Wild Blood/Chapter 9

by Gordon Young

 

TRADITIONS OUT OF SICILY

THERE are many things that should be told at once—that should be told not in sequence, but simultaneously. For instance, there was another fight on deck about two minutes after the men had gone up and found the ship aback in the wind, rolling and drifting like a crewless craft.

Shaylor jerked out a belaying-pin and started to give orders. Hawkins jerked out another and told him to go to the devil. I had the story from Raulson.

Hawkins was bleeding and battered, but he avowed that he was not beaten. He rushed in and was laid unconscious. The men took orders from Shaylor.

For another thing, Davenant sidled up to me as I came out of Williams's room, his white teeth showing in a hateful smile, and whispered low.

“Luck has been with us, eh?”

Some time had passed in that cabin before Davenant met me, and among other things during that time I had unlocked the chest—of course, to make sure the rifle-plungers were safe—and emptied a bottle of gin down my own throat, all except a sip that Dula had taken from a cup that I offered her. She had tried in a not unskilful way to wipe and dress the wound. The girl was tired and worn, and more pale than I had seen her. And more resolute.

I probably smiled at him, for I was past caring what he thought or did. Luck? Luck? I played with the word. Indeed, for sooner or later we'd drift or be blown to some island where there were natives; and wherever there were natives Williams was known; and when they found him dead, or half-dead:

“How would you like to see your head drying on the rafters of a chief's hut!”

I left him.

Davenant probably suspected that I was drunk, but he had something to brood over anyway. He should have known enough of human nature to be aware that no man is to be trusted; so he really had no reason to be surprised at me when he came whispering about “luck” through those shining teeth.

I found Hawkins, a great red gash on his head as if he had been half-scalped, on the forecastle-head. His face was scarcely recognizable.

He began by cursing me for a coward, a hanger-back and named all the other men for the same. By his side he had an ax.

Shaylor could shout his own throat out. He wouldn't budge. Let Shaylor come forward for him and there would be another fight.

I mentioned significantly that somebody had stolen my gun. Hawkins vowed he did not care how many guns Shaylor might have stolen.

He looked longingly at the big revolver of Williams's that I had put on. He damned me for not using it—then suddenly he cursed Williams for pulling the fellow out of the sea. Let him have. the gun; he would go aft then and there—

I had a bottle behind my back. We drank it. And talked.

No—Shaylor would not get to the bottles in the chest. Dula Davenant was there. She was keeping vigil—had he ever seen such a woman?

No, of course not. Worse than any ever seen. Of course.

Peculiar, strange, fierce, dangerous. But then all women were dangerous. There was no distinction. Aye, and she hated Shaylor.

Hawkins said the crew did, every man.

Except Davenant?

Maybe not Davenant, but what of it? Wait till night, Hawkins went on, and Shaylor would learn something. All the men hated him—. If I would bring up another bottle he would take his ax and go aft. He had a mind to go after another bottle himself.

I warningly shook my head.

Dula was keeping vigil with a naked knife on the table beside her. There was no knowing who had fired into his back. She would trust no one. Me? Yes, but no one else.

She had begged could I—could I possibly imagine what Williams was about to say of her—of “that woman”—when he had been diverted? I could. But I lied. I knew how very much she resembled another woman, one whom Williams could not forget.

It is better to hate than to love. I did not tell her so. No doubt she already knew; and knew, too, how uncontrollable love is, even when consciously futile.

Hawkins was talking. Pie did not know, he said, what had got into him. He was a peaceable man. But the ship, the ocean, the world, wasn't big enough for him and Red Shaylor.

He had had fights—a few. But he never felt that way toward any other man, except one. Carp Taylor. Taylor's ship, he said, looked as if it had been hit by a typhoon before the crew got him, Hawkins, across the main-hatch. Afterward he had tried four times to kill Taylor. Twice he thought he had succeeded. He hated him worse than Shaylor. No, he wouldn't hit Shaylor from a shadow. But give him that gun and he would take a shot or two at Shaylor there on the poop just to see him jump.

Shaylor walked back and forth on the poop. That was his domain. In full view, Hawkins and I sat and drank. The men below in the waist stared first one way and then the other, mumbling together, shaking and nodding heads gravely, depressed, afraid of they scarcely knew what.

In a way, perhaps, they had come to regard Williams as one who in spite of his abrupt violence and harshness had other qualities than a tigerish strength that evoked respect. He filled the ship. There was no hesitancy about him; and there was a sense of definite security—something definitely dependable—in him.

