Part 2

She flapped away along the dark hall, not a yard from the silent man, humming and bubbling between her gums. There was a long hush, broken only by the snores of the sleepers and the continuous, subdued moaning from the kitchen, like the chant of a vigil. Va Di went out as softly as he had come in, and stood by the gate, fanning his face with the big hat.

“Damn!” he mumbled. And after a moment, “’Tain’t none o’ _my_ fun’ral, though.”

Putting the hat on his head, he opened the gate, turned aimlessly toward the back country, and mounted the clear, blue slope of the dune, picking his way mechanically among the scattered tomato-cans and disemboweled bedticks and skeletons of barrels. Sitting down on the crest, he became part of it, moon-colored and still. The night was so intolerably quiet that the ground-swell eating the beaches far off on the outside crept in to him, and he ruffled the sand with his feet because it made him think of his mother’s moaning and her words: “Poor thing! Poor thing!”

“God! how that girl looked at me!” he remembered out loud. “She l-l--”

He jumped up and shuffled around; rolled a cigarette, wetting it too much with his tongue so that it fell apart; threw it away. “She _l-l-loves_ me,” he came out, more racked by the word than ever a child by his virgin oath.

He found himself at the foot of the dune on the other side, his canvas shoes sucking up moisture from a bog. He climbed another hill, drawn back toward the town, and waded across it knee-deep in scrub and wild roses that tore triangular rents in his flannel trousers. Descending into the shadow of familiar trees, he hunched himself up to sit on the shingles of a pigsty, and heard the sluggish animals, whose distant forebears he had beaten with furtive barrel-staves, grunt and roll over in the interior muck.

He took out his knife and whittled the shingles, trying not to look at the house. There was something incredibly fearful about its being awake in the midst of all the sleepers, staring him down with its lighted windows, profligate of kerosene and tallow. The kitchen door was open; by and by a woman came and leaned in the bright rectangle, a silhouette of fatigue. This was Rosie Courier. She had been old Henny Lake’s housekeeper as long as Va Di could remember. Sometimes she had served in the store. Va Di could think of her, immensely tall and tight-garmented, behind the counter, her lean, brown face with its cheek-cords pressing in the corners of her mouth, hovering over his head, righteous and suspicious. Quite invisible as he was in the shadow, he could not keep from cringing a little against the roof as she stood there in the doorway, breathing and resting.

Town hall clanged a single note, full and round, and as if in answer another note came and hung among the leaves, a high, unmodulated animal-cry, torn carelessly from the tissues of a throat. The austere silhouette in the doorway straightened and disappeared.

“O, my God!” Va Di breathed. As a boy he had always been sent to play with neighbor children on those days when brothers or sisters accrued to his family, and so he did not know. He had supposed he knew; he had had a leg broken once by a jibing boom, and he had seen plenty of men crushed or torn in the bad seconds of ocean fishing. But they had always screamed like human beings.

The distracted ululation was in the trees again.

“Don’t,” the man whispered. “For Christ’s sake, M-a-m-i-e--don’t!”

He got down and tried to walk away, but found himself back again, leaning his crossed arms on the sty roof. He had to be doing something, to dull the blade of that outcry, and so he made up an unearthly anger at those shadows moving against the window-squares.

“Damn you to hell!” he mumbled, shaking his white fist. “Why don’t y’u _do_ somethin’? Why don’t y’u _do_ somethin’?”

He was aware of Baldy Minn’s figure flapping out of the door, a yawling cat held at arm’s length. He watched her slay the little beast, make some horrible business with a kitchen knife, and flap into the house again with the warm liver. He knew well enough that this would soothe the sufferer a little, tied with a cord around her neck, but he became more than ever furious at the shadowy transaction. He did not want Mamie’s agony allayed a little; he wanted it stopped, definitely and forever. He stood up and bawled after the retreating midwife: “Ow! Ow! Ow!” Baldy Minn turned and peered into the night, wondering, shook the fleshy pendants of her head, crossed her billowy bosom with the hand that contained the liver, and slammed the door shut.

