The strangers' banquet

Front matter

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By DONN BYRNE

"There is an evil which I have seen under the sun, and it is common among men: A man to whom God hath given riches, wealth and honor, so that he zvanteth nothing for his soul of all that he desireth . . . but a stranger eateth it: this is vanity

Chapter I

WITH his long white beard and with his white hair, with his hook nose and his black eyes, with his little gold ear-rings, he was, as he sat back in his chair, his stick leaning against the arm of it, the coal fire playing on his face, a picture an Italian painter might have made. It was hard to believe he was eighty-seven years old.

"I've sailed many seas in my time." His head wagged reminiscently. "North and south seas, east and west ones. From Java Island to Sandy Hook and from Boston town to San Francisco. There's no sea I haven't sailed."

His daughter, sitting near him, twenty-two years old, dark as he himself had once been, with the same Hispano-Celtic features, softened, feminine, but from the same die, could hardly believe he was her father. He seemed like some epic figure from out of a dim past. Time seemed to have stopped for him, and he might have been of any epoch, a viceadmiral of Noe's equally as well as the old clippership master and builder, Shane Butler Keogh. He had had three wives before he married her mother. The first had been from his native Connacht, and she and her two children were dead half a century ago. The second was a Turkish woman, whom he had stolen in Jaffa, and she, too, was dead. The third was very beautiful, but the less said of her the better. It was rumored he had killed her in Marseilles. And then he had married a little Quaker lady from Philadelphia, who had thee'd him and had driven him unerringly in straight paths. It was very hard to believe him her father, with his four wives, one of them a Turkish woman; and with the little gold rings in his ears. He was more like a figure from an old story — there was something about him that suggested Solomon the King.

" Forty-six days to the Cape I took with the Antique Lady; seventy days to Java Head. Back again from Hongkong to London in ninety-six days. There's sailing for you, and the monsoon blowing like the Bull of Barney, and the mate all the time in the hold, a dead man."

Bran, the bigger of two wolf-hounds before the fire, rose and nuzzled his head against the old man's hand. The old man still kept his eyes in the yellow center of the fire.

"And out of Boston in the Paul Revere, ninetythree days to San Francisco — great time, though not the best. And a crew ready for mutiny all the time. But I handled them," he chuckled. "Oh, ay! They worked for me."

She smiled, too, for she had heard how he handled them. There was no unnecessary bawling, no brutality of mates. The august presence of the old master seemed to infuse volcanic energy into the hands. They were hired to get those ships in on time or die in the attempt. An old sailor told her how her father once took on a crew of Jamaica negroes, great sailors, but untrustworthy in discipline.

"My men" — he lined them up on the poop. His voice was suave — "you are all Christians. You all love Jesus, and obey Him."

"Oh yes, sir!" they chorused.

"Good!" His voice suddenly took on the keenness and terror of a steel blade. His eyes fired up and swept them like a mitrailleuse. "Aboard this ship," he said — "aboard this ship / am Jesus Christ." They scuttled to their stations like scared rabbits. She was always somewhat shocked at the story, as was everybody, but all agreed it was her father, typical of him — from the life: Shane Butler Keogh.

"Isn't it time for you to be turning in, sir?" she suggested. "It's nine o'clock." He took no notice of her. Outside, the young June moon was rising, full and silvery, and was lighting up the sea from Edgartown, where they were, across to Nantucket Shoals.

She remarked the hour again, but again received no answer. There was something on his mind and he would not go to bed until it was settled. For a week now he had been acting queerly. He had decided to leave the New River house and come over to the Vineyard early. "I want the sea," he had explained, "not this muddy puddle."

His mind had been wandering a little, too. Life, which he had stretched out like a thinly drawn elastic ha::a. had ^::arrii haah suddenly at times, and he had mistaken his daughter fcr his sister of three-quarters of a century before. Even the Gaelic had come back to him. He « ing in queer grace

notes, and in lor. a; pauses like plain chant:

is

*"A hundred women think I'm theirs when I'm drinking ale, but two-thirds oi them I cannot stomach when I rer.terr.ber their conversation with n he would translate for her. " 'Oh. the blown snow falling on the crest oi Slievenamon, and my love is the :: '. -;:-. Df the White Thorn Tree.' The Blossom of the White Thorn Tree." he would tell her. "That's your mother. God be good to her. Denth, my dear."'

