A SCENE FROM THE PHOTOPLAY.
“Nicholas was dreadfully upset, and hid in the
pines for a day or more. He told me if I spoke of
him it would happen, and if I left it would happen—to
father. Then he came back. He said that
you were—were in love with me, and that I must
send you away. He added that you must go today,
for he couldn’t stand waiting any more. He said
that he wanted to be right, but that things were
against him. This morning he got dreadful—if I
fooled him he’d get you, and me, too, and then there
was always father for something extra special.
That, he warned me, would happen if I stayed
away for more than an hour.” She rose, trembling
violently. “Perhaps it’s been an hour now. I
must go back.”
John Woolfolk thought rapidly; his face was
grim. If he had brought a pistol from the ketch
he would have shot Iscah Nicholas without hesitation.
Unarmed, he was reluctant to precipitate a
crisis with such serious possibilities. He could secure
one from the Gar, but even that short lapse of
time might prove fatal—to Millie or Lichfield
Stope. Millie’s story was patently fact in every
detail. He thought more rapidly still—desperately.
“I must go back,” she repeated, her words lost
in a sudden blast of wind under the dilapidated
roof.
He saw that she was right.
“Very well,” he acquiesced. “Tell him that you
saw me, and that I promised to go tonight. Act
quietly; say that you have been upset, but that you
will give him an answer tomorrow. Then at eight
o’clock—it will be dark early tonight—walk out
to the wharf. That is all. But it must be done
without any hesitation; you must be even cheerful,
kinder to him.”
He was thinking: She must be out of the way
when I meet Nicholas. She must not be subjected
to the ordeal that will release her from the dread
fast crushing her spirit.
She swayed, and he caught her, held her upright,
circled in his steady arms.
“Don’t let him hurt us,” she gasped. “Oh,
don’t!”
“Not now,” he reassured her. “Nicholas is finished.
But you must help by doing exactly as I
have told you. You’d better go on. It won’t be
long, hardly three hours, until freedom.”
She laid her cold cheek against his face, while her
arms crept round his neck. She said nothing; and
he held her to him with a sudden throb of feeling.
They stood for a moment in the deepening gloom,
bound in a straining embrace, while the rats gnawed
in the sagging walls of the store and the storm
thrashed without. She reluctantly descended the
stair, crossed the broken floor and disappeared
through the door.
A sudden unwillingness to have her return alone
to the sobbing menace of Iscah Nicholas, the impotent
wraith that had been Lichfield Stope, carried
him in an impetuous stride to the stair. But there
he halted. The plan he had made held, in its
simplicity, a larger measure of safety than any
immediate, unconsidered course.
John Woolfolk waited until she had had time to
enter the orange-grove; then he followed, turning
toward the beach.
He found Halvard already at the sand’s edge,
waiting uneasily with the tender, and they crossed
the broken water to where the Gar’s cabin flung out
a remote, peaceful light.
X
THE sailor immediately set about his familiar,
homely tasks, while Woolfolk made a minute
inspection of the ketch’s rigging. He
descended to supper with an expression of abstraction,
and ate mechanically whatever was placed before
him. Afterward he rolled a cigarette, which
he neglected to light, and sat motionless, chin on
breast, in the warm stillness.
Halvard cleared the table and John Woolfolk
roused himself. He turned to the shelf that ran
above the berths and secured a small, locked tin
box. For an hour or more he was engaged
alternately writing and carefully reading various
papers sealed with vermilion wafers. Then he
called Halvard.
“I’ll get you to witness these signatures,” he
said, rising. Poul Halvard hesitated; then, with a
furrowed brow, clumsily grasped the pen. “Here,”
Woolfolk indicated. The man wrote slowly,
linking fortuitously the unsteady letters of his name.
This arduous task accomplished, he immediately
rose. John Woolfolk again took his place, turning
to address the other, when he saw that one side of
Halvard’s face was bluish and rapidly swelling.
“What’s the matter with your jaw?” he promptly
inquired.
Halvard avoided his gaze, obviously reluctant to
speak, but Woolfolk’s silent interrogation was
insistent. Then:
“I met that Nicholas,” Halvard admitted; “without
a knife.”
“Well?” Woolfolk insisted.
“There’s something wrong with this cursed
place,” Halvard said defiantly. “You can laugh,
but there’s a matter in the air that’s not natural.
My grandmother could have named it. She heard
the ravens that called Tollfsen’s death, and read
Linga’s eyes before she strangulated herself.
Anyhow, when you didn’t come back I got doubtful
and took the tender in. Then I saw Nicholas
beating up through the bushes, hiding here and
there, and doubling through the grass; so I came on
him from the back and—and kicked him, quite
sudden.
“He went on his hands, but got up quick for a
hulk like himself. Sir, this is hard to believe, but
it’s Biblical—he didn’t take any more notice of the
kick than if it had been a flag halyard brushed
against him. He said ‘Go away,’ and waved his
foolish hands.
“I closed in, still careful of the knife, with a remark,
and got onto his heart. He only coughed
and kept telling me in a crying whisper to go away.
Nicholas pushed me back—that’s how I got this
face. What was the use? I might as well have
hit a pudding. Even talk didn’t move him. In
a little it sent me cold.” He stopped abruptly, grew
sullen; it was evident that he would say no more in
that direction. Woolfolk opened another subject:
“Life, Halvard,” he said, “is uncertain; perhaps
tonight I shall find it absolutely unreliable. What
I am getting at is this: if anything happens to me—death,
to be accurate—the Gar is yours, the ketch
and a sum of money. It is secured to you in this
box, which you will deliver to my address in Boston.
There is another provision that I’ll mention merely
to give you the opportunity to repeat it verbally from
my lips: the bulk of anything I have, in the possibility
we are considering, will go to a Miss Stope,
the daughter of Lichfield Stope, formerly of
Virginia.” He stood up. “Halvard,” Woolfolk
said abruptly, extending his hand, expressing for
the first time his repeated thought, “you are a good
man. You are the only steady quantity I have ever
known. I have paid you for a part of this, but the
most is beyond dollars. That I am now acknowledging.”
Halvard was cruelly embarrassed. He waited,
obviously desiring a chance to retreat, and
Woolfolk continued in a different vein:
“I want the canvas division rigged across the
cabin and three berths made. Then get the yacht
ready to go out at any time.”
One thing more remained; and, going deeper into
the tin box, John Woolfolk brought out a packet
of square envelopes addressed to him in a faded,
angular hand. They were all that remained now
of his youth, of the past. Not a ghost, not a
remembered fragrance nor accent, rose from the
delicate paper. They had been the property of a
man dead twelve years ago, slain by incomprehensible
mischance; and the man in the contracted
cabin, vibrating from the elemental and violent
forces without, forebore to open them. He burned
the packet to a blackish ash on a plate.