Without any clear transition, his hate shifted from “them” to “it.” It was “it” that was tearing and killing Mamie.

“Damn it--I’d like to--” The finger-nails ate into his palms. He hoped that “it” would die--that “it” would be a “six-monther,” so there could be no possibility of its not dying. “Her and I would be--” His ravening speculations tumbled on into giddy chaos.

The night was laced with threads of agony, exquisite, racking, prolonged, still prolonged. Va Di reached out and gripped either edge of the roof, as if to keep himself from sliding. He pleaded with it to stop. The interstices among the leaves of the overhanging willows were filled with the gore of imminent day; Ma Deutra’s rooster crowed in his hollow house away down a flushing lane. But still that haggard utterance hung over the world.

It ceased. A faint breeze came to life and wandered across the back yards, tumbling papers; a lark, as though bribed and timed, mounted into the sky and whistled his morning triumph; Va Di’s head sank down on his arms, his knees caved in to rest against the side of the sty, and his fingers fell out flat on the shingles.

He opened his eyes by and by to find Rosie Courier standing in the horizontal radiance of the sun, regarding him from the other side of the pen. Her face was the color of a dusty boot, lifeless and flabby.

“She wants to see you,” she said.

“Who? _Her?_”

She nodded stiffly, allowed the thick, mottled lids to droop over her eyes, and turned back toward the kitchen door. Va Di followed. In the kitchen Baldy Minn sat beside the sink, her hands working in a huge blossom of suds. The tight little nubbin of hair had shaken down off the bald spot, lending her a curious expression of wildness.

“Was it--did--” Va Di groped for words. “Did it live, Baldy Minn?”

“Did it _live_?” Her eyes rolled in their liquor, her whole person quivered and dashed against its margins, and she grinned at him, closing the rent in her teeth with a meaning tongue-tip “Did it _live_? Ho-ho-ho!”

He turned away and followed Rosie Courier through a dark passage, smelling of life and death, and entered a room full of sunshine. Within the door a profound embarrassment laid hold of him; he shifted from foot to foot and looked down at the great hat revolving in his hands. Mamie was so white and still and all eyes, and the eyes dwelt upon him with such a spent and inscrutable adoration. He was afraid to look at her; he felt curiously like a figure done in clay, destructible and worthless. Her hand, all the opacity burned out of it, lay on the flowered “comfortable,” and remembering suddenly how it came out to him from last night’s window, he fell down on his knees and laid his cheek against it and wept the tears of weakness.

“Mamie,” he sobbed in the wadding. “You’re a good girl, M-m-mamie.”

After a little a sound of snickering behind him brought him to his feet, his face flaming. It was Baldy Minn, almost filling the doorway with her oceanic being, against which the bundle in her arms seemed incredibly tiny and helpless. She advanced, undulating and bubbling, to lay it across Va Di’s hastily crooked arms, laughing at his panic.

He held his chin stiff and his eyes desperately horizontal. “Naw, naw!” he mumbled. “Somebody come.” He turned to Mamie, appealing, and Mamie, moved by that irresponsible humor which is deeper than solemnity, smiled.

“Ton’,” she whispered, unsteadily. “It’s killin’, Ton’--how he favors you. It makes me laugh, Ton’--you without the mustache, _exactly_. I wish’d you’d look, Ton’.”

His knees were no good; he sat down in a rocker and looked around the room for mental help. Rosie Courier, standing, a black, unimpeachable spire, beside the bureau, gave him none. Her lids were lowered and her thoughts had turned inward for refuge. By an irony, he had to come to Baldy Minn. Dirty, evil-fleshed, full of matter prurient, there still endured in her a flicker of that essential fire that lives, somehow, through all the changing winds of orthodoxies. She had to express it, of course, in her own way.

“You old devil!” she bubbled, benevolently. “I might o’ knowed....”

