The Savage Gentleman (6 page)

"He was sitting here on the sand fishing." Jack held up a pole which had been pulled from a bush and to which was tied a long vine. There was neither hook nor bait. I Henry fidgeted.

His father sat down weakly. "You know you should never go out without someone, son."

"How old do I have to be before I can go alone?"

"Fourteen."

"Couldn't I go a little way when I'm seven?"

"No."

McCobb caught his lost breath. "Did you think you'd be able to catch anything with that, Henry?"

The child looked at his tackle.

"Nothing very big," he confessed, "but I thought maybe a little teeny, teeny fish would bite the end and I could pull it out before it could let go."

Jack exploded into laughter. Stone postponed his lecture on taking illicit advantage of open gates.

They returned to the house.

Sometimes, at night, McCobb and Stone would talk. Often they would sit for long hours in silence--for they had covered long ago most of the subjects which they thought would be of mutual interest. Occasionally, now, their discussions would be of the world and what was taking place there.

"We left at an interesting time," McCobb would say, and Stone would not need to wonder if there were faint and unprotesting regret in his voice. "That fellow Edison was starting things to hum. I don't think the possibilities of electricity were ended with the invention of incandescent lights and power, and whatnot, either.

"Then--there's flying."

"Fiddle-faddle," said Stone, remembering an editorial he had written on the subject.

"Well--you can't overlook balloons."

"I can overlook balloons," Stone would reply. "And I do overlook balloons."

Something of his drawing-room manner would return to him. "Let's straighten out the problems of travel on the ground, I say, before we start spinning cobwebs in the sky. I trust I am progressive--but I also trust a thousand years of civilization are realized before man takes wings."

"I'd like to have a look at the bay on the southeast corner of the island."

McCobb always submerged his wonderings about the world they had left with a little forage on his own in the local bush.

"Go ahead. Take the boat."

He would take the boat--if the weather promised to hold--and in some seasons it was absolutely steady--and sail out of the harbor and along the coast.

Then a new McCobb would come into being. He would be master of himself, sailing his own small ship, in his own world, on his own business. He'd smoke and steer and stare.

He had, thus, found the crocodile-ridden swamp at the head of the lake. He had discovered the unnamed birds which were taller than ostriches and laid eggs a foot long and which had extremely violent dispositions.

One day he returned from an absence of forty-eight hours with a cloth bag which he took to the "shed." He spent some time there and talked to Stone about it that night, after they had shared a bottle of wine to celebrate his home-coming.

"I have a little surprise for you," McCobb said.

"New bird? Because if that's it--I had enough of birds the first time I saw those filthy creatures."

"No."

McCobb fished in his pocket and poured a handful of shining metal on the table.

Stone stared at it. "Is it?" he asked finally.

McCobb nodded. "Gold. Pure gold. I found it in those hills north of the lake. In rotten quartz. There's enough on the surface to sink a ship."

Henry bent over the treasure. "Can I have some?"

"
May
I have some," his father suggested.

"May I?"

"You may have it all, Henry. It's no good to me."

"Unless," Stone suggested, "you want to go into the ornament business. It works easily--and it might be something for Henry to learn. There's a book about it around here.

Benvenuto Cellini and so on."

The Scot stared at the metal. "I wonder if I could do that sort of thing?"

"Why not?"

McCobb developed a new interest which eventually became almost a passion.

The year 1905 they remembered as the year of 'the hurricane. It came at the turn of the monsoons.

Henry was at his studies when McCcibb spoke about it to Stone.

"Probably time for it now."

"For what?" Henry asked, glad of an excuse to end his work.

"A change of the prevailing winds," his father said. '' Go ahead, now. Seven plus six plus three divided by four is how much?"

Outside the skies were thickening--not rapidly as in a northern thundershower, but slowly, as if more fury was to be reaped for patient effort. The sun went out before the morning "schoolwork" was finished. The sky where it had been was first white, then cream colored, then gray in darkening shades to black.