For the week now he had been talking continually o: his birth.pl. ir the County of Mayo, and Derith recognized it as being the nostalgia of the sea, and the r.erce longing chat the r.iajh: watches g^ve ED the gteat loneliness for the concrete spot where a man's re. He seemed when he spoke oi that to be back again as master trading out oi Galway int: Spain, or r'rom Liverpool to the Levant, and ID br always crooning for his purple Connacht hills.

"A great poet wrote that — Rafftery the blind man. Now with the coming of the summer, he says, the day will be lengthening out, and after Saint Colum's day, says he, I will raise my sail. By sea and river, by night and day. I will make no stop until I come to the County of Mayo."

He was humming it again as he watched the fire. " Anois teacht an t' Samhraidh," he went on in his frail voice . . . "go dti Connda Alhuigheo — go dti Connda Mhuigheo!" He raised his eyes. "It's a fine night, Derith," he said, "a fine night, and summer's in the air. . . .

II

In all her twenty- two years, ever since she had come to the age when she could think, feel, and consciously exist, she had never felt other than that she was a part of the fine and gigantic old man who had brought her into the world. He was a comet flaring across the heavens, and she was a part of it, which would one day detach from the parent mass and become individual itself with a flaming wake.

Her mother had meant little to her, a quiet woman who did beautiful needlework. She could not think of her except as a kind and worthy body, who had tended her as an affectionate nurse might. Her brother John, weak, lovable, and insignificant, had no iron bond to draw her. All her life was centered in her father. She saw him vague as a sea-god, powerful as an Arabian djinn. He was so old he hardly seemed a father, just a romantic figure from a romantic time. He had no domestic virtues. He was never the one to drool over his family in animal affection. All his life he had treated her with the deferential affection, he, the former lover of a hundred women, might have shown to any young, pretty, and worth-while girl, with this vague distinction, that she was his daughter.

He had kissed her good-by and sent her off to school. He had kissed her good-by and sent her off to college. He had come to see her there at the stated occasions. She had been intensely proud of him. Tall, broad-shouldered even at his mighty age, with his little ear-rings glittering, with his fearless, insolent black eyes, he had towered above the fathers of other girls, bankers and statesmen, obese and bald-headed, as a king might tower above a rabble of grocers. The young girls drew swift breaths of awe, the young men drew back in respect as he strode among them.

Romance and power, that was what he stood for. There was a legend that he had once jumped over the taffrail of his schooner in Biscay Bay after his hat. That was like him. She could see him in his later years, master of the great clipper boats, racing from China with silks and tea, from the Golden Gate with virgin gold, driving his men like a hurricane, outwitting the wind and tide, fearless even of the Act of God. Among the best of his day, he was — great as Waterman of the Challengey and Creary of the Flying Cloud, great even as Mackay, who built and skippered the Sovereign of the Seas.

He had been great in those days, a gigantic national figure, but since then, to the girl's mind, he had been greater still. Came '57 and the later days, and the knell of the clipper was rung, and out of the hands of the New World passed the supremacy of shipping. But at his yards in New River old Shane Butler Keogh still built ships, small, but good in their way as any of the Belfast products and as those which slipped down the Clyde ways. And now that ship-building was coming back to its own, he was in the forefront again. . . .

It was queer how he and she coincided in so many ways. This little place on the Vineyard, strongly buttressed against wind and storm, was more to her, as it was to him, than the stately home in New River with all its modern conveniences. The living-room about them wainscoted in the fine mahogany that had come from the Marco Polo; the big fire of sea-coal, with its Old World crane; the two wolf-hounds, the old man's one extravagance, Bran and Sgeolan, which he had reconstructed on the Irish type at a fabulous outlay; outside in the hall, as a dinner-bell, the bell of the Goban Saor, the first ship the old man had commanded — all these things he loved, and she loved them, too.

And how like him, too, she was in outward physical appearance, fairly tall, as tall as a woman should be, and bigger than the average woman, and yet slim. Her father suggested a battle-charger, lean, fearless, flashing-eyed, and there was in her, too, that look of race, the look of the horse — a blooded mare, one thought of instantly, slick in the haunch, highheaded. The face was a refinement of her father's, firm-chinned, firm-nosed, black-haired, the Hispano- Celtic of Galway, with a faint duvet on the upper lip. Her father's eyes were black, but hers were gray, with violet flecks in them. Her father's mouth was set firmly, but hers was mobile, expressionful. A fair, graceful edifice, one would have judged her character, with the foundation of a fortress to it. She was taking now, as the word is — bonny and taking. Later on she would be a fine woman. When she was old she would be very beautiful.