The bundle in Va Di’s arms became articulate, demanding its primal planetary food. The man’s muscles suffered a poignant sensation of combat, a gentle struggle with an infinitesimal kicking. His face became pink; his mouth muscles contracted in that species of self-conscious smirk so hard for others to bear; he opened and closed his lips tentatively, as though they were quite new and uncertain of their powers.

“He’s--he’s--he’s a _s-s-stout_ little bastard,” he stammered, in all innocence.

THE YELLOW CAT

At least once in my life I have had the good fortune to board a deserted vessel at sea. I say “good fortune” because it has left me the memory of a singular impression. I have felt a ghost of the same thing two or three times since then, when peeping through the doorway of an abandoned house.

Now that vessel was not dead. She was a good vessel, a sound vessel, even a handsome vessel, in her blunt-bowed, coastwise way. She sailed under four lowers across as blue and glittering a sea as I have ever known, and there was not a point in her sailing that one could lay a finger upon as wrong. And yet, passing that schooner at two miles, one knew, somehow, that no hand was on her wheel. Sometimes I can imagine a vessel, stricken like that, moving over the empty spaces of the sea, carrying it off quite well were it not for that indefinable suggestion of a stagger; and I can think of all those ocean gods, in whom no landsman will ever believe, looking at one another and tapping their foreheads with just the shadow of a smile.

I wonder if they all scream--these ships that have lost their souls? Mine screamed. We heard her voice, like nothing I have ever heard before, when we rowed under her counter to read her name--the _Marionnette_ it was, of Halifax. I remember how it made me shiver, there in the full blaze of the sun, to her going on so, railing and screaming in that stark fashion. And I remember, too, how our footsteps, pattering through the vacant internals in search of that haggard utterance, made me think of the footsteps of hurrying warders roused in the night.

And we found a parrot in a cage; that was all. It wanted water. We gave it water and went away to look things over, keeping pretty close together, all of us. In the quarters the table was set for four. Two men had begun to eat, by the evidences of the plates. Nowhere in the vessel was there any sign of disorder, except one sea chest broken out, evidently in haste. Her papers were gone and the stern davits were empty. That is how the case stood that day, and that is how it has stood to this. I saw this same _Marionnette_ a week later, tied up to a Hoboken dock, where she awaited news from her owners; but even there, in the midst of all the water-front bustle, I could not get rid of the feeling that she was still very far away--in a sort of shippish other-world.

The thing happens now and then. Sometimes half a dozen years will go by without a solitary wanderer of this sort crossing the ocean paths, and then in a single season perhaps several of them will turn up: vacant waifs, impassive and mysterious--a quarter-column of tidings tucked away on the second page of the evening paper.

That is where I read the story about the _Abbie Rose_. I recollect how painfully awkward and out-of-place it looked there, cramped between ruled black edges and smelling of landsman’s ink--this thing that had to do essentially with air and vast colored spaces. I forget the exact words of the heading--something like “Abandoned Craft Picked Up at Sea”--but I still have the clipping itself, couched in the formal patter of the marine-news writer:

The first hint of another mystery of the sea came in today when the schooner _Abbie Rose_ dropped anchor in the upper river, manned only by a crew of one. It appears that the out-bound freighter _Mercury_ sighted the _Abbie Rose_ off Rock Island on Thursday last, acting in a suspicious manner. A boat-party sent aboard found the schooner in perfect order and condition, sailing under four lower sails, the topsails being pursed up to the mastheads but not stowed. With the exception of a yellow cat, the vessel was found to be utterly deserted, though her small boat still hung in the davits. No evidences of disorder were visible in any part of the craft. The dishes were washed up, the stove in the galley was still slightly warm to the touch, everything in its proper place with the exception of the vessel’s papers, which were not to be found.

All indications being for fair weather, Captain Rohmer of the _Mercury_ detailed two of his company to bring the find back to this port, a distance of one hundred and fifteen miles. The only man available with a knowledge of the fore-and-aft rig was Stewart McCord, the second engineer. A seaman by the name of Björnsen was sent with him. McCord arrived this noon, after a very heavy voyage five days, reporting that Björnsen had fallen overboard while shaking out the foretopsail. McCord himself showed evidences of the hardships he has passed through, being almost a nervous wreck.