One simply could not imagine a mutineer with an ax holding his forecastle and keeping men away from the jib. They were literally at sea; they felt figuratively so.

Shaylor called them aft and tried to win them, tried to explain. He was, in a way, plausible; even right. Somebody had to be captain. They had to make port. They were all pressed men.

Then too there would be the reward. They would share that.

The first thing to do was to rush the forecastle-head and take care of the two fools up there. Heads twisted soberly over shoulders in our direction.

It may have been they caught a whiff of the liquor; or it may have been that they did not know what they wanted; whether to go to a white man's port with Shaylor who might break their heads if they refused, or to join Hawkins on the forecastle.

Men are much like domesticated animals. They may not like to be herded, but they are much at a loss to know what to do without herding. Though, on the other hand, there is a perceptible lure in being rebellious. Even in rebellion, mutiny, outlawry, they want a herder.

“What we goin' do?” Hawkins asked, tired of trying to listen to what Red Shaylor was saying to the men. There was very little interest in the question. He did not greatly care. The brandy had been strong, and enough of it to warm his big body.

I did not know. Williams wanted to get to Savaii—to the village of Lelela. He had friends and stores there.

No, Williams wouldn't die. The only way a man like that died was suddenly.

Give him a chance to keep his finger-tips on his soul and he would wrest it out of Death's hands. It had to be snatched from his body all at once, by surprise.

Hawkins showed honest amazement. He thought Williams was dead, or the same thing, as good as dead. Ho, that made a difference. It was probably the brandy that made the difference.

He had a mind to go run Shaylor off the ship, to make him jump into the ocean and drown. Hawkins assured me that I was a fine fellow. He loved me. Let's go chase Shaylor.

The men were leaving the poop, straggling off. Whatever they had decided, they had not done so with enthusiasm. Perhaps they had decided nothing.

“Hey, you cookee,” Hawkins bellowed at Raulson. “Bring us some dinner.”

Only he put an assortment of lurid oaths into the order; but somehow they were not offensive even to Raulson. There is a subtlety in cursing that evades any effort to get it down on paper because it belongs entirely to the tone and in some very nearly impalpable way to the intention behind the tone.

Shaylor quickly commanded Raulson not to give us food until he gave permission. Hawkins bellowed that he would shave Raulson's ears off if he didn't send up a full kid. Shaylor bellowed back that he would brain Raulson if he did. Raikes's head appeared at the top of the forecastle ladder.

“Get down, you one-eyed shrimp!” Hawkins roared, waving his ax, but not going to the trouble of standing.

Despite his warlike tongue Hawkins was very nearly in a merry mood. What was a battered face and aching body? All in the day's hazard.

Raikes came on. He was with us. He hoped Shaylor would die of various foul diseases and be eaten by a shark, then get himself toasted on the devil's tail as long as there was a coal left. Raikes did not want to go to Sydney. Shaylor did.

Raikes explained that some of the old heads advised standing by Shaylor. What was there in it for them to go on with the Sally Martin? They might all be hanged.

Then there was the reward, and probably salvage on the ship. He denounced them all. He wouldn't have anything to do with such a lot of dogs.

Hawkins, a little unsteadily, thickly, praised Raikes. Patted his head.

“'Ave a drink, old mate,” and gave him the nearly emptied bottle.

Raikes drained it. Hawkins clamored for his dinner, tried to sing a little, roared at Shaylor, dared everybody to come up and get him, nearly struck my foot in sinking the blade of the ax into the deck to show how he could split the first adventurous head that came up the ladder; and requested Shaylor to put his up first

Now and then his head would nod a little, and be jerked up; then Hawkins would look quickly about him, see all was well, remember his empty belly, or forget the words of some song he would try to get out.

I did not know what to do. Not even the good magic jinnee that dwell in gin and brandy bottles could chase away the black melancholic devils that sat nipping at my heart.

I was helpless, felt even more helpless than possibly I was. I could not take bearings or set a course. I knew no more of laying a course than a grocer's apprentice. I could follow one after a fashion, but I could not take bearings.

Raikes could not either. He admitted it. Said something about “dead reckoning,” but I would rather have trusted the wind and tide than his calculations. We had both lied to Davenant when we told him we knew nautical mathematics.

Shaylor could navigate all right, but he couldn't find his bearings without instruments. And he had no chance to get to them. Dula had the door locked. She would give up nothing. Davenant himself had asked to get in, and been refused.