Ill

The little clock on the mantel had just chimed four bells — ten o'clock. The moon had risen higher in the sky with the clear, early brilliance that cut light and shadow in a well-defined chiaroscuro. Faintly, through the open window, they could see, a mile offshore, a big bark setting westward toward Nantucket Shoals, sails and staysails and jibs set to the breeze abeam.

"I mind the time," the old man was saying, "down in New York, along the river-front, when the clipper ships were lined up side by side, like horses on parade. And when they were going out they would lie at the Battery for the crew. The Whitehall boats would bring them aboard — Bill Decker's boat or Steve Roberts's, maybe. Hoist them aboard. 'Get up, damn ye!' the mate would meet them and give them a lift with the boot.

"Then the tide would begin to run ebb, and the anchor would be hove short; sails loosened fore and aft. Overhaul the gear in the tops and crosstrees. Loose the royals and skysails and leave the staysails fast. On the foretopsail yard, damn ye! and mind that gasket! Great days!

"They'd all be flutter in the gear by then, courses, topsails, to'ga'n's'ls, royals, and skysails. Sheet home your topsails. On the halyards there. Curse ye! Put your backs into it. The chantyman would start the tune, ' We'll kill Paddy Doyle for his boats,' or * Whisky, Johnny.' Begad, you could hear it, 'way up Beaver Street.

"Oh, whisky killed my sister Sue,

Whisky, Johnny, And whisky killed the old man, too,

Whisky for my Johnny.

Whisky's gone, what shall I do?

Whisky, Johnny.

Oh, whisky's gone and I'll go, too,

Whisky for my Johnny.

"Then she'd begin to pay and gather away, and over the side with the 'longshoremen and the runners. Off she belts to Java Head. Great days!"

He nodded his head several times and thumped his stick on the floor, keeping time to the chant:

"Whisky is the life of man,

Whisky for my Johnny.

Let him drink it when he can, Whisky, Johnny.

"I mind them all," he went on, "the Ann McKimy out of Baltimore. She was the earliest of them — - an opium boat in the Chinese trade. Live-oak her frames were, and copper-fastened, and she had twelve brass guns. I mind the Oriental, that brought the first cargo of tea from China to England, an American boat. There was nothing like her in speed or rig. I mind the Surprise the day she was launched. They

ii thought she would capsize, begad! but she took the water like a duck. She had a big eagle for a figurehead, and Phil Dumaresq commanded her. The bonniest ship that had ever been seen.

"I mind them all,indeed I do— the Witch of the Wave; the Flying Cloud, that made the trip to San Francisco in eighty-nine days — three hundred and seventy-four miles in one day, steering northward and westward around Cape Horn; the Sovereign of the Seas, with her crew of one hundred and five, four mates and two boatswains — Lauchlin Mackay, a brother of Donald's, commanded her; there was the Great Republic, the biggest ship that had ever been built. The James Baines, the Young America, the Glory of the Seas — I mind them all.

"And then steam came, and the great days were over, and the mastery passed from Boston and New York and Baltimore to Belfast and the Clyde.

"But it's coming back again, some of these days, Derith, and you'll see it right in this land. There's the steel in this country, and there's the shipwrights and the ability, and there's the blood of the old clipper men that could sail a boat through the gates of hell and back again. Oh, it's coming. We'll never see sail again. But the boats, like the White Star and the Cunard boats, will be turned out here — boats that can beat all records to blazes going from sea to sea. It's coming slowly, but it's coming sure. You'll see it; I won't. And I want you to keep the shipyards going night and day. You and your brother together. You've got the spirit and the brains, but John's a man. And you'll need a man. Will you do that? Will you promise?"

She looked straight into his eyes. "I promise, sir," she said, solemnly. A swift shadow came over her face. "But you'll see it, sir, never fear."

"I will not," he said, decidedly. "Ten years ago I thought I might. You were a very wee girl then, and your mother was alive, and one morning about this time of the year I went out early in the morning toward Oak Bluffs, and I had a dog with me, the bitch we got Bran out of. It was just about six o'clock, and I was passing down by the golf-course and the sun was coming up and the birds were singing. And a queer fancy came over me to start running, and away I went over the links like a two-year-old, leaping like a hare, supple as the dog beside me. A quarter of a mile I ran then, with hardly a breath out of me, and me seventy-seven years of age. And I thought at that time I would be like Doctor Parr in England, that lived to be nearly a hundred and fifty years old. But now I feel like a nut that's going to break open, or a ripe apple, maybe, that's going to fall from the tree."

He looked at the fire a minute or so, smiling. " Anois teacht an t' Samhraidh," he began singing to himself. "Now, at the coming of the summer. . . ." The little ship's clock on the mantelpiece chimed six silvery strokes. It was eleven o'clock.

