A Horrifying Tale of the Sea
The Latvian
WE WERE sitting in the cool dining room of an Occidental club at Tokyo, enjoying the tinkling of tall thin glasses and the soothing gelidity of our highballs.
Knowlton, a slight young man with a moustache, who was gathering material in the Orient for a series of financial articles, was making a droll story out of an adventure he had when he once strolled through a pasture with a girl and a guitar.
"She had a red hat," he was saying, "and the bull saw it. Before I knew what was happening, he was heading for us, snorting like a mad schoolma'am.
"What did I do?
"I picked up my guitar and ran. The girl got to the fence about the time I did, but she got there without any help from me.
"I saved my guitar and myself. The incident showed me that I was fonder of song than I was of woman."
Drucamp, a plump little old man with an absurd pair of whiskers, broke into the laugh:
"You should have played your guitar. They say that music hath charms to soothe the savage beast."
"Congreve wrote it 'the savage breast,' I think," said my friend Maclou, the wanderer. "He might as well have said one as the other.
"I have often wondered whether he knew how mysterious and strange a truth he was speaking, or whether he was just getting off a line that sounded good to him.
"Do you care to hear a story somewhat different from Knowlton's which proves the power that music has over what Drucamp has called the savage beast?"
There was acquiescence in the general turning toward the speaker. He was a man of forty with a spare, dark face and a body as slender and hard as an iron rod. Two of us at least—Knowlton and I—knew that he had been captain of a rum-running fleet off New Jersey; that he had smuggled cognac from Cuba into the sponge beds off the coast of Florida for the sponger fishers of Tarpon Springs to find; that he had performed mysterious errands for the King of Siam and that his adventures in the Gobi desert had been the subject of a thrilling narrative by a famous author.
He spoke but seldom of the incidents of his life—the man who has had much excitement does—and he usually preferred listening to talking when there was conversation at the table.
The power upon him of the story he was to tell was obvious. As it progressed, his hands clenched: and unclenched and his eyes looked through the fragile walls of the club, far into some magical territory of which we knew nothing,
"Perhaps," he began, "you have heard—but no; I'll start the story farther back than that.
"I was standing on the deck of an auxiliary sloop moored to a wharf in New Orleans, when I noticed the most dejected figure I have ever seen. It was the figure of a man, well-built, dressed in the outfit of a Russian sailor.
"The figure struck me because it was so downcast. You have seen men down and out along the beaches of the South Seas, and here in the Orient, and you know how far into despair a man can go. This man arrested my attention by his dejection—and I was used to waterfront bums. You can see that it must have been bad.
"His clothes, as I say, pointed him out to be a Russian, but the fine features were more those of a Pole. I decided, on second thought, that the man must be a Lithuanian, because his eyes were fair and his skin, in spite of the marks of exposure, was as delicate as a baby's.
"While I was watching, a policeman took him in tow. The man protested vigorously; waved his hands and talked in broken English, but the cop was obdurate. He took him away.
"The sight of the Latvian started me on a train of thought. I had been in Lithuania once, in the government of Kovno. The mission that took me there is of no importance to the story. What I remembered, as I stood there on the deck of my sloop, was that I had watched the worship of trees in a little village at the edge of a long marsh.
"You have read of the tree-worshippers, and perhaps you have seen some queer rituals here in the East. I have seen fanatics shove saw-toothed swords through their bowels in a temple in Egypt, and I have seen the American Indians in New Mexico crunch scorpions in their teeth and swallow rattlesnakes alive. It was horrible and fascinating, but the most powerful thing I have ever seen was the worship of a gnarled oak tree there in that Latvian village.
"There was none of the crazy nastiness of the rituals I have mentioned. It was all in silence at the start, with the Krive-Kriveyto, the priest of priests, standing at the foot of the sacred tree, gnarled and ancient as the oak itself, his knotted arms and his bundled fists raised over his head, which he threw back till his dry skull rapped on his vertebrae.
"They brought sacrifices to the tree—and one of the things they sacrificed I will not mention even among such sophisticated men as you. But it was beautiful and solemn and glorious, and at the end there was a whispering in the leaves of the tree, and an eerie whispering broke out among the worshippers. They were talking with the tree—talking its own language!
"In the two weeks or so that I spent there, I heard much that I have forgotten now, and much that I never understood. The talk of the people was as thick with mysticism as you will find the air at certain towns of Wales and certain villages of India. I gathered
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