It was, he saw from the chronometer, seven
o’clock; and he rose charged with tense energy,
engaged in activities of a far different order. He
unwrapped from many folds of oiled silk a flat,
amorphous pistol, uglier in its bleak outline than
the familiar weapons of more graceful days; and,
sliding into place a filled cartridge clip, he threw a
load into the barrel. This he deposited in the
pocket of a black wool jacket, closely buttoned
about his long, hard body, and went up on deck.
Halvard, in a glistening yellow coat, came close
up to him, speaking with the wind whipping the
words from his lips. He said: “She’s ready, sir.”
For a moment Woolfolk made no answer; he
stood gazing anxiously into the dark that enveloped
and hid Millie Stope from him. There was another
darkness about her, thicker than the mere night, like
a black cerement dropping over her soul. His eyes
narrowed as he replied to the sailor: “Good!”
XI
JOHN Woolfolk peered through the night
toward the land.
“Put me ashore beyond the point,” he told
Halvard; “at a half-sunk wharf on the sea.”
The sailor secured the tender, and, dropping into
it, held the small boat steady while Woolfolk
followed. With a vigorous push they fell away
from the Gar. Halvard’s oars struck the water
smartly and forced the tender forward into the
beating wind. They made a choppy passage to the
rim of the bay, where, turning, they followed the
thin, pale glimmer of the broken water on the land’s
edge. Halvard pulled with short, telling strokes,
his oarblades stirring into momentary being livid
blurs of phosphorescence.
John Woolfolk guided the boat about the point
where he had first seen Millie swimming. He recalled
how strange her unexpected appearance had
seemed. It had, however, been no stranger than
the actuality which had driven her into the bay in
the effort to cleanse the stain of Iscah Nicholas’
touch. Woolfolk’s face hardened; he was suddenly
conscious of the cold weight in his pocket. He
realized that he would kill Nicholas at the first opportunity
and without the slightest hesitation.
The tender passed about the point, and he could
hear more clearly the sullen clamor of the waves on
the seaward bars. The patches of green sky had
grown larger, the clouds swept by with the apparent
menace of solid, flying objects. The land lay in a
low, formless mass on the left. It appeared
secretive, a masked place of evil. Its influence
reached out and subtly touched John Woolfolk’s
heart with the premonition of base treacheries. The
tormented trees had the sound of Iscah Nicholas
sobbing. He must take Millie away immediately;
banish its last memory from her mind, its influence
from her soul. It was the latter he always feared,
which formed his greatest hazard—to tear from her
the tendrils of the invidious past.
The vague outline of the ruined wharf swam forward,
and the tender slid into the comparative quiet
of its partial protection.
“Make fast,” Woolfolk directed. “I shall be out
of the boat for a while.” He hesitated; then:
“Miss Stope will be here; and if, after an hour, you
hear nothing from me, take her out to the ketch for
the night. Insist on her going. If you hear
nothing from me still, make the first town and
report.”
He mounted by a cross pinning to the insecure
surface above; and, picking his way to solid earth,
waited. He struck a match and, covering the light
with his palm, saw that it was ten minutes before
eight. Millie, he had thought, would reach the
wharf before the hour he had indicated. She
would not at any cost be late.
The night was impenetrable. Halvard was as
absolutely lost as if he had dropped, with all the
world save the bare, wet spot where Woolfolk stood,
into a nether region from which floated up great,
shuddering gasps of agony. He followed this idea
more minutely, picturing the details of such a
terrestrial calamity; then he put it from him with an
oath. Black thoughts crept insidiously into his
mind like rats in a cellar. He had ordinarily a
rigidly disciplined brain, an incisive logic, and he
was disturbed by the distorted visions that came to
him unbidden. He wished, in a momentary panic,
instantly suppressed, that he were safely away with
Millie in the ketch.
He was becoming hysterical, he told himself with
compressed lips—no better than Lichfield Stope.
The latter rose greyly in his memory, and fled across
the sea, a phantom body pulsing with a veined fire
like that stirred from the nocturnal bay. He again
consulted his watch, and said aloud, incredulously:
“Five minutes past eight.” The inchoate crawling
of his thoughts changed to an acute, tangible doubt,
a mounting dread.
He rehearsed the details of his plan, tried it at
every turning. It had seemed to him at the moment
of its birth the best—no, the only—thing to do,
and it was still without obvious fault. Some trivial
happening, an unforeseen need of her father’s, had
delayed Millie for a minute or two. But the
minutes increased and she did not appear. All his
conflicting emotions merged into a cold passion of
anger. He would kill Nicholas without a word’s
preliminary. The time drew out, Millie did not
materialize, and his anger sank to the realization of
appalling possibilities.
He decided that he would wait no longer. In
the act of moving forward he thought he heard,
rising thinly against the fluctuating wind, a sudden
cry. He stopped automatically, listening with every
nerve, but there was no repetition of the uncertain
sound. As Woolfolk swiftly considered it he was
possessed by the feeling that he had not heard the
cry with his actual ear but with a deeper, more
unaccountable sense. He went forward in a blind
rush, feeling with extended hands for the opening
in the tangle, groping a stumbling way through the
close dark of the matted trees. He fell over an exposed
root, blundered into a chill, wet trunk, and
finally emerged at the side of the desolate mansion.
Here his way led through saw grass, waist high, and
the blades cut at him like lithe, vindictive knives.
No light showed from the face of the house toward
him, and he came abruptly against the bay window
of the dismantled billiard room.
A sudden caution arrested him—the sound of his
approach might precipitate a catastrophe, and he
soundlessly felt his passage about the house to the
portico. The steps creaked beneath his careful
tread, but the noise was lost in the wind. At first
he could see no light; the hall door, he discovered,
was closed; then he was aware of a faint glimmer
seeping through a drawn window shade on the right.
From without he could distinguish nothing. He
listened, but not a sound rose. The stillness was
more ominous than cries.
John Woolfolk took the pistol from his pocket
and, automatically releasing the safety, moved to
the door, opening it with his left hand. The hall
was unlighted; he could feel the pressure of the
darkness above. The dank silence flowed over him
like chill water rising above his heart. He turned,
and a dim thread of light, showing through the
chink of a partly closed doorway, led him swiftly
forward. He paused a moment before entering,
shrinking from what might be revealed beyond, and
then flung the door sharply open.
