The enchanted garden

Front matter

Book.

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PART II. A NEW WORLD VI The Search

VII The Storm.

VIII The Girl of the Island . . . , IX The Superfluous Man . . . . ,

X The Stone by the Pool.

XI The Lovers.

XII The Reason for Bruce.

XIII An Accident.

XIV Thirty-Six Hours.

XV Fugitives.

XVI The Struggle.

X

CONTENTS

Part III. The Call Of The Past Chapter Page

XVH Possessing the World.193

XVHI The Smile of Irony.207

XIX The Air That Kills. 215

XX The Return of Bruce.226

PART IV. MAISIE XXI The Land of Lost Content. 241

XXH Happy Highways.255

XXHI The Looming Distance.275

XXIV The Gateway Again.288

XXV The Circle.300

Afterword.311

THE ENCHANTED GARDEN

THE ENCHANTED GARDEN

J WORD

Dike some alchemist who saw, or thought he saw, the grain of gold transmuted from a baser metal, or like the treasure-seeker bending over the treasure amid the dark soil he has turned up, I tell myself that I have hit upon the secret — upon one of the secrets — behind the appear¬ ances of life.

Not that I believe life to be a formula, or an equation, or a capside. But it is, undoubtedly, something shaped, controlled and molded like a statue — monstrous in its simplicity, a strange god, gigantic, colossal, awe-inspiring before you learn the mystery of the priestcraft in the crypt beneath the pedestal.

Here on my peaceful Island, surrounded by every in¬ strument and safeguard of tranquillity, I find myself suddenly lashed by an irresistibly urgent desire to write this narrative. A throbbing fire of eagerness pulses in my veins and I feel myself driven to an unaccustome\d pen. Call it a tribute, an escape, or a fragment of the eternal human quest for truth — as you mil. In any case, I believe I have found something and I burn to tell it.

The secret, I am willing to swear, is woman.

There are, of course, the motives and appearances of ambition, riches, adventure, travel — lust — a thousand

A WORD things. But to my mind they are a thousand disguises — masks, masks! Behind them all lurks the one fact, the one face and shape — that of woman. She is adventure and art, she is chance, Wcissitude, romance, home, travel, life and death.

If life is a mechanism, she is the only goddess in the machine. On earth, in men’s lives, she is all, — the in¬ strument, the potter and the wheel. In human affairs she holds direct from the Deity.

Why, I sometimes cry out inwardly, should she have so much power, the sorceress? And then I must laugh at my own emotional absurdity. Nevertheless, had I a son, I should give him hut one blessing ere I confided him to life:

“ Heaven defend you in the women you meet!

For in that one thing lies everything. . . .

Every human being, so it is said, has at least one story, coidd he but tell it. And despite a host of short¬ comings and lack of skill, I am about to attempt the story of the one human being I know best and therefore, inevitably, least of all on earth.

Chapter I Flight

*

He was an inch, perhaps a trifle less than that, under six feet, well-muscled, but by no means muscle-bound, with a squarish jaw, a slight wave to his chestnut hair and eyes of a dark and brooding blue. The slight for¬ ward droop to the shoulders in one of his height gave him peculiarly the effect of being forever bent on some secret quest that might not wait, but that could on no conceivable account be given away. A quiet controlled eagerness seemed to emanate from his young limbs, an eagerness, you felt, that life itself could not balk, — an eagerness for life.

I see him now with those eyes and that sense of sup¬ pressed excitement that he imagined, poor soul, gave him almost the appearance of lounging, moving listlessly about,the wharves of Boston in an old and faded, threadworn suit, especially unearthed for the occasion, looking for a ship. He was no sailor then, God knows, and scarcely a man, for he was in his nineteenth year. It was insufferably hot at the end of August and waves of heat were visibly drifting upward from the steel sides of dirty-looking tramp ships, from second-rate liners and from such other miscellaneous craft as lay along¬ side those uninspiring wharves.

Now and then a watchman on a boat would lazily gaze over the bulwark rail with a speculative aqueous eye at the approaching youngster and send a jet of darkred tobacco juice into the dirty waters below, before the possible disturbance of answering a question.

