The Gun-Runner: A Novel/Chapter 15
CHAPTER XV
THE LULL IN THE STORM
It was not until the Laminian was well down off the coast of San Salvador that she rode into settled weather. Then, in a night, she seemed to emerge from a world of wind and unrest and tumult into a world of brooding quietness. As she crept on, forging ever southward under the high-arching azure sky, this sense of quietness and completion grew deeper. The air became warm and soft. The sun streamed down on the patched awnings, on the worn deck that seemed bone-white in the flat, strong light of noonday. Through the ventilators, all day long, came the purposeful throb and beat of the engines, muffled, like the throbbing of a great heart. There seemed something inevitable and ordered in that unhurried and undeviating pulse, as though the ship and all she carried were forever at peace with the world.
A passenger or two moved slowly about the level decks or sat listless in the dark shade of the canvas, listening to the plaintive hiss of the ship's bow as it parted the turquoise sea into two widening simitars of curling foam. Cinders rained gently down on the slowly flapping awnings, on the bone-white deck boards steaming with sea-water sprayed from a leaking hose in a foolish effort to keep their cracks from widening, on the eddying and milk-white trail behind the threshing screw. From somewhere forward the bells sounded out, lazily, sadly, ghostlike, as though recording time in a world where all things slept. The ship's brasswork flashed and burned in the hot light. From the silence of the bow, at times, came the sound of a calling voice, mournful and measured. Naked-shouldered stokers, blanched and wet with sweat, crept out to the mid-deck rail and let the draft that alleyed along the companionways cool their moist skin. Now and then a flying-fish rose and circled away, off the bow, and fell shimmering back into the turquoise sea. Piloting the ship's cut water, ever raced and dodged a band of porpoises. Now and then a creeping dorsal fin cut the surface of the water and slunk away again. It seemed to impart something ominous and sinister to the unrelieved brilliance of the arching sky. It left the oily and unruffled sea menacing and cadaverous-like in its calm.
The ship crept on, the centre of its circle of water overhung by its circle of sky. Along the flat fringe of this sky were ranged low tiers of cumulus clouds. They seemed as fixed and orderly as the clouds on a painted stage-drop; they stood like floating flecks of cotton, making a circling amphitheatre of the lonely sea. And in the ever-shifting centre of this amphitheatre throbbed and pulsed the thing of flashing brass-work and bone-white decks, of sadly flapping awnings, of quiet men with watching and melancholy faces, of a world complete in it self. As the long afternoon waned and the sun dipped behind the orange-red sky-line and the light passed away, the orderly and sentinel lamps were hung out. Along the pitted side-plates writhed blurred lines of phosphorus. The sea became a circle of inky blackness furrowed by two ghostly lines of foam. The sky melted into a maze of velvet and lonely light-points. Along the shadowy hatches sat and crooned vaguely outlined groups of seamen, and from somewhere below decks rose the sound of string-music, mournful, outlandish, touched with mystery, as the lonely ship and the huddled lives she sheltered drifted farther and farther southward.
The outward sense of peace that brooded over the Laminian was not shared by certain of her passengers. Alicia Boynton, after a feverish night and a day in her berth, emerged from her cabin a little paler than before, with a soft hollow of anxiety under either cheek-bone. But otherwise she showed no sign of the ordeal through which she had passed, or of the chaos of uncertainty which still confronted her.
McKinnon's own nights, since Hatteras had been left behind, had been equally unsettled. His restless and broken sleep was disturbed by dreams wherein he thought he was engulfed in burning quicksands, and held fast there, when he ought to be at his key. The more he struggled and raged to reach his instrument, just beyond his touch, the more firmly the engulfing quicksands seemed to hold him. Then troubled visions of firing-squads and blindfolded prisoners of war would run through his brain, of dark-skinned little soldiers in ragged denim shouting bravas to a beautiful woman in navy blue, of imprisonment in a small and fetid quartel, or huge, red-handed conspirators and drunken and cursing ship-captains. In his waking hours he was oppressed by a continued sense of suspended action, like that ominous impression which creeps over a ship when her engines stop in mid-ocean.
The drama about him seemed at a standstill. But only too well he knew that this suspense was for the time being alone. It was not peace into which they were drifting. Things had gone too far for a long-continued armistice. And the longer a truce was maintained, McKinnon felt, the more decisive would be the final action. Events were merely framing themselves for that ultimate surprise which he was hopeless to forecast. He was oppressed by the feeling of vague conspiracies being enwoven about him. What these conspiracies were, he could not even guess.