Leaves withered and scant puffs of air made them swing heavily.

The first lightning was very far away and merely made the beholders guess that they had caught a flash. Soon distant clouds were evanescently silhouetted. Thunder stirred.

Then it was on them.

The wind rose like a siren. The rain came slantwise and so rapidly that it collected on slopes, and the ground in the compound seemed to be bouncing with peas from a celestial hopper. It became impossible to talk in anything like an ordinary tone.

Henry was Calm. He watched his father's face for his cues. But presently, as the speed and pressure of the gale grew, it became obvious that his father was worried.

Henry bent toward his ear.

"It's only wind and rain. They're soft," he shouted.

His father answered with an absent nod.

It grew cold--colder than it had ever been on the island. Jack lighted a fire in the grate, but a separate gust came down the chimney and blew it into the room. A second fire was extinguished by a rush of water.

Henry stared through the window. It was dark outside but he could see the under sides of the nearest trees turned whitely upward in the wind.

The thunder bowled directly overhead. Lightning never stopped but danced from place to place.

The wind increased in pitch and velocity until those who sat in the shaking house believed it could increase no more, and until it became intolerable to their nerves, and then it did increase and renew and add to its ferocity.

Henry was least terrified of all.

His father thought that the house would go at: any moment. It was unsafe to leave, for huge trees were crashing in the forest and their roots were dragged like brooms across the land.

Jack sat and rocked his body.

The Scot muttered steadily.

Henry bent near to the
Negro
and heard him wail, "I wish I was home, home, home!"

When he went to McCobb, the Scot looked at his watch and shouted to him:

"You better go to bed. That's where all good little boys and girls should be now."

Henry went finally and sat beside his father on hassock. The thatch was ripped from the roof in a single blast and water began to dribble into the room.

For six hours the terror was endured and then, abruptly, its last breath whistled over the Indian Ocean and peace was restored.

The men relaxed.

It was early night, and here and there a star briefly appeared. Everyone went outdoors to investigate the damage, but Henry was abstracted. He did not react in his usual way when Jack came running from the zebu pen and said that a man was lying under a tree.

They went, armed, to see. They found a hairy back and a body that had a shape more or less human.

But it was not a man. It had a tail and a fox-like head and it was dead.

Stone stared at it.

"That's a lemur," he said, at last. "A giant lemur. There were some in prehistoric times. They must be mighty shy--not to have showed themselves in all these years.

Jack frowned. "That's not a man?"

"No, Jack. Not a man."

"Dawgone. That's what I saw the first night we was here. And now I recollect what was funny about that there man. He had a tail."

The minds of McCobb and Stone harked back through time to the first hours of their arrival and they remembered Jack's "man." They exchange glances. Here was at last the final lifting of the long unspoken thought that perhaps somewhere in the secret places of the island a breed of men lived furtively. They turned over the dead animal and looked at Jack and smiled.

But Henry had received two new ideas, born of the stress of the hurricane. He was scarcely interested in the lemur. He spoke of his ideas when his father came to his bedside before he had fallen asleep.

Henry's blue eyes were wide and intent in the gloom.

"Father!"

"Yes, son."

"Isn't this home?"

"Yes, son. It's all the home we have." His silhouette, tall and supple, bent over the bed.

"Then why did Jack say he wished he was home?"

"Oh--did he say that?"

"In the lightning."

' I'll explain all about it tomorrow, son. It's part of your geography lesson."

"Oh."

"Go to sleep."

"Father!"

Patiently now, "Yes, son?"

"What are girls?"

A long pause. A pause so long that it marked the mind of the child.

"Girls?"

"Boys and girls. I'm a little boy. What's a girl? Are they little, too?"

Stone realized that they had grown away entirely even from the mention of women. His silence had been the result of his life. But the silence of McCobb and Jack was doubtless in deference to him.