Uninspiring as were those docks and wharves, they were nevertheless a fairy palace to the boy. The strange smells of spices mixed with the aroma of leather, of wirebound bales in brown gunny sacking, of coarse burlaps marked with mystic numerals, words and symbols, an immensity of crates and boxes, the grind of small truck wheels and the occasional shouts and swearing of list¬ less stevedores, — all these elements, drab enough in their way, combined into a powerful black magic that to the lad that hot August day was scarcely of this earth.

He was looking for a ship,— this boy who had barely sailed so much as a catboat without guidance. He had begun his quest with Rowe’s Wharf because the name was a familiar one, but he left it with a rapidity of retreat that would have justified a leper camp, merely because he saw a glittering excursion steamer there with paddle wheels. That domestic trimness shocked his sense of decency and high resolve. He had come to seek he knew not what, and the placid old tub painted white for bobbing in home waters was a nauseating of¬ fense to him.

The dirty rusty-looking tramps, smeared and blistered, farther on toward Charlestown, however, began to bring him a deep, a soul-filling satisfaction. These were of the Sea, — of the sea in the abstract, that forever lures life because it gives life, that has made and unmade men and nations, that is the source of dreams, more precious than bread.

The lure of the sea, however, the disturbing call of

FLIGHT adventure, romance, was, if not secondary, at least strangely intermingled with another force working in the boy’s throbbing breast that hot August morning. He had been challenged and had proudly, not recklessly, with a defiant lift of startled eyes to startling eyes, quietly accepted the challenge. It was one of those cries so meaningless to the mature of any wisdom or experience, so ineluctable to the young — a dare! Where character has not yet hardened and proved itself, it rushes like hot liquid metal into the first mold set for it, however useless the form, however meaningless the re¬ sult. The perturbed youth that summer morning was for the first time in his life actively establishing his own character. He was looking for a ship and beneath the assumed quietude of his exterior the heady, rushing cur¬ rent of his blood was flooding his heart and brain like a mill race over a dam. All other thought was swirling and scattering like so much flotsam on the stream of that one impetuous volition. He must and he would find a ship.

The steady succession of refusals, of vague and evasive answers, however, was causing a darkness like a cloud to settle on his enterprise, when suddenly he came face to face with a short, heavy-set man walking up and down on the quay beside a trim, yachtlike, newly painted green and white schooner.

Something in his heart leaped forward and he gulped visibly before addressing this straw-hatted, alpaca-coated, heavy-mustached little man intent upon his own thoughts, a man whom he would not have remarked in a crowd, but who now, on a sudden, seemed charged with the gravity, importance and authority of all the world, — of the quivering mysterious future.

“ Do you know who is captain of this ship? ” the youth inquired bravely and it seemed to him miraculous that the words had issued so smoothly from his parched throat, from his dry lips.

“ Why? ” and the little man cocked a quizzical twin¬ kling eye at him from under the brim of his straw hat that seemed to twitch suddenly upward in mocking chal¬ lenge. All the world, even to that inanimate straw hat, was bent upon challenging the youthful untried entity of his manhood.

“ Fm looking for a job — a berth,’’ he corrected him¬ self — ‘‘ before the mast.”

The little man’s face purpled a shade deeper, he threw back his head and laughed joyously. A humorist, evi¬ dently !

The young man turned scarlet to the ears and grinned uncertainly, painfully.

“Before which mast?” demanded the little man crisply, his eyes still dancing with laughter. “ Fve got three there I ”

It was now the lad’s turn to laugh, but he checked himself shortly.

“ Oh, I don’t pretend I’ve had much experience,” he muttered. Then in a firmer tone, “ But I’d like to have — and I like this ship.”

“ Like this ship,” repeated the other slowly, thought¬ fully eyeing him. “ Good taste, lad, good taste — that’s something,” he muttered, as if to himself.

“ Brandon! ” he called, suddenly spinning around like a teetotum on his heel toward the ship.

“ Aye, aye, sir,” responded a voice from the after deck¬ house and a smooth-shaven ruddy face under a visored cap appeared first and then a slim tall young body clad in blue serge followed it and stood leaning over the after rail.

“ Come down here, Brandon — want to see you.”