His one escape from this wearing sense of arrested action lay in his key and recorder. At all times of the day he worked busily at his apparatus or brooded patiently over his tuner and coherer. Morning, noon, and night he remained on the lookout for any word that might creep in to him. And all the while he kept calling, doggedly, hoping against hope to get in touch with the Princeton or at least to pick up some stray ship or station. He came to feel something forlorn, something poignant, in his repeated calls, fluttering out and dying away unanswered in those vague etheric wildernesses between a lonely sea and a lonely sky. They seemed to endow the wandering ship with a pathos like that of a lost ewe crying alone and unheard in the night.
Ganley's own attitude made this waiting game a still harder one. He sauntered about under the Laminian's gently flapping awnings, smoking his flat-bellied Hondurian cigars, as placid and unperturbed as a commodore pacing his own yacht deck. He accosted McKinnon, from time to time, with the off-handed geniality of long-established comradeship. He appeared to have buried all memory of those scenes in which he had taken such a recent and such an active part. He divulged nothing of the plans which were fermenting behind the bulwark of his low and massive frontal bone. He said nothing of the doubts and uncertainties, if such he had, which were preying on his mind. But all the while McKinnon felt that he was being watched, just as all the while he himself was guardedly watching the other.
Once, as McKinnon stood alone at the ship's rail, Ganley sauntered over with his ponderous and deliberate strides, and joined him in his silent study of the star-strewn heavens. The operator waited, feeling that at last his enigmatic enemy was about to speak. But the gun-runner's meditative eyes remained turned up to the stars, soft and warm and luminous against a sky of velvety blackness. He seemed utterly at peace with the world and his own soul, as McKinnon left him there, contemplating the intimidating vast dome of the tropical heavens.
It was only as the Laminian rounded the eastern coast of Cuba that McKinnon detected any signs of unusual interest in the gun runner's actions. He caught sight of him at the rail, shadowed by one of the life-boats, scanning the shore-line through his binoculars. He could see him there for an hour or more, studying the long, grayish-yellow littoral land-shelf and the lonely and misty blue hills beyond it. He stood there, expectantly, as though in search for some signal which was not to be found. Then he fell to walking the deck, impatiently, between the engine-room skylights and the life boats. McKinnon, as he watched him striding back and forth, with a touch of exasperation out of keeping with his customarily ponderous movements, could see that a little of the colour had gone from his pendulous cheeks, and that his deep-set eyes were more haggard and puffy than usual.
But nothing came to the quiet and sun-steeped ship to relieve McKinnon's accruing sense of anxiety. His coherer wooed no response from the silence about him; his aerials intercepted no answering message. More than once he felt tempted to confront his impassive and quiescent opponent, if for nothing more than to end the strain, to knock the chip off his shoulder and bring things to an issue.
But Ganley gave him no opening. And again there crept through the younger man, as the second long and sultry day ended in a black and star-strewn evening, the feeling that he was friendless and alone, far from his own kind. With the coming of the calm and spacious tropical night there came to him a more compelling sense of his isolation. More keenly than ever he felt the barrier that his own dissimulation had built up between himself and Alicia Boynton. There was a barb of mockery, he felt, in the very manner in which he had been compelled to relinquish a friendship that had promised to mean so much to him. He tried to tell himself that a man must fight alone, in warfare such as that he was facing, that he must learn to accept his loneliness as a natural part of the game.
Then, of a sudden, his isolation seemed a thing of the past. For, looking up as he sat crouched before his tuner, he saw a figure standing at his open door. And it did not take a second glance to show him that this figure was the figure of the woman of whom he had been thinking. The moment he caught sight of her, in her low-throated gown of white linen, he felt the subjugating influence of her presence. His heart began to beat faster, even before she stepped in across his coppered door-sill. He felt grateful for her companionship, for her mere presence there. He noticed the restlessness of her brooding eyes as she sank into the broken-armed steamer-chair that he placed for her. He wondered just where the thread of their old intercourse would be taken up again.
"Are you in communication with anything?" she asked, with an anxious glance at his apparatus. Her tone was tentative and non-committal; it left everything still unanswered.
"No," he said.
"You can't get anything?"
"Nothing whatever," he answered, "though I've been calling regularly, twice an hour."