"Girls are part of another lesson, son. I'll tell you about them."

"Now?"

"Not now. Go to sleep."

"'Night."

"Good night."

Chapter Six:
THE MENACE

THE years on the island passed with unbelievable speed, from the standpoint of retrospect. They mingled and telescoped in a memory of similar days and regular changes of the two seasons. Little things made separate days stand out. They recalled events, but they confused dates.

A day when Henry was observed by his father floating in his boat on the pond-still harbor and looking intently overboard. His father stood on the beach and watched.

He wondered what the boy was seeing.

And then, suddenly, the water near the boat broke and there emerged a long and terrible arm, a sinuous arm, covered with saucer-shaped suckers and feeling in the unfamiliar air. Henry regarded the arm with interest but his father paled.:· .

"Row, son, row! Come ashore!!"

"There's an odd thing down here in the water--"

"I know. Hurry--it's a devilfish."

Henry rowed in obediently although reluctantly and his sweating father saw that the monster followed him nearly to the water's edge.

Was Henry nine, then, or ten?

How old was he when they began to talk in French and German instead of English? Eight for French? Seven?

It was on his twelfth birthday that he showed his father the chalice he had carved from wood and covered with gold leaf. Its shape was handsome, but the horses he had engraved upon it were faintly like the pictures of horses but woefully unlike horses in the flesh.

It was on his twelfth birthday that Stone discussed him with McCobb.

Faithful McCobb. He had passed fifty. His eyes were still clear and his muscles firm--but his hair was salted with gray.

"What do you think of the lad, McCobb?"

"He's a grand lad."

"And what are his faults?"

"None," the Scotchman said loyally.

"And what characteristics might become fault in him?"

McCobb drew on his pipe.

"That's different. He's independent and fearless. He's idealistic. You can have ideals here in this wilderness but the world would shock them rudely. He's willful and stubborn."

"That's true."

"And I've never seen a lad who had no contact with the lassies. It makes them strange. He's manly enough and he's polite. He'd make friends swiftly in any city--but he's strange. There's a look in his eye--an absent look--that's going to increase, Stephen, when he passes fourteen and begins to feel things he cannot define."

Stone sighed. "I've told him, McCobb--all about women. About women as mothers. And I've recounted their sins. Their shortcomings. Their lack of imagination and their superficiality. I've tried to educate him--prejudice him, perhaps--without lying. He understands."

"But will he understand when he begins to hunger--"

"That hunger," Stone said with a quick anger, "is deceitful."

"Deceitful, maybe--but it's strong, Stephen. It's mightily strong. And here it'll be like wanting the moon.
Not
even the moon--because you can see that."

"Do you resent my plan, McCobb--after all these years?"

"I do not. He's a fine lad. I was thinking only yesterday that I'd like to start him with the higher mathematics: You'll be well along to making a newspaperman of him, with your exercises and your editorial writing and your discussions of news and policy.

But I can make an engineer of him, too, and it'll do him no harm. Jack's taught him to play the banjo--and we might as well combine to make him the cistern of all our knowledge. I'll teach him science."

"You've done very well."

The Scotchman chuckled. "I've done a little. He's learned his botany and his zoology. There isn't a plant on the island he hasn't gathered and we've invented names for the ones we cannot find in the books, as you know. But I made a mistake about not telling him of devilfish--having never seen one in these waters."

"I don't think you should be blamed for that. He should have had the sense to see that it was an unwholesome thing."

McCobb shrugged. "That's a characteristic of him. He has the sense--but his interest is always getting the best of his caution."

Henry came round the house at that moment. He had been spading in the garden.

His young shoulders were bare and his skin was Indian color. His hair had darkened a little and it now hung damply over his brow. He wore trousers of soft-tanned leather and shoes not unlike low riding boots.

He grinned. "I got the new bed spaded. I'll plant it this afternoon."

"Good work. You didn't have to finish it today. It was a two-day job."