The man called Brandon moved forward, seemed to

FLIGHT slide down the narrow gangplank to the quay and stood beside them attentively.

** Yes, Captain Flitch?” he murmured.

Look at this lad, Brandon — think you could make a sailor of him? ” His voice now carried a new, a some¬ what exaggerated tone of serious authority, — the authority of the short man in power, always a shade over-assertive and always slightly amusing.

“ Why — yes, sir,” said Brandon, slowly scrutinizing the lad from head to foot. Fve made sailors of worse material.”

** How old are you ? ” the captain turned upon the youth abruptly.

“ Twen—twenty-one, sir,” and he could have bitten his tongue for stammering words that he had so often re¬ hearsed both vocally and mentally.

The captain shot a quick darting glance at Brandon but made no comment.

“ Where are you from ? ” he demanded.

** Up-state,” was the reply — “ from the country.”

** Truth is,” announced the captain, lifting his hat and wiping the perspiration from his forehead with a blue cotton handkerchief, “ we’re short a man. Were sailing without one. And here is this-” he turned to Bran¬

don again. “ Question is, is a landlubber better than nothing at all ? ”

Brandon grinned and glanced at the lad.

“ Weren’t all sailors landlubbers sometime? ” The lad spoke up quietly.

The words seemed to fasten the attention of both seamen for a minute, and then something hard, a shade chilly, like a glint of steel, showed in Brandon’s eyes.

I’ll take him. Captain, if you want me to,” he snapped sharply and turned away, slightly lifting his eyes to the furled rigging of the ship.

“ Right,” crackled the captain in the same business¬ like voice. Where’s your dunnage? ”

“ Not far away,” answered the lad and he felt an im¬ mense relief, momentary, triumphant, that immediately gave way to the heavy feeling of a grave decision.

“ Go and get it then,” snapped the captain. “ Be back in an hour! ”

The world of request was behind him. He had en¬ tered the world of command. He gave a succinct nod of the head, turned away quickly and ran for it with lowered eyes. Once under the shed of the wharf, among strag¬ gling stevedores in the cool, musty shade, he slowed up. It shot through his head like an arrow that there was time yet to draw back, to disappear in the indifferent crowd of the streets and return to the garden of sunlit everyday life. Who could trace him? Who would ever know? The thought was like a blow and, startled lest any one should see it, he glanced sharply over his shoul¬ der. Captain and mate were standing where he had left them, with their backs turned upon him, their eyes fixed upon upon the rigging, evidently discussing their ship. They had trusted him, believed in him, in his word. No, he could not fool them. This world of men into which he had erupted almost in a whim, in a wave of something like intoxication, believed in him. His Rubicon was crossed. If a streak of “yellow” lurked within his make-up, now was the moment to efface it forevermore. They had accepted his word. There was no going back. Swiftly he made his way to the street, boarded an electric car going in the direction of the North Station, where that morning, upon arriving from Adams Rock, he had checked his bag.

The blind tumult in his brain made a somnambulist of him in the midst of the prosaic world that now seemed a jumbled incomprehensible nightmare. On a sudden

FLIGHT his eye would fall upon a face in the car, on a child’s shoes turned toward him while their owner gazed joyously out of the window, on a stain in the opposite seat, but al¬ ways these dots of old reality would recede to a pin’s point, to nothingness, and again his wild speculation, that could fasten on nothing outside, turned inward.

“ It’s done — it’s done-” the grinding car wheels

seemed to repeat endlessly. “ There is no going back! ”

Chapter II

How indifferent are the ministers to some of life’s greatest adventures! That came home to him only after¬ wards — well afterwards — when he thought of the dark close-cropped young man who had handed, with heavy briskness, his portmanteau across the counter of the parcel room in the North Station. The fellow didn’t know!

With a new rush of dry-mouthed excitement that seemed to emanate from the pit of his stomach, he seized the bag and, like a mystic forcibly excluding the world from his meditation, he flung out of the station precincts and hurled it upon the rear platform of a car bound toward the ship. He dared not look back, dared not think or swerve by a hair’s breadth from his course, lest his challenged manhood should suffer defeat. An old familiar being, a he that had been, that was, must then and there die the death, so that a new he could be born. The old Roderic Whitford familiar to him expired at the moment when he gave his name to the mate upon boarding the ship and put his signature to a paper in the chart room.