"And not a message in two days?" she asked.
"Yesterday afternoon I picked up a few words from an Atlas liner, bound north. She seemed to be reporting distances. But I couldn't get enough power; my coils weren't strong enough to reach her."
The girl rose to her feet, and crossed the cabin and stood studying the faded map of the Caribbean on the closet door.
"But aren't there chances of still getting in communication?" she asked. "There are so many ships, nowadays, that carry wireless."
McKinnon rose and stood beside her, regarding the map.
"Yes, there are hundreds and hundreds of ships, but, on the other hand, there is so much ocean, so much distance to swallow them up," he explained, indeterminately feeling that the longer he could hold her there the more firmly the tie of their old companionship would be re-established. "Look at this map, for instance, with all these islands that seem so terribly close. In the Bahamas alone there are three dozen good-sized islands, and over six hundred cays, and nearly twenty-five hundred rocks of one kind or another. You'd imagine, to look at them on the map here, that you'd hardly get a ship through without bumping into one of them. But when you're down here actually cruising among them, going days without a glimpse of land, you realise how far apart they actually lie. And it's the same with ships. It's possible we may not get another call all the way across the Caribbean."
"That means the Princeton won't be at Puerto Locombia?"
"Not unless I can pick her up."
"Then it's hopeless!"
"I can't say the case is hopeless," parried McKinnon. "But the chances are against us. All we can do is wait and be ready. Sometimes, on clear nights like these, we can make wireless carry a surprising distance."
"There must be somebody—some ship!" persisted the girl, as she sank into the chair again. He began to wish, as he watched her, that it lay in his power to bring some touch of contentment to those unhappy and anxious eyes before him.
"We'll surely overhaul the Princeton," he had the hardihood to assert, "if she's lying to anywhere in the neighbourhood of Culebra."
"And if that fails?" asked the girl.
"I'm hoping we'll still be able to pick up Puerto Locombia itself," he ventured.
She shook her head meditatively, absentmindedly.
"There is no station at Puerto Locombia."
"No station?" cried McKinnon.
"It will be dismantled—most likely it will be burned to the ground by this time. If De Brigard is fighting his way up to the capital, he would never leave a coast-station behind him, to be calling for help."
Here was news, indeed, thought McKinnon; and a sudden grateful look leaped into his eyes, as he realised the misstep from which she had saved him.
"Can you remember if there is a telegraph-line between Puerto Locombia and that capital?" he asked, after a moment of deep thought.
"There was one, once," answered the woman. "But their poles rotted down in less than a year—the heat and rain and insects of that climate, you know, will make a log as high as your table crumble away in one season. So the government brought in a shipload of street-car rails, I think they were second-hand rails from Kingston, and planted them for poles to carry the line up to Guariqui. But the natives kept cutting out sections of the wire for their own use, to mend saddle-girths and tie up hut-wattles, and it took three-quarters of Arturo's government troops to patrol the route and keep the line open. So they gave it up, at last, and fitted up the three wireless stations."
She did not join in McKinnon's laugh over the untimely end of Locombia's telegraph-system.
"Where is the third station—the one besides Guariqui and Puerto Locombial?" he asked.
"At Boracao—that's the biggest of the banana-shipping towns."
"It's hard to have to sit and wait for—for the inevitable this way," he said, with an assumption of cheeriness.
"Yes, it is hard," she said, out of the silence that once more fell over them.
He felt, none the less, wordlessly grateful for her presence there, talking or silent. She seemed to bring a new and more vital atmosphere into his squalid little station. She seemed to throw a warm and transforming tint on everything about her, as he had seen a rose-tinted stage-light alter and enrich the canvas and tinsel of a Broadway playhouse.
He saw her take a long and troubled breath, look up at him, and once more look away. The hum and whir of his electric fan was the only sound in the cabin.
"I don't think either of us has been quite honest with the other," she said, compelling herself to meet his puzzled gaze.
"I know—and I'm sorry," he replied, puzzling her again by his note of humanity.
"I've told you an untruth," she said at last, taking another deep breath.
"In what way?" asked McKinnon.
"I lied to you, when Ganley and you were in my cabin. I can't let it go on. I can't endure the thought of this lie standing between us like—oh, like a quicksand that can never be crossed."
"But what is it?" asked the other.
She looked up at him again, very steadily and very bravely.