We had talked, Dula and I. The sense of intimacy had suddenly become close, but there were still curtains between us, or rather before her. Williams slept feverishly, or he may not have slept at all. He had opened his eyes from time to time and looked at us, looked hard, with something of a startled expression, at her. He coughed—blood. The crude dressings she had put on the wounds gave him little comfort.

Among the things she had said at that time, whispering with watchful glances to make sure that even low tones were not disturbing, was:

“He is so unlike the men I have known. I was never the least afraid of him.”

It was such an odd thing to say—for her who seemed to me to have no fear at all, to say. I asked the most natural question, and gravely she replied:

“Yes, I was a little afraid of you. No. I am not now. Why? I can't say. You have changed. Haven't you?”

Had I? I wasn't then drunk enough to tell her that—that—that—. But tell her what? How was I to tell her anything? Particularly something I had not then admitted to myself.

I asked what she meant to do.

She meant to stay by the bedside and watch over the wounded man. That was her immediate and impersonal answer. It was as if she meant for me to understand that she would stay by any bed that had a wounded man in it.

“You love him.”

It was a thought that slipped out aloud.

Her face flushed—her eyes blazed. The strong little chin went up, and she pressed her lips nervously. As usual when I told the truth I was into trouble.

But it seemed to me that in spite of her determined pose she was all aflutter. Deeper waves of red surged into her pale cheeks. Her tense, slim hands motioned out at me fiercely. She was aroused, but even then she whispered.

Love? She hated the word! She hated every man that ever used it. It was a mockery, that word.

Then with a quick change of manner, almost coaxingly, she asked why I had said such a thing. And waited, suspended in a kind of eagerness, as if my answer would be important.

“I am drunk,” I had told her.

And, snatching up a bottle of brandy, I had gone out and found Hawkins on the forecastle.

I had left him there, half-dozing. Raikes said he would play sentinel. I passed the men, edging away to avoid them. As I went by they followed me with their eyes, said nothing.

Shaylor and Davenant were sitting on the skylight. I heard the word “Dakaru” before they saw me. Shaylor got up truculently. Davenant asked me to come there.

I kept at a distance. My fingers fumbled with the handle of a big revolver. Shaylor tried not to appear unamiable. But the very curves of his body were threatening.

We had an old grudge anyway; and I did not know then that when he had knocked on the door, Dula had said she would not open it—not to anybody except “Mr. McGuire.” Mr. Red Shaylor would have liked to break the neck of Mr. McGuire.

I shall say for him that he was no good as a hypocrite. Not at all in the same rank with Davenant, who, had he never learned that a smile is supposed to inspire confidence, would have been more convincing.

They wanted me to bring out what Davenant called the “instruments of navigation.” I told them they did not need a sextant to find the way to hell.

They guessed that I had been drinking. Shaylor seemed the more interested in the possibility of my having left a little something.

He tried to explain. He was sorry Williams had been shot. If he knew who had done it, he would hang the fellow astern by the neck.

I suggested that nobody would stop him from suicide. He swore at me, and seemed about to rush. He withheld himself, and inquired if I was crazy.

Davenant asked me to remember certain conversations with himself. I had a defective memory, regrettably so.

It came to nothing, all that talk.

I backed down the companion, painfully conscious that there was no courage in me. Someway I couldn't act with resolution. Too much given to words, I suppose.

There aren't many people in the world who know what it is to feel themselves cowards. It is always easy to delude one's self. I had always been able to do it before; to plead discretion or indifference, or the intention of using some subtle, roundabout means of evening the score.

I was gifted in the making of impertinent replies; also thought that I was wily in laying plots and traps. Every man succeeds in being a hero to himself. At that moment I had nothing inside of me but ruins.

“Who is it?” Dula asked as I tapped lightly on the door.

There was nothing soft and feminine about her voice, nothing tremulous—no fear in it. I told her. The bolt slipped back. The door opened an inch, scarcely more, as she peered out. And she had a gun in her hand.

“Mine!” I exclaimed in a breathless gasp.

A trace of misgiving flickered across her face, and was gone. But a shadow, nothing more, remained for a moment or two in her manner. She had stolen it from me while I was asleep.

Her explanation was naive; at once convincing and humiliating. I had not used it that night when Red Shaylor flung me to the deck. She would use it if—well, if he ever put his hands on her.

Probably she had reasoned, if a woman does ever reason after she has an idea, that he could not stop a bullet as he might grasp her wrist and stop a knife-thrust.