IV

She went about the house, putting everything to rights for the night — a habit she had somehow acquired, though there were even here on the Vineyard four servants to help her, a housekeeper and a cook and two maids. She went into her father's bedroom to see that all was ready, the lamps lighted, the sheets turned down. Below, by the fire, still the old man was sitting, not dozing as was his custom, but wide awake, with a look of concentration on his face, and behind that somehow, as behind the soft moonlight without, there was the sense of the infinity of space. The fire still glowed heartily and on the table beside him the housekeeper had laid, on its tray, the big square glass bottle of whisky, the sliced lemon, and the sugar-bowl for his nightcap. From the crane above the coals the diminutive bronze kettle sang like a cricket. Derith came in bustling.

"I'm going to make you your toddy and send you to bed, father," she told him. "It's after eleven." "I'm not going to have any to-night." "But you always have it. For twenty years — " "But not to-night." He was emphatic. The answer somehow disquieted her, unquiet as she was already. She felt that there were in the air things she could not grasp. The dogs even were restless, though they stretched before the glow. Their eyes were open, moving to and fro in a small orbit.

She wished vaguely that John were here, but John was down in New York this week, playing in a golftournament with Pat Doyle, and Marston, and Alec Simpson, of Old Point. But John would be of little avail here, for all his great bulk and muscle. She smiled as she thought of him — a great baby, he always impressed people, with his round, chubby face, blue-eyed, small-nosed, whitish-haired, and his overgrown baby's body. She could visualize him only as he was driving from the tee, his ball going straight and fast as a bullet down the fairway, his gigantic hulk grown suddenly graceful as a Russian dancer's body as his swing followed through, or see him cleaving through the water with his trudgeon stroke, or leaning back with the discus in his hand, as when he broke the world's record at Stockholm. No, John could not help her. Nothing had any existence for her brother that he could not feel or strangle with his monstrous, calloused paws. Anything above the average measure of intelligence in man or woman awed him. He looked on silent, helplessly. Poor John!

She went out into the garden, roaming, restless. The moon was brighter now, and it cut its shadows firmly in the little sun-dial in the rose-bed. It had been an early spring, and already the scents of summer were in the air, the scent of clover and of early roses and the tang of newly cut grass. Even in that peaceful, moonlit garden there was a sense of disquiet, of awaiting.

Well, if things were happening that she did not understand, a thing had happened which she did. Her father had intrusted to her the carrying out of his dream. All her life, as a child, as a girl, as a young woman, she had felt she was set apart for something — that there was more in her life than simple marriage, the breeding of children, the sheltered common domesticity. And suddenly as a young princess might be called from her sacrosanct pleasance to wield a scepter, she had been shown her empery. Those vast activities in New River, the great shipyards, with their high, graceful slips, with their

IS titanic derricks, with their grimy, muscled population, all those were to be hers, to govern and direct. There was John, of course. But she didn't feel that John could help, and it was on her that her father had laid the burden of the destiny. And then clearly as Moses had seen the Land of Promise from the Mount called Nebo she saw the old man's vision roll before her like an open canvas. She saw the keel laid upon the slips and stroke by stroke the graceful lines rise. The sounds of the labor rang in her ears like a droning of busy honey-bees. There was the clatter of riveting and the clang of hammers. Little by little the queer, near-human thing a ship is took shape and strength. It came down the slips to the sea in a flurry of foam, and the fearless guild of mariners took possession of her, master and navigator, mate and bo's'n, the quartermaster at the wheel, and the lookout in the bows. And it went off on a queer life of its own, addressed in a strange language, keeping its own queer time of many bells, following separate laws unknown to landsmen and upheld by ancient, inviolate traditions. And other ships followed, a mighty navy, going off on their lawful occasions, as the sonorous prayer said.

In her mind's eye she could see them, some passing westward by Nantucket Shoals, south of the Bishop's and Clerk's Light, now blinking to the north. And they would go rolling down to Rio for coffee; eastward to China for spices, silks, and tea. They would enter the ancient gates of Herakles down to the tobacco-scented Levant and penetrate north again to the Black Sea, where the oil and emerald shores are. They would go anywhere, dare everything, on an adventure of commerce as epic in its way as the journey of the Argonauts of old, or as the setting out of Philip's Armada, or as the voyage of the Spanish captains to the countries of gold. . .