"I told you that my husband was dead," she answered in her low and constrained voice. "He is not dead."
"He is not dead?" echoed McKinnon.
"I said that he died of yellow fever. He took the fever and was ill with it. But he did not die. He was sentenced and sent to the Island of Malpanto, on the Pacific coast. The Locombian penal colony is there. He was sent there, for life. He was dead, to all the world—he was dead to me."
"Then he is dead, to all"
"Wait. I wanted to make sure of my freedom, to be foolishly sure of it. So I went North. Then I went to New Orleans, to my old home."
"But why?" he asked, as he noticed her hesitation.
"A felony, in Louisiana, is a cause for absolute divorce."
"You mean you were set free in your own country!"
"Yes, that is why I went to the United States. That is why I was there when the news of this revolution first reached me."
"And Ganley knows this?" McKinnon demanded.
"Ganley knows everything," she answered.
"And this is why you are so against him?"
She had to school herself into self-control before she could go on.
"I have a better reason for being against him. If he and his Liberal Party once acquire power, Ganley will bring Perralta back to Guariqui; he will commute his sentence. He will do this to strike at my brother Arturo."
McKinnon looked at her in amazed and silent comprehension. At last he seemed able to understand, disturbed as he was by the thought of so fragile a figure entangled in such brutal and rudimentary conflicts. The lack of motive for her presence in the same circle with Ganley, whether facing or following such a man, had been the underground yet actual cause of more than one of his wayward suspicions. But now he understood. And her confession, instead of shocking and disturbing him, brought into his softened eyes a sense of release, of more perfect understanding. What she had told him seemed to humanise her, to bring her into touch with the world of realities as he had met and known it. The last of his old-time fear of her, his hampering awe of her, had vanished.
"We are both against Ganley," he said, as though speaking to himself.
"You are against Ganley?" she questioned.
"To the end of time!" he answered, with a solemnity that brought her great wondering eyes up to his. She noticed that he rose from his chair and closed the cabin door.
"Why have you changed?"
"I have not changed!"
"Then what is it?"
"It's that I'm at last going to be half honest with you—that I can't continue not being honest with you! I am on this ship for the same purpose that you are here."
"To go to Locombia?"
"No—to defeat Ganley!"
"For what reason?"
"For your reason!"
"But for whom?"
"For the Minister of War of the United States of Locombia," answered McKinnon. He leaned towards her a little as he spoke, and lowered his voice, with a warning side-glance towards the closed door.
"But my brother Arturo is the Locombian Minister of War," she maintained, her eyes still wide with wonder.
"And for two months past I've been commissioned by your brother to keep in touch with practically every so-called 'Liberal' expatriate in New York. And only twenty hours before this ship sailed I found out what it carried and why it was necessary for me to be on board of it."
For a full minute she did not utter a word.
"Then you are a spy?" she said, at last.
Scarcely a spy—I am merely a Secret Agent for Arturo Boynton's government," was his answer.
He could see the deep breath she took as she leaned relaxingly back in the broken-armed steamer-chair.
"Then we are acting together," she murmured, slowly, still a little mystified, still a little sceptical as to this new issue which was reuniting them.
"Yes, we're acting together—and we'll never let Ganley win!" said McKinnon.
It was something more than the fire of foolish ardour. And the woman at his side must have seen and known it, for a touch of colour came into her pale cheek. The electric fan purred and hummed on its little bracket. The soft and balmy night air beat on their faces. The gloom and quietness of the ship was about them.
"Won't you let me fight this fight out, for you?" he asked, surrendering to the tide of feeling that seemed tearing him from all his old anchorages.
"If we only could!" she said, inadequately.
"We can, together," he cried, with blind and unreasoning hope, resenting the look of something that seemed strangely akin to pity as she gazed up at him.
She did not answer, in words, but some slowly transforming emotion, some inner and unuttered capitulation slowly overbore the look of trouble that weighed upon her. Then she closed her eyes, as though shutting out some glimpse of happiness too great to be anything but a mockery. Before she opened them McKinnon had her hand between his great bony fingers, and reckless fire and warmth and daring went singing through his veins.
"I'm going to fight this out for you," he said, "and I'm going to win because you want me to win!"
"Oh, it will be hard!" she murmured, with a vibrata of something that was almost happiness in her voice.
"Hard!" he cried, in his new-born and unreasoning audacity; "I'd fight through Hell itself for you!"