“ Roderic Whitford,” he had answered in a harsh uncertain voice that was strange to him, and the mate wrote “ seaman ” after his name. Then the old Roderic was securely dead and a new one, as unfamiliar and un¬ certain as the next hour, came tremulously into being.

No one had doubted him, no one had questioned his word or expressed the slightest suspicion of his promise to return. There he was and being taken for granted. He grew mentally at least an inch in stature. A tug¬ boat with a sort of waddling movement like a duck was already chough-choughing toward the ship, and dirty men aboard her were preparing hawsers.

“ Better cast off, Brandon,” Captain Flitch came hustling aft. “We must be off. Oh, the lad!” he grinned faintly, ironically, as he perceived Roderic emerg¬ ing from the chart room. “Just in time!”

The ship would have gone without him had he lingered! Promptly he lost the imaginary inch in stature!

Brandon, hurrying away to execute his orders, flung something unintelligible over his shoulder at Roderic. Bewildered and useless, the boy stood for a moment look¬ ing dazedly at the captain.

“ Stow your duffle forward, lad,” irritably cried the captain, who had no patience with bewilderment; “ take an empty bunk ” — and then, as though he remembered the quality of his new hand, Captain Flitch grinned quizzically with a twitching of his bushy mustache. “ And keep out of the way,” he added more kindly, “ till some one shows you how to be useful.”

With head lowered to hide a crimson flush and his heavy portmanteau bumping against his legs, Roderic ran forward among scurrying sailors and all but fell down the scuttle of the forepeak hold, where he sat pant¬ ing for a space on his upright bag. Luckily there was not a soul in that dim abode to watch his darkling agony, for this was not the forecastle, but a sail room.

How long he sat there alone in his misery he could not have told. He was aware only that with every at¬ tempt to think something like a volcanic eruption happened in the midst of his brain and the fragments of his thoughts flew up skyward and fell in a jumbled state of debris in the crowded precincts of his skull. Not being Caesar, he did not announce that the die was cast, the Rubicon crossed, or anything else philosophical. He merely heaved a profound sigh from the depths of his troubled being, like a groan, rose unsteadily and began groping and peering at the masses of spare sails.

Hastily he scrambled out of this in search of the real forecastle. He found it stealthily, the forward deck¬ house partitioned by a bulkhead into halves — the world of cofflnlike bunks. The only one that seemed empty of human belongings was the lower one nearest the door and into that he lifted his bag and stood for a moment undecided. For the first time in his life he experienced what it felt like to be a prisoner. A wild desire to cry out, to shout in the dim recesses of that solitary com¬ partment, leaped within him like a sporadic reversion to childhood. An impulse to flee, to beat his hands against the bulkheads shook him like a spasm of intense fear. He trembled for an instant like a leaf and his lips twitched. Then, as quickly as it had come, the strange feeling passed and he laughed bitterly at himself, a short tortured laugh that was like a sob.

“ Talk about manly courage,” he muttered to him¬ self. “ Fm full of it! ” and he grinned piteously.

He must get out of this. Anything was better than this lugubrious forecastle with its strange odor mingled of paint, boots and either grease or turpentine, — he could not tell which. He turned to the door that had slammed behind him, then abruptly he paused. No, he could not go like this. Even his threadbare clothes were grotesquely anomalous when he recalled the melee of sailors in overalls, or gray undershirts, whom he had tried not to see as he ran the length of the deck with his portmanteau. Luckily he had brought two blue shirts and a pair of overalls. Feverishly, he threw off his coat, began to undo the straps of his portmanteau and with the other hand to unbutton the striped madras shirt he was wearing. He was just climbing into those un¬ soiled overalls when he heard a shout outside.

“Here you, Whitford! Crawl out here and lend a hand! It was Brandon’s voice. He was stunned for an instant by the suddenness of the call. But immedi¬ ately a wave of exultation leaped up in his blood. His' heart was aflood with gratitude. He was called! Still buckling his shoulder straps he dashed out, bumping his shins against the high coaming, but oblivious of pain, and for a second he blinked like a mole in the dazzling light of sun, sea and sky.

