Aliens

"Yes," I said. "Green lights."

""Oh, that was the Harwich boat," he says. "I know that. She"s gone.

Must have been going twenty-two knots."

""It was an aeroplane," I said, whispering, "flew past."

""_Eh!_" says he. I said it again. He straightens up and takes a turn up and down the bridge.

""You"d better watch out," I said. "It may come back."

""I _am_ watching out!" says he, rather savage. "_I"ll_ take care of all the aeroplanes about, Chief."

"I went back then and took another look round with my gla.s.ses, but I saw nothing but a couple of coasting steamers in sh.o.r.e. I stepped down into the mess-room and looked through the slit of the Fourth"s door. Funny coincidence! He was on his settee in his pyjamas, asleep, and on his stomach was a magazine he"d been reading, a magazine with a coloured cover showing an aeroplane dropping a bursting sh.e.l.l on a man-o"-war.

"I lay awake for a long time, listening to the bells, watching Rosa"s picture flickering on the bulkhead as the screw below me shook the ship.

So we"d met again! I couldn"t blame the Second Mate--I"ve kept the grave-yard watch myself; I couldn"t blame Mister Charley Phillips. But what would he have said if I"d told him my brother was on that machine?

What if I"d said I"d seen wireless sparks spitting above it? Humph!

"I suppose I must have dozed a little, for the next thing I remember was the whoop of our siren and the engines going dead slow. As I tumbled out to go down it was three o"clock. The Third was standing by the reversing gear and I saw by the vacuum gauge that the temperature of the sea was down to forty-eight degrees. "Fog, sir?" says the Third. "Aye," I said.

"Shut your injection a little. We"re off the Goodwins, I suppose."

Everything was all right, so I climbed up to look. The Old Man was out on deck and they were heaving the lead. Every minute the siren gave a mournful whoop and the slow thump of the propeller made me miserable. I leaned over the side, thinking of my brother and his aeroplane. For the life of me I couldn"t be sure it wasn"t all a dream. The thin whine of the siren sounded very like his cry of "_Charley!_" I heard the Old Man bark something, heard the tinkling of the telegraph and the siren bellowed again. We were going full speed astern! Just as I turned away from the bulwarks I saw a green light, the starboard light of a coaster, rush past. I could hear some one shouting through a megaphone on the bridge. She must have been awful close--went past our stern with an inch to spare as we swung. And then all was quiet again as the engines stopped and went ahead dead slow. I went down and got my overcoat and a pipe. The Second was putting on his clothes. "Ah, you may as well," I said. "It"s thick all right," I like a man that don"t have to be called.

"All night we crawled along. You see, the Straits of Dover are very like Piccadilly Circus. You never know who you may run against in a fog, it"s so crowded and the company is so mixed. About breakfast time the Old Man judged by soundings he was abeam of Dungeness and we went half-speed.

The fog lifted about Beachy Head.

"So you see, the fact and the fiction was so mixed up in my mind that by the time we got into the Western Ocean I didn"t feel sure which was which. The Second Mate never said a word more about green lights, for if he allowed there was an aeroplane about on the middle watch the Skipper would naturally ask him why he didn"t see it. And then what mixed things in my mind still more was my picking up the Fourth"s magazine in the mess-room one day and reading that yarn. I was going to tell you about this; but merely to show you how my brother impressed me that I dreamt about him at sea. But now--it seems I didn"t dream it after all.

"I"m not surprised," went on Mr. Carville, after a slight pause to stir up the ash in his pipe with a pen-knife, "not surprised. My brother had it in him always. Quite apart from any personal feeling I might have for him or against, I was always prepared, so to say, to see him doing something big. His trouble with his season-ticket and his bigger trouble that put him in gaol were very much on a par. He always had an unconventional way of getting what he wanted. It was no use talking to him; he simply doesn"t see what you mean. I--I wonder what he"s going to do next."

"He might pay a visit over here," I said tentatively. Mr. Carville gave me a quick glance.

"I shouldn"t like that at all," he said, shaking his head. "You see ...

I might be away ... I shouldn"t like it at all."

He was obviously disturbed, and I felt that the suggestion had been unwise. Obviously it would not do to tell him that his brother knew where he was.

"So far," he remarked presently, "my little boys don"t know anything about their uncle. I"ve no wish that they should. I want them to grow up in this country without any connection with Europe at all. Any debt they owe to Europe can be paid later. My brother couldn"t help them at all.

And Rosa----"

Mr. Carville stood up to go. The cover for _Payne"s Monthly_ caught his eye and he nodded approvingly.

"That"s clever," he said. "I wish sometimes I"d gone in for doing things, like you. As you said, a man"s mind rusts, gets seized, if it isn"t working. I did think of doing something with a few papers I"ve got in my berth on the _Raritan_, but--I don"t know."