“Then Davenant shot him!” I cried, excited, pointing to Williams.

He had lapsed into unconsciousness, and was scarcely breathing.

For an instant she stared at me, then sighed heavily, dropping her arms. Her body relaxed in a kind of hopeless depression. She half-fell, wearily, against the door.

“I might have known. I might have known,” she said in a low, tired voice.

Then, straightening up, her tone growing firmer and rapidly merging into fierceness, her bright black eyes narrowing and glittering until she was strained, panting and furious:

“I might have known! He isn't the first Lord Davenant has shot in the back. How I hate him and have hated him! His heart is as black as his face, Oh, I have done his crimes for him till I—till I—I——”

“Do you know why we are going to Dakaru? I am going there to kill my own father; then I'll use the same knife to cut into the heart of Francisco Davenant!”

I could not help it; I shrank back against the bulkhead, horror in my eyes. I knew it was there. I felt it. She did not notice. I was half-drunk, yet I was appalled.

The walled-up passion within her had burst. There was no reticence, no shame, no hesitancy. I had known she would be terrible in anger, but it had been impossible to dream of anything like this.

It was bewildering, frightening; in spite of the utter ferocity of her words there was no hysteria in her manner or voice. She was not a woman suddenly unbalanced, but was speaking from the secret depths within her. It is unlikely that she realized what she was saying, though she was saying what she had long brooded over, bitterly, malignantly; and it may be true that she was mad. She did not seem so, however much her words may.

Hers was a vengeance nurtured from early girlhood. Her Sicilian family was noble and barbaric. It had a tradition from old time of never forgetting an injury and of never going into a court for its revenge.

She was proud of that. She scorned the English who gave their wrongs and stained honors to be washed out by lawyers. Her two immediate male ancestors had been English, but she felt that none of their blood was in her.

That amazing young Sicilian countess who, shortly after the Napoleonic wars, came into England the bride of a marquis's son had handed down her traditions and her blood. With her own slim hand and the knife that Dula thrust toward me, she had poniarded a young gallant who had foolishly thought she was, except for her beauty, much like other women.

All London was horrified, though the matter was hushed and the young gallant, much wiser for his loss of blood, was bundled off to the Alps to recover. The marquis's son, pulled on by his shocked family, set about a divorce; but his wife, Dula's amazing grandmother, told him:

“You drag me into your stupid courts, you take your name away from my children—and what do you think I will do? Shut myself up in a tower room and weep? No. No. Before my two brothers can come out of the south, each with an oath on his knife, you will be dead.”

There was no divorce. Not even after the marquis's son returned from his long travels to assume his father's title. The proud, fiery countess retired into the country with her children, and they were brought up Sicilians; brought up to hate their father, scorn the English forms of justice and the mild, easy honor that did not use blood to wash out insult and injury.

In time Dula's mother met, loved and eloped with a handsome young cavalry officer. The brother, Francis Davenant, baptised Francisco, went after them. The new bride had in her the same blood as her brother, and Captain Grahame does not seem to have been timid—though Dula gave him not even that meager credit.

Her mother loved the captain, and would not leave him. Love is more than family, more than tradition, blood, honor—more even than Sicilian vengeance! Back they went, Lord Davenant, Captain Grahame and his bride to face the fiery old countess—then a marchioness, also—who seems to have been as warm-hearted as she was terrible.

Captain Grahame came from a good family; he avowed his love, promised his watchful devotion; and appears to have been not a little impressed. The countess settled a sum of money on her daughter and gave them a warning along with her blessing.

A year later Captain Grahame was like all other men; drinking, gambling, embittered. Two years later he was out of the army. Dula said thrown out, disgraced. And when Dula was five years old, she was taken to her aging grandmother's—her father gone, her mother dead. He had run away with an Englishwoman, a cousin, and had gone too far to be found.

The mother—with that same knife that Dula shook glitteringly before my alarmed eyes—had stabbed herself and died. Perhaps less from shame than through the hope that her wronged spirit might better seek out and harry the man who had so disgraced her.

Not in five hundred years, not since her Sicilian family remembered its name, had there been a divorced or a deserted woman. Some of its daughters had, when married to worthy men, been killed by their wronged husbands. The old countess had impressed upon Dula that that was a death of dignity and justice.

“A woman,” she had said, “woos death when she embraces her husband's friend, and if she smiles under the knife the Mother of God weeps in pity!”