His pistol was directed at a low-trimmed lamp in
a chamber empty of all life. He saw a row of
large black portfolios on low supports, a sewing bag
spilled its contents from a chair, a table bore a tin
tobacco jar and the empty skin of a plantain. Then
his gaze rested upon the floor, on a thin, inanimate
body in crumpled alpaca trousers and dark jacket,
with a peaked, congested face upturned toward the
pale light. It was Lichfield Stope—dead.
Woolfolk bent over him, searching for a mark of
violence, for the cause of the other’s death. At first
he found nothing; then, as he moved the body—its
lightness came to him as a shock—he saw that one
fragile arm had been twisted and broken; the hand
hung like a withered autumn leaf from its circular
cuff fastened with the mosaic button. That was all.
He straightened up sharply, with his pistol
levelled at the door. But there had been no noise
other than that of the wind plucking at the old tin
roof, rattling the shrunken frames of the windows.
Lichfield Stope had fallen back with his countenance
lying on a doubled arm, as if he were attempting to
hide from his extinguished gaze the horror of his
end. The lamp was of the common glass variety,
without shade; and, in a sudden eddy of air, it
flickered, threatened to go out, and a thin ribbon of
smoke swept up against the chimney and vanished.
On the wall was a wide stipple print of the early
nineteenth century—the smooth sward of a village
glebe surrounded by the low stone walls of ancient
dwellings, with a timbered inn behind broad oaks
and a swinging sign. It was—in the print—serenely
evening, and long shadows slipped out
through an ambient glow. Woolfolk, with pistol
elevated, became suddenly conscious of the withdrawn
scene, and for a moment its utter peace held
him spellbound. It was another world, for the security,
the unattainable repose of which, he longed
with a passionate bitterness.
The wind shifted its direction and beat upon the
front of the house; a different set of windows
rattled, and the blast swept compact and cold up
through the blank hall. John Woolfolk cursed his
inertia of mind, and once more addressed the profound,
tragic mystery that surrounded him.
He thought: Nicholas has gone—with Millie.
Or perhaps he has left her—in some dark, upper
space. A maddening sense of impotence settled upon
him. If the man had taken Millie out into the
night he had no chance of following, finding them.
Impenetrable screens of bushes lay on every hand,
with, behind them, mile after mile of shrouded pine
woods.
His plan had gone terribly amiss, with possibilities
which he could not bring himself to face.
All that had happened before in his life, and that
had seemed so insupportable at the time, faded to
insignificance. Shuddering waves of horror swept
over him. He raised his hand unsteadily, drew it
across his brow, and it came away dripping wet.
He was oppressed by the feeling familiar in evil
dreams—of gazing with leaden limbs at deliberate,
unspeakable acts.
He shook off the numbness of dread. He must
act—at once! How? A thousand men could
not find Iscah Nicholas in the confused darkness
without. To raise the scattered and meager
neighborhood would consume an entire day.
The wind agitated a rocking chair in the hall, an
erratic creaking responded, and Woolfolk started
forward, and stopped as he heard and then identified
the noise. This, he told himself, would not
do; the hysteria was creeping over him again. He
shook his shoulders, wiped his palm and took a
fresh grip on the pistol.
Then from above came the heavy, unmistakable
fall of a foot. It was not repeated; the silence
spread once more, broken only from without. But
there was no possibility of mistake, there had been
no subtlety in the sound—a slow foot had moved, a
heavy body had shifted.
At this actuality a new determination seized him;
he was conscious of a feeling that almost resembled
joy, an immeasurable relief at the prospect of action
and retaliation. He took up the lamp, held it
elevated while he advanced to the door with a ready
pistol. There, however, he stopped, realizing the
mark he would present moving, conveniently illuminated,
up the stair. The floor above was totally
unknown to him; at any turning he might be surprised,
overcome, rendered useless. He had a supreme
purpose to perform. He had already, perhaps
fatally, erred, and there must be no further
misstep.
John Woolfolk realized that he must go upstairs
in the dark, or with, at most, in extreme necessity, a
fleeting and guarded matchlight. This, too, since he
would be entirely without knowledge of his
surroundings, would be inconvenient, perhaps impossible.
He must try. He put the lamp back upon
the table, moving it farther out of the eddy from
the door, where it would stay lighted against a
possible pressing need. Then he moved from the
wan radiance into the night of the hall.
King Vidor’s “Wild Oranges.” A Goldwyn Picture.
A SCENE FROM THE PHOTOPLAY.
XII
HE formed in his mind the general aspect of
the house: its width faced the orange
grove, the stair mounted on the hall’s
right, in back of which a door gave to the billiard
room; on the left was the chamber of the lamp, and
that, he had seen, opened into a room behind, while
the kitchen wing, carried to a chamber above, had
been obviously added. It was probable that he
would find the same general arrangement on the
second floor. The hall would be smaller; a space
inclosed for a bath; and a means of ascent to the
roof.
John Woolfolk mounted the stair quickly and as
silently as possible, placing his feet squarely on the
body of the steps. At the top the handrail disappeared;
and, with his back to a plaster wall, he
moved until he encountered a closed door. That
interior was above the billiard room; it was on the
opposite floor he had heard the footfall, and he was
certain that no one had crossed the hall or closed a
door. He continued, following the dank wall. At
places the plaster had fallen, and his fingers encountered
the bare skeleton of the house. Farther
on he narrowly escaped knocking down a heavily
framed picture—another, he thought, of Lichfield
Stope’s mezzotints—but he caught it, left it hanging
crazily awry.
He passed an open door, recognized the bathroom
from the flat odor of chlorides, reached an angle of
the wall and proceeded with renewed caution.
Next he encountered the cold panes of a window and
then found the entrance to the room above the
kitchen.
He stopped—it was barely possible that the
sound he heard had echoed from here. He revolved
the wisdom of a match, but—he had progressed
very well so far—decided negatively. One
aspect of the situation troubled him greatly—the
absence of any sound or warning from Millie. It
was highly improbable that his entrance to the house
had been unnoticed. The contrary was probable—that
his sudden appearance had driven Nicholas
above.
Woolfolk started forward more hurriedly, urged
by his increasing apprehension, when his foot went
into the opening of a depressed step and flung him
sharply forward. In his instinctive effort to avoid
falling the pistol dropped clattering into the darkness.
A sudden choked cry sounded beside him,
and a heavy, enveloping body fell on his back.
This sent him reeling against the wall, where he
felt the muscles of an unwieldly arm tighten about
his neck.
John Woolfolk threw himself back, when a wrist
heavily struck his shoulder and a jarring blow fell
upon the wall. The hand, he knew, had held a
knife, for he could feel it groping desperately over
the plaster, and he put all his strength into an effort
to drag his assailant into the middle of the floor.