"Why not let me have a look at them?" I said. "I might act as a sort of an agent for you, unpaid of course----"

"Much obliged," said Mr. Carville placidly, "but I don"t know as you need bother. I threw a book over the side once."

"A ma.n.u.script!" I said, aghast. He nodded, looking at his boots. "I thought a lot of it once; called it _Dreams on a Sea-Weed Bed_, and got a funny faced little girl in Nagasaki to type it for me. But one voyage, when I"d been reading a book called _New Grub Street_, I got sick of the whole thing and dumped it in the Java Sea, half way between Sourabaja and Singapore."

"I can"t approve of that, Mr. Carville," I said, standing up and confronting him. "A foolish thing to do!"

"How"s that? It might just as well be twenty fathoms deep in the Java Sea as twenty volumes deep in the British Museum? Eh! It was mine."

"Oh yes, yes; but it"s hardly fair to deprive the world of it."

"Humph! I guess the world won"t sweat, sir. It would be a good thing if a lot of modern stuff was dumped. Some of the authors too, by your leave!"

"I quite agree," I said. We had been to see Brieux" _Damaged Goods_ in New York a week or so before, and we were in the mood to sympathize with Mr. Carville"s doubt of modern tendencies. He stood by the door of the studio, one hand on the jamb, the other under his coat, the plain gold albert stretched across his broad person, the light shining on his smooth pink forehead as he looked down at his crossed legs. It has occurred to me from time to time that this un.o.btrusive man, with his bizarre record and eccentric mentality, was evolving behind the mask of his mediocrity a new type. That this process was only half deliberate I am ready to believe. A man who disciplines his soul by flinging overboard the ma.n.u.script of a book does not thereby slay his imagination. He only drives it inward. When we first came to America we planted all our seeds in the garden too deep and they grew downward, a.s.suming awful and grotesque forms. In some such way Mr. Carville"s imagination was working within him, fashioning, as I say, a new type. I insist upon this, inasmuch as beyond it I have no mementoes of him. Both he and his are gone from our immediate observation, and though we may hear from him again, as a ship pa.s.sing in the night, a rotund meditative figure pacing the deck of some outbound freighter, so far I remember him mainly by this intellectual inversion. For him the suppression of pa.s.sion had become a pa.s.sion; for him individuality was cloaked by the commonplace. In his way he made a contribution to art; he had hinted at the possibilities underlying a new combination of human characters. He had given strange hostages to Fortune, so that Fortune hardly knew what to do with them. It is possible that the abrupt and dramatic disappearance from his life (I refer to his brother) has slackened the intensity of his hold upon this idea; but I do not know.

He left us that evening quietly and without fuss. He had, in a notable degree, the neat movements and economy of gesture which I can imagine indispensable to those who live in confined cabins and take their walks upon decks beneath which their shipmates sleep. In a quiet indescribable way there was manifest in his demeanour a gentle repudiation of all things traditionally English. You could not possibly imagine him vociferating "G.o.d save the King" or "Sons of the Sea." With a simple dignity he had a.s.sumed the dun livery of the alien, and there was to me a certain fineness in the sentiment that forbade any flaunting of his nationality in the faces of his native-born children.

And in the midst of our musings, just before we turned out the lights, it occurred to me quite suddenly that, since he had finished his story, it was quite possible that we should not see him again.

CHAPTER XII

THE VISION FROM THE KILLS[A]

For a long time that night I lay watching the gem-like glitter of the lights that fringed the eastern horizon. A strong north wind shook the house, sweeping the clouds before it with a contemptuous energy that had in it a promise of frost on the morrow. As the stars rose it was as though the lights of the city themselves were rising into the clear sky, emblems of the vast and serene power that had sent them forth. High above the level constellations soared the two great beacons of the Metropolitan and Woolworth towers, like the masthead lights of some enormous vessel, while away northward, almost hidden by the swinging limbs of our elm, the occulting flash on the Times Building added a disquieting element to the otherwise peaceful scene. For me at least the glamour, the mystery and the beauty of that amazing city had never worn thin. For me, after a day in her roaring streets, after a scramble in her lotteries, there ever comes a recrudescence of that wonder with which I beheld my first view of her from the Jersey sh.o.r.e. The cynical American says, I know not with what truth, that the alien, clutching his bundle and gazing with anxious, frightened eyes toward the mountainous masonry of Manhattan, catching sight of the green sunlit image of Liberty with her benign unfaltering regard, holds his breath and feels within his bosom a fierce but short-lived ecstasy of joy. For one brief instant (I still quote the cynical American) faith and hope flame in his heart and the future lies before him as a shining pathway of industry and peace.

