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Portal of Dreams, a fiction by Charles Neville Buck |
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Chapter 8. Nature Indulges In Satire |
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_ CHAPTER VIII. NATURE INDULGES IN SATIRE Though I am not giving authorship to this narrative with a view to its general perusal, I am determined so to write it that if other eyes do chance upon it they may read the true records of a man's emotions under those circumstances. I shall never be able to coax myself into any illusion of heroism in my adventures and I shall set down my most abject terrors in equal and impartial degree with the few occasions in which the instinct of self-preservation enabled me to rise to the need and bluff magnificently. The case of the submarine commander of Nippon was different. He wished to leave behind him such a message as an Emperor might read, and with exalted devotion to his object, he left it. Still, had some miracle brought his vessel to the surface before the end, who knows but that, in the confessional of his own memory, he might have acknowledged a very delirium of terror? Who knows but that between the period of one unflinching paragraph and the capital of the next, there may have been intervals of wallowing in the trough of physical despair? At least with me there were many fears. The night went by a road of nightmare and thirst which led to no haven of rest. I slept fitfully and in terror, and awoke at its end to a feeling of exhaustion. For a while I dreaded to rise and face the possibilities of a new day. It was only the burning torture of thirst that finally outweighed panic and drove me in search of water. I held timidly to the shore, distrusting the jungle and dodging furtively from rock to rock, with straining eyes and ears. Climbing among the ragged boulders which were strewn like fragments of fallen masonry at the foot of the cliff, I shortly came upon a thread of clear water, where I lay and slaked my thirst. After that came a renewed freshness and a sudden return of vigor. I began also to feel a healthful hunger, and when, in clambering to the top of a steep rock, I frightened a shrieking gull from her nest, I fell avidly on the eggs she left behind. As the sun climbed, a tepid humidity freighted the air, but the trade-wind, rising steadily and freshly, tempered it and stirred the delicate fronds of palm and fern. The cliff was honeycombed with small irregular caverns and rifts. Some were mere grottoes, but others went back into somber recesses deeper than I, with no means of lighting my steps, cared to explore. For my dwelling place I selected one that broadened from a twisted and narrow fissure to a crude chamber large enough for a wolf's den, or at need a man's refuge. A fern-fringed brooklet trickled across the opening. For my door yard I had a small plateau with a sheer wall of cliff at my back and a steep drop at the front. One must climb to reach the place which is an advantage where the tenant may desire to roll stones down upon the heads of his visitors. The Wastrel must have gone to the bottom near by, for incoming tides from time to time deposited on my shore strange and satirical scraps of flotsam. The sardonic humor of the sea mocked me by delivering on my beach a tattered fragment of old newspaper and an empty biscuit tin. It was two days after my arrival that I discovered some bulky thing lodged, as my raft had been, upon the near-by rocks. The two days had told upon me. My pajamas were in ribbons; my canvas shoes torn, and my flesh bruised. My feet, too, were cut and blistered and my hands raw. I had already tired of talking aloud to myself and more and more often I caught myself turning with a sudden start to peer apprehensively at the fringe of the forest. To my growing morbidness it seemed that over the beauty of the place hung an impalpable but certain curse. I waded out eagerly to the fresh bit of salvage and found a seaman's chest with quaintly knotted handles of tarred rope. It was of stout workmanship and its heavy locks and hinges had endured without injury the buffeting of the sea. The name of J. H. Lawrence still legible upon one end brought back with startling vividness the memory of a man waiting with stoical amusement the coming of death. Laboriously enough I dragged it in, halting often to pant and wipe the sweat out of my eyes with my forearm. The sun was sinking over the shoulder of the mountain when I at last arrived, exhausted but still tugging at my prize, upon the plateau of my cliff apartment. I lay a long while, my heart pounding with exertion, before I was equal to the task of attacking its lock with a stone and my sheath knife, and after that it was some moments before the lock yielded and I raised the heavy lid. First there met my eyes a scattered collection of souvenir postcards, much discolored and faded, but sufficiently preserved to awaken a clamor of protest and longing. There were tantalizing pictures of the Cafe de Paris and Trafalgar Square and the bund at Hong Kong. Young Mr. Lawrence must have been a confirmed souvenir-buyer. I could trace his odyssey by trivial things he had picked up here and there. Two curved daggers with turquoise settings in the hilt had come from the bazaars of Damascus or Jerusalem. A copper incense-burner with a package of scented tapers had been brought from Tokio or Nagasaki. Equally useless things filled package after package. No mission chest piously outfitted at home ever carried to the remote heathen a more useless assortment of unnecessaries than this one brought to me. There was not a shirt, not an article of utility, only trinkets as serviceable as doll-babies to a prizefighter. At last, however, I came upon two packages carefully wrapped in sail-cloth. So painstaking and secure had been their packing that when I took off the first covering and the second, I found that the contents had suffered no wetting. The first bundle contained the violin which had incensed the captain and several packages of extra strings. As I took it out, I seemed to hear again its plaintive, wordless song and I laid it down reverently. It seemed a part of the dead man's soul--something intimate and wonderful which had outlasted his mortality. In the second package was something wrapped in tissue paper and very soft to the touch. I opened it and spread out on the sand a gorgeously wrought Mandarin kimono. Its silk was of the heaviest and richest quality and its design flamed with the unstinted opulence of Chinese embroidery. On the flowing sleeves and bordered panels were storks of blue and silver flying among poppy-like flowers of crimson purple. There were also delicately worked streams and reeds and moons, all tangled up with ranting dragons of gold, gazing fiercely out from eyes of inset jade. Gold thread, silver thread, silk