It was impossible now to recover his pistol, but
he would make it difficult for Nicholas to get the
knife. The struggle in that way was equalized.
He turned in the gripping arms about him and the
men were chest to chest. Neither spoke; each fought
solely to get the other prostrate, while Nicholas developed
a secondary pressure toward the blade
buried in the wall. This Woolfolk successfully
blocked. In the supreme effort to bring the struggle
to a decisive end neither dealt the other minor
injuries. There were no blows—nothing but the
straining pull of arms, the sudden weight of bodies,
the cunning twisting of legs. They fought swiftly,
whirling and staggering from place to place.
The hot breath of an invisible gaping mouth beat
upon Woolfolk’s cheek. He was an exceptionally
powerful man. His spare body had been hardened
by its years of exposure to the elements, in the constant
labor he had expended on the ketch, the long
contests with adverse winds and seas, and he had
little doubt of his issuing successful from the present
crisis. Iscah Nicholas, though his strength
was beyond question, was heavy and slow. Yet
he was struggling with surprising agility. He was
animated by a convulsive energy, a volcanic outburst
characteristic of the obsession of monomania.
The strife continued for an astonishing, an
absurd, length of time. Woolfolk became infuriated
at his inability to bring it to an end, and he
expended an even greater effort. Nicholas’ arms
were about his chest; he was endeavoring by sheer
pressure to crush Woolfolk’s opposition, when the
latter injected a mounting wrath into the conflict.
They spun in the open like a grotesque human top,
and fell. Woolfolk was momentarily underneath,
but he twisted lithely uppermost. He felt a heavy,
blunt hand leave his arm and feel, in the dark, for
his face. Its purpose was to spoil, and he caught it
and savagely bent it down and back; but a cruel
forcing of his leg defeated his purpose.
This, he realized, could not go on indefinitely;
one or the other would soon weaken. An insidious
doubt of his ultimate victory lodged like a burr in
his brain. Nicholas’ strength was inhuman; it increased
rather than waned. He was growing vindictive
in a petty way—he tore at Woolfolk’s
throat, dug the flesh from his lower arm. Thereafter
warm and gummy blood made John Woolfolk’s
grip insecure.
The doubt of his success grew; he fought more
desperately. His thoughts, which till now had been
clear, logically aloof, were blurred in blind spurts
of passion. His mentality gradually deserted him;
he reverted to lower and lower types of the human
animal; during the accumulating seconds of the
strife he swung back through countless centuries
to the primitive, snarling brute. His shirt was
torn from a shoulder, and he felt the sweating,
bare skin of his opponent pressed against him.
The conflict continued without diminishing. He
struggled once more to his feet, with Nicholas, and
they exchanged battering blows, dealt necessarily
at random. Sometimes his arm swept violently
through mere space, at others his fist landed with a
satisfying shock on the body of his antagonist. The
dark was occasionally crossed by flashes before
Woolfolk’s smitten eyes, but no actual light pierced
the profound night of the upper hall. At times
their struggle grew audible, smacking blows fell
sharply; but there was no other sound except that
of the wind tearing at the sashes, thundering dully
in the loose tin roof, rocking the dwelling.
They fell again, and equally their efforts slackened,
their grips became more feeble. Finally, as
if by common consent, they rolled apart. A leaden
tide of apathy crept over Woolfolk’s battered body,
folded his aching brain. He listened in a sort of
indifferent attention to the tempestuous breathing
of Iscah Nicholas. John Woolfolk wondered dully
where Millie was. There had been no sign of her
since he had fallen down the step and she had
cried out. Perhaps she was dead from fright.
He considered this possibility in a hazy, detached
manner. She would be better dead—if he failed.
He heard, with little interest, a stirring on the
floor beside him, and thought with an overwhelming
weariness and distaste that the strife was to commence
once more. But, curiously, Nicholas moved
away from him. Woolfolk was glad; and then he
was puzzled for a moment by the sliding of hands
over an invisible wall. He slowly realized that the
other was groping for the knife he had buried in the
plaster. John Woolfolk considered a similar
search for the pistol he had dropped; he might even
light a match. It was a rather wonderful weapon
and would spray lead like a hose of water. He
would like exceedingly well to have it in his hand
with Nicholas before him.
Then in a sudden mental illumination he realized
the extreme peril of the moment; and, lurching
to his feet, he again threw himself on the other.
The struggle went on, apparently to infinity; it
was less vigorous now; the blows, for the most part,
were impotent. Iscah Nicholas never said a word;
and fantastic thoughts wheeled through Woolfolk’s
brain. He lost all sense of the identity of his opponent
and became convinced that he was combating
an impersonal hulk—the thing that gasped and
smeared his face, that strove to end him, was the
embodied and evil spirit of the place, a place that
even Halvard had seen was damnably wrong. He
questioned if such a force could be killed, if a being
materialized from the outer dark could be stopped
by a pistol of even the latest, most ingenious
mechanism.
They fell and rose, and fell. Woolfolk’s fingers
were twisted in a damp lock of hair; they came
away—with the hair. He moved to his knees,
and the other followed. For a moment they rested
face to face, with arms limply clasped about the
opposite shoulders. Then they turned over on the
floor; they turned once more, and suddenly the darkness
was empty beneath John Woolfolk. He fell
down and down, beating his head on a series of
sharp edges; while a second, heavy body fell with
him, by turns under and above.
XIII
HE rose with the ludicrous alacrity of a
man who had taken a public and awkward
misstep. The wan lamplight, diffused
from within, made just visible the bulk that
had descended with him. It lay without motion,
sprawling upon a lower step and the floor. John
Woolfolk moved backward from it, his hand behind
him, feeling for the entrance to the lighted room.
He shifted his feet carefully, for the darkness was
wheeling about him in visible black rings streaked
with pale orange as he passed into the room.
Here objects, dimensions, became normally
placed, recognizable. He saw the mezzotint with
its sere and sunny peace, the portfolios on their
stands, like grotesque and flattened quadrupeds,
and Lichfield Stope on the floor, still hiding his
dead face in the crook of his arm.
He saw these things, remembered them, and yet
now they had new significance—they oozed a sort
of vital horror, they seemed to crawl with a malignant
and repulsive life. The entire room was
charged with this palpable, sentient evil. John
Woolfolk defiantly faced the still, cold inclosure;
he was conscious of an unseen scrutiny, of a menace
that lived in pictures, moved the fingers of the
dead, and that could take actual bulk and pound
his heart sore.
He was not afraid of the wrongness that inhabited
this muck of house and grove and matted bush.