For me, however, the impression that New York had made was neither so unpractical nor so evanescent. For me there was reserved a certain _fear_ of those mult.i.tudes and those heaven-kissing towers, an apprehension that even a species of victory after defeat had not sufficed to dethrone. Call it perhaps awe, mingled with homage to the indomitable spirit of the race, rather than fear.

This I felt, and every visit to the heart of the city quickened it, stirring my imagination to some fresh effort, and revealing some new phase of the exhaustless energy of America.

It was only natural that in the course of my musings it should strike me as strange that Mr. Carville displayed no shadow either of reverence or dislike for a place which impressed itself upon me more even than San Francisco or Chicago. It seemed to me strange that a man so sensitive to detail, so conscious of the scant poetry of the commonplace, should have no feeling for that astonishing accident which we call New York City.

That he was not aware of her I refused absolutely to credit. If he could feel the beauty of Genoa and the immensity of London, he must necessarily be conscious of the sublimity of Manhattan. I regretted that I had not led him to speak of this. I regretted the possibility of seeing him no more. I felt a pertinacious curiosity about him, as a man who could contemplate with equanimity a spectacle that for me held always an inscrutable problem. To the disgust of the cynical American I always waved aside Washington and even Boston, ignored even that mysterious bourne, the "Middle West," and claimed that he who found the secret of New York had also found the secret of America. As I drowsed that night I registered a vague resolve to see Mr. Carville again and broach the subject to him. I felt sure that in some way or other he would add something to my knowledge, not only of the city, but of himself.

I became aware of Mac"s voice in my ear, and struggling to rise, saw that he held in his hand a letter bearing a special-delivery stamp. It is one of the terrors, and no doubt advantages of the American mail, that a letter may descend upon one at unexpected hours. You may be locking up for the night, or enjoying your beauty sleep in the early morn, when a breathless messenger will hammer at your door with a letter, quite possibly containing a bill. Such a missive my friend held over me like a Damocles sword, between thumb and finger, and awaited the news with interest.

It did not, however, contain a bill. It was a request from an advertising agency to proceed to Pleasant Plains, S. I., and interview the president of a realty company who desired what we call tersely enough a "write-up," an essentially modern development of English Literature, in my opinion. Mac maintains with stubborn ingenuity that Doctor Johnson and Goldsmith did "write-ups," just as Shakespeare wrote melodramas, and Turner did "bird"s-eye views." I make no such claim. The point is that a write-up brings in fifty dollars, while sonnets are a drug in the market. For this reason I sprang out of bed with unusual alacrity and prepared to catch the eight o"clock express.

"It may mean a "bird"s-eye,"" I remarked, as I bolted my breakfast.

"You can make the suggestion," returned Mac, pa.s.sing me half a grape fruit. "There"s no need to introduce either mosquitoes or ice-floes into a "bird"s-eye."" This in reference to New Yorkers" objections to Staten Island.

"I shan"t mention them in the booklet unless they specially ask me to,"

I said with a grin. We are always facetious when a new job comes up. I should not be surprised if the immortals were much the same.

Catching the eight o"clock express is with us rather a legend than a solid fact, in spite of our vaunted breakfast at half after seven. One has to shave, collect the necessary papers, put on one"s boots, pocket tobacco and matches, run upstairs for a fresh handkerchief, things that somehow or other take time. As a rule we find ourselves halfway to the station, running breathlessly, only to find that we have two left-hand gloves, or that some vitally important doc.u.ment has been left behind.

The seasoned commuter, by long and arduous practice, eliminates these errors; but we, who go to New York but once in a week or so, are unskilled in early morning hustles, and generally see the tail-end of the express disappearing in the cutting. This morning, however, I managed to get out of the house by three minutes to eight, sufficient time for an athlete to do the half-mile to the station. With a silent prayer that the train might be a few minutes overdue I raced across the lot and down Pine Street.

I saw, as I hurried down the straight incline of Walnut Avenue, that I was in time, and slackened my pace to a walk. The morning, as I had expected, was clear and cold; a sharp frost had glazed the puddles in the roadway, and on the uplands of the further bank of the Pasayack River light patches of snow lay among the trees. The sun shone gloriously in a blue sky, and a keen wind blew the leaves into swirling eddies about the stoops of the houses. At the bottom of the hill was the station, a small low-roofed structure of wood. Some score of commuters were cl.u.s.tered about it, and I perceived, seated sedately upon a hand-truck, his feet crossed, his corn-cob drawing serenely, and his brown-gloved hands holding a copy of the _New York Daily News_, none other than Mr. Carville.

He raised his hand in salute as I came up. I hurried into the office to buy a ticket, and the train came in as I came out, the locomotive-bell clanging faintly above the gasp of the air-brakes and the blowing of steam.