Stewart McCord! Yes, Stewart McCord would have a knowledge of the fore-and-aft rig, or of almost anything else connected with the affairs of the sea. It happened that I used to know this fellow. I had even been quite chummy with him in the old days--that is, to the extent of drinking too many beers with him in certain hot-country ports. I remembered him as a stolid and deliberate sort of a person, with an amazing hodgepodge of learning, a stamp collection, and a theory about the effects of tropical sunshine on the Caucasian race, to which I have listened half of more than one night, stretched out naked on a freighter’s deck. He had not impressed me as a fellow who would be bothered by his nerves.

And there was another thing about the story which struck me as rather queer. Perhaps it is a relic of my seafaring days, but I have always been a conscientious reader of the weather reports; and I could remember no weather in the past week sufficient to shake a man out of a top, especially a man by the name of Björnsen--a thoroughgoing seafaring name.

I was destined to hear more of this in the evening, from the ancient boatman who rowed me out on the upper river. He had been to sea in his day. He knew enough to wonder about this thing, even to indulge in a little superstitious awe about it.

“No sir-ee. Something _happened_ to them four chaps. And another thing--”

I fancied I heard a sea-bird whining in the darkness overhead. A shape moved out of the gloom ahead, passed to the left, lofty and silent, and merged once more with the gloom behind--a barge at anchor, with the sea-grass clinging around her water-line.

“Funny about that other chap,” the old fellow speculated. “Björnsen--I b’lieve he called ’im. Now that story sounds to me kind of--” He feathered his oars with a suspicious jerk and peered at me. “This McCord a friend of yourn?” he inquired.

“In a way,” I said.

“Hm-m--well--” He turned on his thwart to squint ahead. “There she is,” he announced, with something of relief, I thought.

It was hard at that time of night to make anything but a black blotch out of the _Abbie Rose_. Of course I could see that she was potbellied, like the rest of the coastwise sisterhood. And that McCord had not stowed his topsails. I could make them out, pursed at the mastheads and hanging down as far as the cross-trees, like huge, over-ripe pears. Then I recollected that he had found them so--probably had not touched them since; a queer way to leave tops, it seemed to me. I could see also the glowing tip of a cigar floating restlessly along the farther rail. I called: “McCord! Oh, McCord!”

The spark came swimming across the deck. “Hello! Hello, there--ah--” There was a note of querulous uneasiness there that somehow jarred with my remembrance of this man.

“Ridgeway,” I explained.

He echoed the name uncertainly, still with that suggestion of peevishness, hanging over the rail and peering down at us. “Oh! By gracious!” he exclaimed, abruptly. “I’m glad to see you, Ridgeway. I had a boatman coming out before this, but I guess--well, I guess he’ll be along. By gracious! I’m glad--”

“I’ll not keep you,” I told the gnome, putting the money in his palm and reaching for the rail. McCord lent me a hand on my wrist. Then when I stood squarely on the deck beside him he appeared to forget my presence, leaned forward heavily on the rail, and squinted after my waning boatman.

“Ahoy--boat!” he called out, sharply, shielding his lips with his hands. His violence seemed to bring him out of the blank, for he fell immediately to puffing strongly at his cigar and explaining in rather a shame-voiced way that he was beginning to think his own boatman had “passed him up.”

“Come in and have a nip,” he urged with an abrupt heartiness, clapping me on the shoulder.

“So you’ve--” I did not say what I had intended. I was thinking that in the old days McCord had made rather a fetish of touching nothing stronger than beer. Neither had he been of the shoulder-clapping sort. “So you’ve got something aboard?” I shifted.