He said this loudly to the prostrate form; then,
waiting a little, repeated it. He would smash
the print with its fallacious expanse of peace. The
broken glass of the smitten picture jingled thinly on
the floor. Woolfolk turned suddenly and defeated
the purpose of whatever had been stealthily behind
him; anyway it had disappeared. He stood in a
strained attitude, listening to the aberrations
of the wind without, when an actual presence
slipped by him, stopping in the middle of the
floor.
It was Millie Stope. Her eyes were opened to
their widest extent, but they had the peculiar blank
fixity of the eyes of the blind. Above them her hair
slipped and slid in a loosened knot.
“I had to walk round him,” she protested in a low,
fluctuating voice, “there was no other way....
Right by his head. My skirt—” She broke off
and, shuddering, came close to John Woolfolk.
“I think we’d better go away,” she told him, nodding.
“It’s quite impossible here, with him in the
hall, where you have to pass so close.”
Woolfolk drew back from her. She too was a
part of the house; she had led him there—a white
flame that he had followed into the swamp. And
this was no ordinary marsh. It was, he added
aloud, “A swamp of souls.”
“Then,” she replied, “we must leave at once.”
A dragging sound rose from the hall. Millie
Stope cowered in a voiceless accession of terror; but
John Woolfolk, lamp in hand, moved to the door.
He was curious to see exactly what was happening.
The bulk had risen; a broad back swayed like a
pendulum, and a swollen hand gripped the stair
rail. The form heaved itself up a step, paused,
tottering, and then mounted again. Woolfolk saw
at once that the other was going for the knife buried
in the wall above. He watched with an impersonal
interest the dragging ascent. At the seventh step
it ceased; the figure crumpled, slid halfway back
to the floor.
“You can’t do it,” Woolfolk observed critically.
The other sat bowed, with one leg extended stiffly
downward, on the stair that mounted from the pale
radiance of the lamp into impenetrable darkness.
Woolfolk moved back into the room and replaced
the lamp on its table. Millie Stope still stood with
open, hanging hands, a countenance of expectant
dread. Her eyes did not shift from the door as he
entered and passed her; her gaze hung starkly on
what might emerge from the hall.
A deep loathing of his surroundings swept over
John Woolfolk, a sudden revulsion from the dead
man on the floor, from the ponderous menace on
the stair, the white figure that had brought it all
upon him. A mounting horror of the place possessed
him, and he turned and incontinently fled.
A complete panic enveloped him at his flight, a blind
necessity to get away, and he ran heedlessly through
the night, with head up and arms extended. His
feet struck upon a rotten fragment of board that
broke beneath him, he pushed through a tangle of
grass, and then his progress was held by soft and
dragging sand. A moment later he was halted
by a chill flood rising abruptly to his knees. He
drew back sharply and fell on the beach, with his
heels in the water of the bay.
An insuperable weariness pinned him down, a
complete exhaustion of brain and body. A heavy
wind struck like a wet cloth on his face. The sky
had been swept clear of clouds, and stars sparkled
in the pure depths of the night. They were white,
with the exception of one that burned with an unsteady
yellow ray and seemed close by. This, John
Woolfolk thought, was strange. He concentrated a
frowning gaze upon it—perhaps in falling into the
soiled atmosphere of the earth it had lost its crystal
gleam and burned with a turgid light. It was very,
very probable.
He continued to watch it, facing the tonic wind,
until with a clearing of his mind, a gasp of joyful
recognition, he knew that it was the riding light of
the Gar.
Woolfolk sat very still under the pressure of his
renewed sanity. Fact upon fact, memory on memory,
returned, and in proper perspective built up
again his mentality, his logic, his scattered powers
of being. The Gar rode uneasily on her anchor
chains; the wind was shifting. They must get
away!—Halvard, waiting at the wharf—Millie—
He rose hurriedly to his feet—he had deserted
Millie; left her, in all her anguish, with her dead
parent and Iscah Nicholas. His love for her swept
back, infinitely heightened by the knowledge of her
suffering. At the same time there returned the
familiar fear of a permanent disarrangement in her
of chords that were unresponsive to the clumsy expedients
of affection and science. She had been
subjected to a strain that might well unsettle a relatively
strong will; and she had been fragile in the
beginning.
She must be a part of no more scenes of violence,
he told himself, moving hurriedly through the
orange grove; she must be led quietly to the tender—that
is, if it were not already too late. His entire
effort to preserve her had been a series of blunders,
each one of which might well have proved
fatal, and now, together, perhaps had.
He mounted to the porch and entered the hall.
The light flowed undisturbed from the room on the
right; and, in its thin wash, he saw that Iscah Nicholas
had disappeared from the lower steps. Immediately,
however, and from higher up, he heard
a shuffling, and could just make out a form heaving
obscurely in the gloom. Nicholas patently was
making progress toward the consummation of his
one fixed idea; but Woolfolk decided that at present
he could best afford to ignore him.
He entered the lighted room, and found Millie
seated and gazing in dull wonderment at the figure
on the floor.
“I must tell you about my father,” she said conversationally.
“You know, in Virginia, the women
tied an apron to his door because he would not go
to war, and for years that preyed on his mind, until
he was afraid of the slightest thing. He was without
a particle of strength—just to watch the sun
cross the sky wearied him, and the smallest disagreement
upset him for a week.”
She stopped, lost in amazement at what she contemplated,
what was to follow.
“Then Nicholas—But that isn’t important.
I was to meet a man—we were going away together,
to some place where it would be peaceful. We were
to sail there. He said at eight o’clock. Well, at
seven Nicholas was in the kitchen. I got father into
his very heaviest coat, and laid out a muffler and his
gloves, then sat and waited. I didn’t need anything
extra, my heart was quite warm. Then
father asked why I had changed his coat—if I’d
told him, he would have died of fright—he said
he was too hot, and he fretted and worried. Nicholas
heard him, and he wanted to know why I had
put on father’s winter coat. He found the muffler
and gloves ready and got suspicious.
“He stayed in the hall, crying a little—Nicholas
cried right often—while I sat with father and
tried to think of some excuse to get away. At last
I had to go—for an orange, I said—but Nicholas
wouldn’t believe it. He pushed me back and
told me I was going out to the other.
“‘Nicholas,’ I said, ‘don’t be silly; nobody
would come away from a boat on a night like this.
Besides, he’s gone away.’ We had that last made
up. But he pushed me back again. Then I heard
father move behind us, and I thought—he’s going
to die of fright right now. But father’s footsteps
came on across the floor and up to my side.”