With the death of her grandmother Dula had come directly under the care of Davenant. He was very much dreaded and disliked by many people, and there was a strong cynical hatred in him for everybody. Yet he had a large acquaintance, as a man does who uses up money rapidly; and he must not have been scrupulous as to how he got more.

“He hesitates at nothing and pushed me into everything,” she said. “Oh, what I endured—and learned!”

Her enraged confessional did not cover that period at all; except in so far as I understood, by inference, that it was one of glittering evilness, with no fear of God and no love of anybody.

“I loathe men!” she hissed, glaring at me, her little fists clenched as if she would like to wreak on some man the rage she felt toward all.

She had never been permitted to forget her father. As a child Davenant had made her kiss the knife with which she was one day to kill Grahame.

It was known that he had gone into the South Seas. But one doesn't follow a man by the track his ship leaves in the water. There was, she said, a Sicilian proverb to the effect that if your hate endured the world would shrink to bring the breast of your enemy within arm's reach. Davenant, cold, implacable, watched, waited and gave her no chance, even if she had used it, to forget.

It was through watching for all reports out of the South Seas that she had heard and learned of Hurricane Williams. Oddly enough, what most strongly appealed to her at first was the legend that he was a renegade, hating the men of his blood; and when some imaginative writer, with a basis of fact, described how Williams was so embittered against women that he would avert his face to avoid seeing them, she realized a sudden, sympathetic kinship.

Then, too, he seemed such a man! His exploits, none the less glamourous for being recounted over and over from mouth to mouth and finally done into articles, excited her imagination. Like most people who never saw him, she pictured him as a massive, giant-like man. It was the more amazing to her, and not disappointing, to discover that he was not a huge brute, and that his face, with features not even winds and sun and blows had blurred, was cleanly molded, refined.

For years Hurricane Williams had been more than a name to her. She had not, perhaps, idealized him, for she gloated over the stories of his ferocity—mostly false—his ruses, scarcely exaggerated, and his daring.

Her life at that time must have been passed in a kind of brilliant wickedness; embittered, restless, heartless, yet fluttering through nights of cold, glittering gaiety, hating men she lied to lovingly, and despising the women she knew. Hers was the blood of the remarkable old countess, but hers was not the irreproachable dignity of that famous grandmother.

“I wouldn't have known what to do with a rosary,” said Dula. “I never prayed except that men told the truth when they cried I was ruining their lives!”

Her fierceness in recital was inexhaustible. She gesticulated passionately, and, having so surprisingly begun her confessional, hesitated at nothing. I was the weary one. My body was, but not my ears. They gaped in nervous eagerness to catch every word. Again and again I did not believe it—that she was talking to me. Each time I realized with a faintly palpable shock that it was real, that this woman was telling me her bitter, tragic, quivering story.

She had an unaccountable assurance that some day she and Hurricane Williams would not be strangers. She felt it. She had never felt anything more strongly, not even that some time she would hear where Grahame was and find him.

Only in that one appalling sentence had she said “Father.” He was Grahame to her. With a kind of ghastly diabolism, educed by Davenant, she was from girlhood consecrated to kill him. The naked knife-blade had not been kissed in vain.

At last rumor of him reached Davenant. A solicitor, who had disentangled the nearly exhausted properties of wife and husband when Grahame fled with a cousin for a bride, told Davenant he had been heard from.

Inquiry, investigation, followed. Reports of enormous wealth came back, and a kind of imperial splendor on a remote, wealthy island.

Davenant had got in touch with a sea-captain who knew Grahame, who had been to Dakaru, and who g5ve him the location of the island. A fellow named Taylor.

She and Davenant came to Melbourne. They were to have met Taylor there. But nothing was known of him; nothing could be heard of him. So Davenant made such arrangements as he could to reach Dakaru.

That was her story, the whole of it; except that when she had finished, tired, almost exhausted, by such protracted intensity, she turned and stooped over the unconscious body of Williams, wiping his lips. He was alarmingly motionless, and only a low sound of pain—sounds that could be wrenched from him only when he was unconscious—now and then showed that he was not dead.

She turned about and looked at me, then as if to make Her confessional utterly full, said, low-voiced but fiercely:

“I would rather be under his feet than in the arms of any other man that ever lived. You guessed that, but it isn't love—it is real. I don't know what it is and I don't care as long as it isn't called that miserable, foolish thing, love! Now be like all other men I have known and carry what I have said to Francisco Davenant—I'll kill you too!”