“ When I call you,” rasped Brandon, eyeing him sharply, “ you answer! ”

“ Yes, sir,” muttered Roderic shamefacedly.

“ Coil up those hawsers,” growled Brandon, “ and you, Carmichael,” he turned to a lank, grizzled, weatherbronzed sailor of perhaps fifty-five, “ I want you aft.”

Carmichael, who had already begun coiling up those fat ropes, dropped his work with a sharp “ Aye, aye, sir,” and followed the mate without so much as a glance at Roderic. The mate was no less instantly oblivious of him. And by that careless disregard, had they but known it, those seamen soothed and humored the lad as though they had conferred upon him the freedom of a city. For some time he dated his admission to man’s estate by that seemingly trivial and insignificant episode.

Some of the sails were already set and a southerly breeze coming up was beginning to fill and belly them with the magic force that to a landsman seems at first supernatural, the breath of God. The tugboat, that must have cast off just before he came on deck, was waddling back noisily with what seemed to Roderic pre¬ cisely the air of the duck had she espied the quondam ugly duckling in the shape of a swan. Men were in the rigging, on the shrouds; reefing, hauling and bracing, obeying hoarse orders and giving hoarse replies. Some were slewing tackle, reeving sail gear, making ready as for a holiday or a great enterprise. The orders, mostly unintelligible, that rang out over his head, seemed to flood him with soul-distending intoxication. The com¬ mand to “ loose and set foresail and main jib,” the words to “ hoist away on throat and peak halyards,” though in¬ comprehensible, stirred him like an ancient incantation. No one was paying the slightest heed to him. And therefore the one thought that surged above his name¬ less emotion centered upon making the most perfect coils of rope his hands could fashion.

Once clear of the roads a general easement of the ten¬ sion seemed to settle like an atmosphere over the ves¬ sel. The captain, having set the course, left the wheel and took a turn about the ship. On a sudden his eye fell upon Roderic and his purple face assumed the look of some odd comic mask. With an agile step he ap¬ proached him.

What’s your name, my lad? ” he snapped.

“ Whitford, sir.”

The captain examined him for an instant without speaking and then the bushy mustache indicated that he was struggling with a grin.

“ You know what you’re shipped for, don’t you? ” he inquired with a half-comic, half-challenging graciousness.

“ No, sir,” was the answer.

“ What! ” he cried, darkling. ‘‘ Don’t you know where you’re bound ? ”

“ England, I suppose, sir,” Roderic answered faintly.

England! ” repeated the little man in surprise.

“Didn’t Brandon tell you? Thought you knew.” His aspect was serious. “ We’re bound for Suva, lad — that’s where we’re bound. A long voyage and a stiff one. Make no mistake about that. Does it make any difference? ” he added as an afterthought.

Roderic had no notion where Suva was. He was vaguely aware, however, that it was distant, remote, in the South Atlantic or the South Pacific. Both seemed equally far, incredibly far. But the tug of a heavy weight in his heart did not darken the certain light in his brain, — that it was too late to consider now, too late to draw back 1

“ N-no, sir,” he finally gulped. “ It makes no differ¬ ence.” The skipper’s eyes glittered into his for an in¬ stant, inscrutably. There was a gleam of almost paternal kindliness in them, had Roderic not been too bewildered to read them.

“ Anyway, that’s our destination,” the elder man mur¬ mured, half-absently. “ But you’ll be a sailor when you get there, my lad — if you look smart.” And with that he left him.

Long afterwards Roderic learned how near the little man was at that moment to putting the ship about and sending him ashore. But with abrupt decision he turned and left the new hand alone.

Suva! With the dead helplessness of a spent swim¬ mer sinking heavily, the roar of engulfing waters in his ears, Roderic’s consciousness sank arid struggled for an instant against a blackness that enclosed and overwhelmed it. He felt stunned and buffeted about.

“Suva! Suva!” kept throbbing through the noise in his ears. He had that morning written home that it would be a “ good experience ” to go to England and return in a few weeks. But — Suva! a voyage of months, perhaps years! Would he ever return? Suva! That was different — overwhelmingly different!