“‘Don’t do that, Nicholas,’ he told him; ‘take
your hand from my daughter.’ He swayed a little,
his lips shook, but he stood facing him. It was
father!” Her voice died away, and she was silent
for a moment, gazing at the vision of that unsuspected
and surprising courage. “Of course Nicholas
killed him,” she added. “He twisted him
away and father died. That didn’t matter,” she
told Woolfolk; “but the other was terribly important,
anyone can see that.”
John Woolfolk listened intently, but there was
no sound from without. Then, with every appearance
of leisure, he rolled and lighted a cigarette.
“Splendid!” he said of her recital; “and I don’t
doubt you’re right about the important thing.” He
moved toward her, holding out his hand. “Splendid!
But we must go on—the man is waiting for
you.”
“It’s too late,” she responded indifferently. She
redirected her thoughts to her parent’s enthralling
end. “Do you think a man as brave as that should
lie on the floor?” she demanded. “A flag,” she
added obscurely, considering an appropriate covering
for the still form.
“No, not on the floor,” Woolfolk instantly responded.
He bent and, lifting the body of Lichfield
Stope, carried it into the hall, where, relieved
at the opportunity to dispose of his burden, he left
it in an obscure corner.
Iscah Nicholas was stirring again. John Woolfolk
waited, gazing up the stair, but the other progressed
no more than a step. Then he returned to
Millie.
“Come,” he said. “No time to lose.” He took
her arm and exerted a gentle pressure toward the
door.
“I explained that it was too late,” she reiterated,
evading him. “Father really lived, but I died.
‘Swamp of souls,’” she added in a lower voice.
“Someone said that, and it’s true; it happened to
me.”
“The man waiting for you will be worried,” he
suggested. “He depends absolutely on your coming.”
“Nice man. Something had happened to him too.
He caught a rockfish and Nicholas boiled it in milk
for our breakfast.” At the mention of Iscah Nicholas
a slight shiver passed over her. This was
what Woolfolk hoped for—a return of her normal
revulsion from her surroundings, from the past.
“Nicholas,” he said sharply, contradicted by a
faint dragging from the stair, “is dead.”
“If you could only assure me of that,” she replied
wistfully. “If I could be certain that he wasn’t in
the next shadow I’d go gladly. Any other way it
would be useless.” She laid her hand over her
heart. “I must get him out of here—My
father did. His lips trembled a little, but he said
quite clearly: ‘Don’t do that. Don’t touch my
daughter.’”
“Your father was a singularly brave man,” he
assured her, rebelling against the leaden monotony
of speech that had fallen upon them. “Your
mother too was brave,” he temporized. He could,
he decided, wait no longer. She must, if necessary,
be carried away forcibly. It was a desperate chance—the
least pressure might result in a permanent,
jangling discord. Her waist, torn, he saw, upon
her pallid shoulder, was an insufficient covering
against the wind and night. Looking about he discovered
the muffler, laid out for her father,
crumpled on the floor; and, with an arm about her,
folded it over her throat and breast.
King Vidor’s “Wild Oranges.” A Goldwyn Picture.
A SCENE FROM THE PHOTOPLAY.
“Now we’re away,” he declared in a forced lightness.
She resisted him for a moment, and then collapsed
into his support.
John Woolfolk half led, half carried her into the
hall. His gaze searched the obscurity of the stair;
it was empty; but from above came the sound of a
heavy, dragging step.
XIV
OUTSIDE she cowered pitifully from the
violent blast of the wind, the boundless,
stirred space. They made their way about
the corner of the house, leaving behind the pale,
glimmering rectangle of the lighted window. In
the thicket Woolfolk was forced to proceed more
slowly. Millie stumbled weakly over the rough
way, apparently at the point of slipping to the
ground. He felt a supreme relief when the cool
sweep of the sea opened before him and Halvard
emerged from the gloom.
He halted for a moment, with his arm about
Millie’s shoulders, facing his man. Even in the
dark he was conscious of Poul Halvard’s stalwart
being, of his rocklike integrity.
“I was delayed,” he said finally, amazed at the
inadequacy of his words to express the pressure of
the past hours. Had they been two or four? He
had been totally unconscious of the passage of actual
time. In the dark house behind the orange
grove he had lived through tormented ages, descended
into depths beyond the measured standard
of Greenwich. Halvard said:
“Yes, sir.”
The sound of a blundering progress rose from the
path behind them, the breaking of branches and the
slipping of a heavy tread on the water-soaked
ground. John Woolfolk, with an oath, realized
that it was Nicholas, still animated by his fixed,
murderous idea. Millie Stope recognized the sound,
too, for she trembled violently on his arm. He
knew that she could support no more violence, and
he turned to the dim, square-set figure before him.
“Halvard, it’s that fellow Nicholas. He’s insane—has
a knife. Will you stop him while I get
Miss Stope into the tender? She’s pretty well
through.” He laid his hand on the other’s shoulder
as he started immediately forward. “I shall have
to go on, Halvard, if anything unfortunate occurs,”
he said in a different voice.
The sailor made no reply; but as Woolfolk urged
Millie out over the wharf he saw Halvard throw
himself upon a dark bulk that broke from the wood.
The tender was made fast fore and aft; and, getting
down into the uneasy boat, Woolfolk reached
up and lifted Millie bodily to his side. She dropped
in a still, white heap on the bottom. He unfastened
the painter and stood holding the tender close to
the wharf, with his head above its platform, straining
his gaze in the direction of the obscure struggle
on land.
He could see nothing, and heard only an occasional
trampling of the underbrush. It was difficult
to remain detached, give no assistance, while
Halvard encountered Iscah Nicholas. Yet with
Millie in a semi-collapse, and the bare possibility
of Nicholas’ knifing them both, he felt that this was
his only course. Halvard was an unusually powerful,
active man, and the other must have suffered
from the stress of his long conflict in the
hall.
The thing terminated speedily. There was the
sound of a heavy fall, a diminishing thrashing in
the saw grass, and silence. An indistinguishable
form advanced over, the wharf, and Woolfolk prepared
to shove the tender free. But it was Poul
Halvard. He got down, Woolfolk thought, clumsily,
and mechanically assumed his place at the oars.
Woolfolk sat aft, with an arm about Millie Stope.
The sailor said fretfully:
“I stopped him. He was all pumped out.
Missed his hand at first—the dark—a scratch.”
He rested on the oars, fingering his shoulder.
The tender swung dangerously near the corrugated
rock of the shore, and Woolfolk sharply directed:
“Keep way on her.”
“Yes, sir,” Halvard replied, once more swinging
into his short, efficient stroke. It was, however, less
sure than usual; an oar missed its hold and skittered
impotently over the water, drenching Woolfolk
with a brief, cold spray. Again the bow of the tender
dipped into the point of land they were rounding,
and John Woolfolk spoke more abruptly than
before.