Then unrolled before her eyes another vista, as though she had come to a mountain-top at the farther end of her vision and another landscape lay before her — the broader, esoteric, ultimate object of her father's dream. He had always instilled into her a fierce love of his adopted country. She could almost hear his voice speaking of it, in the terms of idealism that is the birthright of the Gael.

" There is always something westward," he would philosophize. "Everything comes out of the East and goes to the West, following the sunwise turn. A queer thing, but it's true.

"I mind the time they used to tell me, and me a child in Ireland, of Hy Brasil in the West, where every man was king in daily rotation so that all could have a chance. 'A virgin country, with gold in the rocks and salmon in the waters, and justice being dispensed night and day.' And then suddenly they had America, a country to make Hy Brasil of. A great pity if they spoil it; a great pity, surely."

She could not see, no more than he could, that America as yet was the greatest country in the world. As yet, indeed, it was hardly a country at all, as a boy in his 'teens was not yet a man, but a graceless hobbledehoy. Already, however, it was changing, reaching on manhood's verge. The voice of it was changing from the boastful, childish treble to the deep rumble of a man's tones. And when it had 2 17 grown to manhood it should receive its fortune to have and to hold. In the solemn gift of that she would have her share. Others might help its roaring factories; others shape its magnificent policies, but with her peers, her share would be to launch its pregnant argosies, journeying from sunrise unto sunset and from pole to pole.

A man's dream, but in her, a young and graceful girl, she felt arise the spirit and the power to carry it out. Other women were working night and day, in a changed world, where the old conventual conventions had been cast aside, as science had cast aside the trappings of alchemy, and government the mask of deceit. In the fields women were working, at the lathes in the factories, at the politics of the country. Surely she, too, might take her place in the new battalions, grasping a bigger work than any of them, big as a big man's. And if she did need a man, as, vaguely and intuitively, she felt she would and as her father seemed certain, there was John, her brother John. There was no initiative in John, no vision — that must be faced. But she could provide that. She would be the flame and the mind. John would be the presence and the voice.

"Derith!" her father called . . .

He was sitting there as she had left him, before the fire, his stick in his hands. There was on his face the look of contentment that seemed to denote a problem solved or a resolution taken. Never to her eyes had he seemed more hale, and it struck her with a sense of shock that he was ten years and more above the age the Psalmist allotted unto men.

"Derith," he said, "I want to ask you a question. I am a rich man — a very rich man. When I die the money goes to John and you. Is that your money?"

"I suppose so," she said, puzzled.

"It is not," he told her, abruptly. "If I were to leave you that money, and you were merely to spend it — a house in New York and Newport, a yacht to take your pleasure, a winter in Florida or on the Riviera — would that be right?"

"It doesn't sound so, sir," she agreed.

"It is not." He was dreamy for a moment. "Life, my dear, is a simple thing, when you are old. You look back and the principle has been very simple. It's like a great sea, do you understand, and you make your voyage from the slips of your birth to the big Last Haven. And some days you navigate by sun and stars, and at times you've got to go by dead-reckoning. The course isn't simple. There's shoals and reefs and sand-bars; there's foul and treacherous weather; there's the derelicts of foundered crafts that may bring you to ruin in mid-sea, but in the end you come in, clean and holystoned, the damage of the voyage repaired, and the Great Harbor master boards you and sees if your papers are in order. . . . You can't be towed across, my dear. The Harbor master won't let you in "

"I see, father," she breathed slowly.

"Now, when I'm leaving you this money," he went on, "I'm leaving you a lot more. In a way

I'm leaving you the men who helped me make it. I'm leaving them in trust to you. There's a responsibility on me, too, to see that all's docked in proper order before I quit the bridge. Your aim should not be to make money — have it, by all means, but there's more. I can't explain it to you — but I can feel it, and I'm a very old man. You've got to treat those people right — see that they're properly fitted for their own voyage. There's only one way to do it." Go on, sir. .

"There's one thing in all of us, the worst and the best, that keeps you straight on your course, and that's conscience. It always points the right way, the way the compass needle holds you straight. If you're off" your course or you quit the wheel, your conscience will tell you. If you're on your course and keeping your watch, you can look every swab in the eye and tell him to go to hell. Always feel like that, Derith — always!

"I'm telling you this for your own good, for yours and John's. You could, you know, as they nearly all do, just spend the money and have a good time. Let go your wheel and your business will come into the wind and stay there all right. You wouldn't suffer. . . . I'm not much on religion, but I like it when it's sensible. I'm thinking now of the camel and the needle's eye. . . ."

VI

She was quiet for a while, standing by the mantel and looking into the fire, letting what he had said seep into her brain.