The thought of home awakened him suddenly as a dull distant explosion might awake a sleeper. The sound and splash of rippling water against the sides of the ship came to his ears with a strange sense of matutinal fresh¬ ness and novelty. The darkness had passed. He was broad awake, right enough, riveted to the spot where the captain had left him, and through his brain faintly re¬ verberated — Suva!

Home! By the last mail this afternoon they would get the letter-card he had that morning posted from Boston, — a missive he had meant to intercept and de¬ stroy had his enterprise failed. It had not failed. It had succeeded only too well. To-night they would have the news of his departure, his flight. They would look for word of him shortly, for himself in a few weeks, not too late to enter college, for which he was ready. But here he was sailing for Suva — at the antipodes for all he knew — to return God knew when, if at all! The tricki¬ ness of life, the sardonic deceit of it, on a sudden came home to him for the first time; hit him squarely between the eyes. Everything in the past had been manageable, susceptible of plan and arrangement beforehand, for long periods ahead. Yet everything in the past had been of negligible importance compared to this. This was new, a thing of a savage, gripping, flinging whim¬ sicality; and this was life! Willful, grotesque, unaccount¬ able — life!

They would have the news at home to-night! They would not believe and yet they must believe! He would not return — and they would suffer. He had not meant quite that.

Whitford!’’ crashed through his reverie like the sound of splintering wood in the voice of the mate. “ Lay aft with the helmsman and learn to steer a course. Wake up there! Look alive! ”

“Yes — aye, aye, sir!” he blurted out, bracing him¬ self against the sudden onslaught, and, crimson with confusion, he leaped to obey the order. “Wake up!” the mate had said. If he only knew the truth, the vast, overwhelming, unprecedented truth — his life going topsy-turvy so strangely, so suddenly! Nevertheless the mate mustn’t catch him that way — mooning again. He had understood Brandon’s order; that was something. He was grateful like a pilgrim for an alms in an alien, hostile land.

The grizzled sailor, Carmichael, his brown, rough hands fingering the spokes of the wheel lightly, but with the steellike vigor of a virtuoso’s touch, glanced non¬ chalantly at him as he approached, and without speaking again riveted his eyes to the binnacle. Brandon kept pacing back and forth on the poop deck, his visored cap well over his eyes, looking now at the sea with an intense speculation, meaningful, mysterious. And Roderic, immensely anxious to penetrate and comprehend this mystery into which his own impetuous volition had so suddenly cast him, scrutinized no less intensely the symbols on the compass dial and followed the move¬ ments of the needle with a tumultuous beating of the heart, eager, fascinated, painfully alert, as though he were watching the finger of Fate.

Chapter III

The black bat night, as a poet called it, is no black bat at sea. At sea the night is a state of being, an astral world, literally: a thing of immensities and wheeling con¬ stellations, instinct with life, raining influence upon every nerve, at once shrinking the sensitive conciousness to a pin’s point and expanding it to universal dimen¬ sions. In the watch from eight to twelve, during which the mate had venturesomely posted him for lookout duty, Roderic had time to shake off some of the tumult and excitement of his momentous day. The loss of the sight of land was alone sufficient to leave him face to face with himself, to bring him the semblance of a realiza¬ tion of what he had that day brought about.

Was he actually here, or was this a dream? Had he actually been swept all in a moment from the bustle and clangor of the twentieth century, with its steam and its motor cars and hurry, into this alien world of a too real romance?

The wash of the sea against clipperlike bows settled like a soothing monotony upon his ears. His disturbed young spirit that had darted about flung and buffeted this way and that, like a bird in a gale, settled slowly, uncer¬ tainly, under the spell of the night, to a simulacrum of its old-time calm, though achingly aware that all the old time had been irrevocably swept away.

‘^Who is Roderic Whitford? — who am I?” was the thought that the immensities overhead and all about in¬ vited as if with prayer. The infinity of his own insignifi¬ cance rebounded like an elastic to the more negotiable query, “Why am I here?” Like a tape on a reel, his mind whirled back to the home he had fled, to the life he, in a rush of madness, had left behind, to the dimming world of yesterday.