He was seriously alarmed about Millie. Her
face was apathetic, almost blank, and her arms
hung across his knees with no more response than a
doll’s. He wondered desperately if, as she had
said, her spirit had died; if the Millie Stope that had
moved him so swiftly and tragically from his long
indifference, his aversion to life, had gone, leaving
him more hoplessly alone than before. The sudden
extinction of Ellen’s life had been more supportable
than Millie’s crouching dumbly at his feet. His
arm unconsciously tightened about her, and she
gazed up with a momentary, questioning flicker of
her wide-opened eyes. He repeated her name in a
deep whisper, but her head fell forward loosely,
and left him in racking doubt.
Now he could see the shortly swaying riding
light of the Gar. Halvard was propelling them
vigorously but erratically forward. At times he remuttered
his declarations about the encounter with
Nicholas. The stray words reached Woolfolk:
“Stopped him—the cursed dark—a scratch.”
He brought the tender awkwardly alongside the
ketch, with a grinding shock, and held the boats
together while John Woolfolk shifted Millie to the
deck. Woolfolk took her immediately into the
cabin; where, lighting a swinging lamp, he placed
her on one of the prepared berths and endeavored to
wrap her in a blanket. But, in a shuddering access
of fear, she rose with outheld palms.
“Nicholas!” she cried shrilly. “There—at the
door!”
He sat beside her, restraining her convulsive
effort to cower in a far, dark angle of the cabin.
“Nonsense!” he told her brusquely. “You are
on the Gar. You are safe. In an hour you will
be in a new world.”
“With John Woolfolk?”
“I am John Woolfolk.”
“But he—you—left me.”
“I am here,” he insisted with a tightening of his
heart. He rose, animated by an overwhelming
necessity to get the ketch under way, to leave at
once, for ever, the invisible shore of the bay. He
gently folded her again in the blanket, but she resisted
him. “I’d rather stay up,” she said with a
sudden lucidity. “It’s nice here; I wanted to come
before, but he wouldn’t let me.”
A glimmer of hope swept over him as he mounted
swiftly to the deck. “Get up the anchors,” he
called; “reef down the jigger and put on a handful
of jib.”
There was no immediate response, and he peered
over the obscured deck in search of Halvard. The
man rose slowly from a sitting posture by the main
boom. “Very good, sir,” he replied in a forced
tone.
He disappeared forward, while Woolfolk, shutting
the cabin door on the confusing illumination
within, lighted the binnacle lamp, bent over the engine,
swiftly making connections and adjustments,
and cranked the wheel with a sharp, expert turn.
The explosions settled into a dull, regular succession,
and he coupled the propeller and slowly maneuvered
the ketch up over the anchors, reducing the
strain on the hawsers and allowing Halvard to get
in the slack. He waited impatiently for the sailor’s
cry of all clear, and demanded the cause of the
delay.
“The bight slipped,” the other called in a muffled,
angry voice. “One’s clear now,” he added.
“Bring her up again.” The ketch forged ahead,
but the wait was longer than before. “Caught,”
Halvard’s voice drifted thinly aft; “coral ledge.”
Woolfolk held the Gar stationary until the sailor
cried weakly: “Anchor’s apeak.”
They moved inperceptibly through the dark, into
the greater force of the wind beyond the point.
The dull roar of the breaking surf ahead grew
louder. Halvard should have had the jib up and
been aft at the jigger, but he failed to appear.
John Woolfolk wondered, in a mounting impatience,
what was the matter with the man. Finally
an obscure form passed him and hung over the
housed sail, stripping its cover and removing the
stops. The sudden thought of a disconcerting possibility
banished Woolfolk’s annoyance. “Halvard,”
he demanded, “did Nicholas knife you?”
“A scratch,” the other stubbornly reiterated. “I’ll
tie it up later. No time now—I stopped him permanent.”
The jigger, reefed to a mere irregular patch, rose
with a jerk, and the ketch rapidly left the protection
of the shore. She dipped sharply and, flattened
over by a violent ball of wind, buried her rail in the
black, swinging water, and there was a small crash
of breaking china from within. The wind appeared
to sweep high up in empty space and occasionally
descend to deal the yacht a staggering blow.
The bar, directly ahead—as Halvard had earlier
pointed out—was now covered with the smother of
a lowering tide. The pass, the other had discovered,
too, had filled. It was charted at four feet,
the Gar drew a full three, and Woolfolk knew that
there must be no error, no uncertainty, in running
out.
Halvard was so long in stowing away the jigger
shears that Woolfolk turned to make sure that the
sailor had not been swept from the deck. The
“scratch,” he was certain, was deeper than the other
admitted. When they were safely at sea he would
insist upon an examination.
The subject of this consideration fell rather than
stepped into the cockpit, and stood rocked by the
motion of the swells, clinging to the cabin’s edge.
Woolfolk shifted the engine to its highest speed,
and they were driving through the tempestuous dark
on to the bar. He was now confronted by the
necessity for an immediate decision. Halvard or
himself would have to stand forward, clinging precariously
to a stay, and repeatedly sound the depth
of the shallowing water as they felt their way out
to sea. He gazed anxiously at the dark bulk before
him, and saw that the sailor had lost his staunchness
of outline, his aspect of invincible determination.
“Halvard,” he demanded again sharply, “this
is no time for pretense. How are you?”
“All right,” the other repeated desperately,
through clenched teeth. “I’ve—I’ve taken knives
from men before—on the docks at Stockholm. I
missed his hand at first—it was the night.”
The cabin door swung open, and a sudden lurch
flung Millie Stope against the wheel. Woolfolk
caught and held her until the wave rolled by. She
was stark with terror, and held abjectly to the rail
while the next swell lifted them upward. He
attempted to urge her back to the protection of the
cabin, but she resisted with such a convulsive determination
that he relinquished the effort and enveloped
her in his glistening oilskin.
This had consumed a perilous amount of time;
and, swiftly decisive, he commanded Halvard to
take the wheel. He swung himself to the deck and
secured the long sounding pole. He could see
ahead on either side the dim white bars forming
and dissolving, and called to the man at the wheel:
“Mark the breakers! Fetch her between.”
On the bow, leaning out over the surging tide, he
drove the sounding pole forward and down, but it
floated back free. They were not yet on the bar.
The ketch heeled until the black plain of water
rose above his knees, driving at him with a deceitful
force, sinking back slowly as the yacht straightened
buoyantly. He again sounded; the pole
struck bottom, and he cried:
“Five.”