thread, cunningly combined to the making of its dazzling pattern. Some celestial dignitary had once ordered its embroidering and, perhaps, had ridden upon his palanquin garbed in its splendor with the pride of a peacock in his narrow, slanting eyes. It seemed to me, kneeling there in my torn pajamas, my knees and elbows bruised, my stomach rebelling against rank food, that I could see the whole picture of which this garment had once been a brilliant detail. There were shouting coolies running ahead with huge bamboo staves to clear the way. The grandee's chair, crusted with carving, was borne along in state. I could picture paper lanterns swinging from slender poles and plum blossoms awave and smell the heavy reek of burning incense, and at the thought of all this arrogant luxury I suffered as though I were struggling through a nightmare. The young derelict of the Wastrel had, in all likelihood, bargained for it and haggled over its cost in an Oriental shop. He had finally bought it for a gift to a wife or sweetheart, and even with capable bargaining it must have been a purchase beyond his means. Now in futile magnificence it lay outspread before me who was sea-wrecked and fighting hunger. In the same package, however, I found my first useful articles: a small block of those miniature matches that one may buy in the Chinatown sections of San Francisco or New York, which burn with an odious reek of sulphur. It was doubtless because they partook of the quality of a curiosity that he had preserved them. There was also one of those slung-shots such as may be bought along water fronts where seamen foregather: a small leather sack, loaded with shot and suspended from a wrist-strap. At the extreme bottom of the package, carefully preserved between two sheets of thick cardboard, lay a page torn from a newspaper. It was on that heavy, glossed paper which some journals use for their pictorial sections and was covered with miscellaneous illustrations. I was on the point of throwing the thing away, when some impulse led me to turn it over. What I saw altered and remoulded all my life from that moment forward. A curtain of dusk was beginning to fall upon the hinterland at the edge of the forest. The fringe of cane and palm was filling up with shadow and the peak of the volcano was brooding against a sky of burnished copper. When I turned the sheet it was as though I had come face to face with an actual personality where a moment ago there had been nothing animate. Of course it was only because the art of photographer and engraver had ably abetted each other, but the portrait which worthily filled the seven columns of glazed paper was a marvel of lifelike presentment--and of indescribable loveliness. There are authenticated cases, in plenty, of men who have loved a face seen only in a picture. The Mona Lisa of da Vinci has laid over many beholders the hypnotic spell of the long-dead woman immortalized upon its canvas. Pygmalion loved his Galatea. I fancy that, if the truth were told, I loved in that first flash of view the lady who smiled out at me from the lifelessness of ink and paper. The margins of the sheet had been so close trimmed at the top that no date or caption remained, but beneath, the scissors had left two words: "Miss Frances--" and with these two words I must content myself. But for the picture itself. I have already confessed my passionate reverence for beauty. Here before me was beauty of the purest type I have ever been privileged to see. It was not the brush magic of a gifted painter who has caught from a lovely model the charm of line and color and canonized them with idealization. It lacked all the fire with which the palette might have kindled it. It recorded nothing more than the lens had seen, yet its flawlessness required no aid of art and asked no odds of color. Her clear, young eyes smiled out at me with a miracle of graciousness. Her perfectly curving lips were graver, and if possible sweeter than her eyes. Her chin and throat were exquisitely modeled. Her hair was abundantly massed and heavy. I could guess from the photographic tones that its coils and escaping tendrils of curl, varied in shifting lights between the red warmth of gold and the amber of clear honey. But what most made this a remarkable photograph was its living quality. So vital was the effect as one looked, that it seemed a palpitant personality of breath and soul. The lips might be trembling on the verge of speech and in the quiet smile hovered a delightful hint of whimsical humor. The whole bearing was queenly with that gracious pride which we characterize as royal when we speak of royalty as something inherently noble. For the accolade of a smile from those lips, in the flesh, a man might undertake all manner of folly. The young woman was in evening dress and at her throat hung a rope of pearls. Suddenly a transport of rage and a bitterness of contrast possessed me. My hair was matted, my arms and hands raw and blackened with blood and grime. I was the picture of abandoned misery. The satirical gods now set Tantalus-wise before my eyes a picture of beauty and ease and shelter--a pretty woman in the charming fripperies of evening dress. But while I scowled, her eyes smiled back into my own, challenging in me the vagabond spirit of the whimsical, until I too smiled. I bowed to the picture. "You are quite right," I said aloud. "Since it is impossible to alter the situation, the only sane course is to recognize its humor. While we are together here, I shall regard you as a living person. It shall be our effort to turn this poor jest on the high gods who are its authors." It almost seemed to me that the lips parted and the eyes danced approvingly. "Frances," I added, "I may call you Frances, may I not, in view of the informality of our circumstances?--you are gorgeous. It was good of you to come to keep me company. I needed you." The air held a twilight stillness upon which my words fell clamorously. I realized that I had not before spoken aloud for more than a day. Into the ensuing silence came a new and alarming sound. It was half human and incoherent, like a number of voices at a distance. I felt my muscles grow rigid and choked off a half-animal growl that rose involuntarily in my throat. Instinctively I was whipping the revolver from its holster and slipping forward, crouched in the protection of a rock, my eyes turned toward the jungle. Vaguely lurking in the gathering fog of shadow, where the palms began, were some eight or ten figures. It was impossible in the waning light to make out what sort of creatures they were, but they moved with a soft prowling tread that was disquieting. After a little while they melted out of sight, but until past midnight I sat my eyes alertly fixed on the tangled dark, while the low-hung stars paraded across the sky. _ |
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