“Dead men’s liquor,” he chuckled. It gave me a queer feeling in the pit of my stomach to hear him. I began to wish I had not come, but there was nothing for it now but to follow him into the after-house. The cabin itself might have been nine feet square, with three bunks occupying the port side. To the right opened the master’s state-room, and a door in the forward bulkhead led to the galley.

I took in these features at a casual glance. Then, hardly knowing why I did it, I began to examine them with greater care.

“Have you a match?” I asked. My voice sounded very small, as though something unheard of had happened to all the air.

“Smoke?” he asked. “I’ll get you a cigar.”

“No.” I took the proffered match, scratched it on the side of the galley door, and passed out. There seemed to be a thousand pans there, throwing my match back at me from every wall of the box-like compartment. Even McCord’s eyes, in the doorway, were large and round and shining. He probably thought me crazy. Perhaps I was, a little. I ran the match along close to the ceiling and came upon a rusty hook a little aport of the center.

“There,” I said. “Was there anything hanging from this--er--say a parrot--or something, McCord?” The match burned my fingers and went out.

“What do you mean?” McCord demanded from the doorway. I got myself back into the comfortable yellow glow of the cabin before I answered, and then it was a question.

“Do you happen to know anything about this craft’s personal history?”

“No. What are you talking about! Why?”

“Well, I do,” I offered. “For one thing, she’s changed her name. And it happens this isn’t the first time she’s--Well, damn it all, fourteen years ago I helped pick up this whatever-she-is off the Virginia Capes--in the same sort of condition. There you are!” I was yapping like a nerve-strung puppy.

McCord leaned forward with his hands on the table, bringing his face beneath the fan of the hanging-lamp. For the first time I could mark how shockingly it had changed. It was almost colorless. The jaw had somehow lost its old-time security and the eyes seemed to be loose in their sockets. I had expected him to start at my announcement; he only blinked at the light.

“I am not surprised,” he remarked at length. “After what I’ve seen and heard--” He lifted his fist and brought it down with a sudden crash on the table. “Man--let’s have a nip!”

He was off before I could say a word, fumbling out of sight in the narrow state-room. Presently he reappeared, holding a glass in either hand and a dark bottle hugged between his elbows. Putting the glasses down, he held up the bottle between his eyes and the lamp, and its shadow, falling across his face, green and luminous at the core, gave him a ghastly look--like a mutilation or an unspeakable birth-mark. He shook the bottle gently and chuckled his “Dead men’s liquor” again. Then he poured two half-glasses of the clear gin, swallowed his portion, and sat down.

“A parrot,” he mused, a little of the liquor’s color creeping into his cheeks. “No, this time it was a cat, Ridgeway. A yellow cat. She was--”

“_Was?_” I caught him up. “What’s happened--what’s become of her?”

“Vanished. Evaporated. I haven’t seen her since night before last, when I caught her trying to lower the boat--”

“_Stop it!_” It was I who banged the table now, without any of the reserve of decency. “McCord, you’re drunk--_drunk_, I tell you. A _cat_! Let a _cat_ throw you off your head like this! She’s probably hiding out below this minute, on affairs of her own.”

“Hiding?” He regarded me for a moment with the queer superiority of the damned. “I guess you don’t realize how many times I’ve been over this hulk, from decks to keelson, with a mallet and a foot-rule.”

“Or fallen overboard,” I shifted, with less assurance. “Like this fellow Björnsen. By the way, McCord--” I stopped there on account of the look in his eyes.

He reached out, poured himself a shot, swallowed it, and got up to shuffle about the confined quarters. I watched their restless circuit--my friend and his jumping shadow. He stopped and bent forward to examine a Sunday-supplement chromo tacked on the wall, and the two heads drew together, as though there were something to whisper. Of a sudden I seemed to hear the old gnome croaking. “Now that story sounds to me kind of--”

McCord straightened up and turned to face me.

“What do you know about Björnsen?” he demanded.

“Well--only what they had you saying in the papers.” I told him.

“Pshaw!” He snapped his fingers, tossing the affair aside. “I found her log,” he announced in quite another voice.