The infuriated beating of the waves on the obstruction
drawn across their path drowned his voice,
and he shouted the mark once more. Then after
another sounding:
“Four and three.”
The yacht fell away dangerously before a heavy
diagonal blow; she hung for a moment, rolling like
a log, and then slowly regained her way. Woolfolk’s
apprehension increased. It would, perhaps,
have been better if they had delayed, to examine
Halvard’s injury. The man had insisted that it
was of no moment, and John Woolfolk had been
driven by a consuming desire to leave the miasmatic
shore. He swung the pole forward and
cried:
“Four and a half.”
The water was shoaling rapidly. The breaking
waves on the port and starboard swept by with
lightning rapidity. The ketch veered again,
shipped a crushing weight of water, and responded
more slowly than before to a tardy pressure of the
rudder. The greatest peril, John Woolfolk knew,
lay directly before them. He realized from the action
of the ketch that Halvard was steering uncertainly,
and that at any moment the Gar might
strike and fall off too far for recovery, when she
could not live in the pounding surf.
“Four and one,” he cried hoarsely. And then
immediately after: “Four.”
Chance had been against him from the first, he
thought, and there flashed through his mind the
dark panorama, the accumulating disasters of the
night. A negation lay upon his existence that
would not be lifted. It had followed him like a
sinister shadow for years to this obscure, black
smother of water, to the Gar reeling crazily forward
under an impotent hand. The yacht was behaving
heroically; no other ketch could have lived
so long, responded so gallantly to a wavering wheel.
“Three and three,” he shouted above the combined
stridor of wind and sea.
The next minute would see their safe passage or
a helpless hulk beating to pieces on the bar, with
three human fragments whirling under the crushing
masses of water, floating, perhaps, with the dawn
into the tranquillity of the bay.
“Three and a half,” he cried monotonously.
The Gar trembled like a wounded and dull animal.
The solid seas were reaching hungrily over
Woolfolk’s legs. A sudden stolidity possessed him.
He thrust the pole out deliberately, skillfully:
“Three and a quarter.”
A lower sounding would mean the end. He
paused for a moment, his dripping face turned to
the far stars; his lips moved in silent, unformulated
aspirations—Halvard and himself, in the sea
that had been their home; but Millie was so fragile!
He made the sounding precisely, between the heaving
swells, and marked the pole instantly driven
backward by their swinging flight.
“Three and a half.” His voice held a new, uncontrollable
quiver. He sounded again immediately:
“And three-quarters.”
They had passed the bar.
XV
A GLADNESS like the white flare of burning
powder swept over him, and then he
became conscious of other, minor sensations—his
head ached intolerably from the fall
down the stair, and a grinding pain shot through
his shoulder, lodging in his torn lower arm at the
slightest movement. He slipped the sounding pole
into its loops on the cabin and hastily made his way
aft to the relief of Poul Halvard.
The sailor was nowhere visible; but, in an intermittent,
reddish light that faded and swelled as the
cabin door swung open and shut, Woolfolk saw a
white figure clinging to the wheel—Millie.
Instantly his hands replaced hers on the spokes
and, as if with a palpable sigh of relief, the Gar
steadied to her course. Millie Stope clung to the
deck rail, sobbing with exhaustion.
“He’s—he’s dead!” she exclaimed, between her
racking inspirations. She pointed to the floor of
the cockpit, and there, sliding grotesquely with the
motion of the seaway, was Poul Halvard. An arm
was flung out, as if in ward against the ketch’s side,
but it crumpled, the body hit heavily, a hand seemed
to clutch at the boards it had so often and
thoroughly swabbed; but without avail. The face
momentarily turned upward; it was haggard beyond
expression, and bore stamped upon it, in lines
that resembled those of old age, the agonized
struggle against the inevitable last treachery of life.
“When—” John Woolfolk stopped in sheer,
leaden amazement.
“Just when you called ‘Three and a quarter.’
Before that he had fallen on his knees. He
begged me to help him hold the wheel. He said
you’d be lost if I didn’t. He talked all the time
about keeping her head up and up. I helped him.
Your voice came back years apart. At the last he
was on the floor, holding the bottom of the wheel.
He told me to keep it steady, dead ahead. His
voice grew so weak that I couldn’t hear; and then
all at once he slipped away. I—I held on—called
to you. But against the wind—”
He braced his knee against the wheel and,
leaning out, found the jigger sheet and flattened the
reefed sail; he turned to where the jib sheet led
after, and then swung the ketch about. The yacht
rode smoothly, slipping forward over the long, even
ground swell, and he turned with immeasurable
emotion to the woman beside him.
The light from the cabin flooded out over her
face, and he saw that, miraculously, the fear had
gone. Her countenance was drawn with weariness
and the hideous strain of the past minutes, but her
gaze squarely met the night and sea. Her chin was
lifted, its graceful line firm, and her mouth was in
repose. She had, as he had recognized she alone
must, conquered the legacy of Lichfield Stope;
while he, John Woolfolk, and Halvard, had put
Nicholas out of her life. She was free.
“If you could go below—” he suggested.
“In the morning, with this wind, we’ll be at anchor
under a fringe of palms, in water like a blue silk
counterpane.”
“I think I could now, with you,” she replied.
She pressed her lips, salt and enthralling, against
his face, and made her way into the cabin. He
locked the wheel momentarily and, following,
wrapped her in the blankets, on the new sheets prepared
for her coming. Then, putting out the light,
he shut the cabin door and returned to the wheel.
The body of Poul Halvard struck his feet and
rested there. A good man, born by the sea, who
had known its every expression; with a faithful and
simple heart, as such men occasionally had.
The diminished wind swept in a clear diapason
through the pellucid sky; the resplendent sea
reached vast and magnetic to its invisible horizon.
A sudden distaste seized John Woolfolk for the
dragging death ceremonials of land. Halvard had
known the shore mostly as a turbulent and unclean
strip that had finally brought about his end.
He leaned forward and found beyond any last
doubt that the other was dead; a black, clotted surface
adhered to the wound which his pride, his
invincible determination, had driven him to deny.
In the space beneath the afterdeck Woolfolk
found a spare folded anchor for the tender, a
length of rope; and he slowly completed the preparations
for his purpose. He lifted the body to
the narrow deck outside the rail, and, in a long dip,
the waves carried it smoothly and soundlessly away.
John Woolfolk said:
“‘... Commit his body to the deep, looking
for the general resurrection ... through ...
Christ.’”
Then, upright and motionless at the wheel, with
the wan radiance of the binnacle lamp floating up
over his hollow cheeks and set gaze, he held the
ketch southward through the night.
[Transcriber’s note: Images from the inside cover]
*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 30466 ***