"Beg pardon, sir," put in Sutton very quietly, "but we"ll notify no office and no doctor either--not till we sheer have to."...
The mate was planted by the door where he had been waiting in silence while we two ministered to the chief. Raff had ignored him since our return, but he eyed him now sternly up and down. Most people would have eyed him so, for he made rather an appalling figure, streaked and stained, with his wounds half dried upon him, a raking cut along one cheek and his coat hanging in shreds.
"What in Hull t" Halifax are you talkin" about?"
Sutton drew from his pocket a certain familiar object, a small, black-bound volume. "There was a chap in a book I read, sir--"
The captain regarded him, purpling.
"Is this more of your wonderful notions?"
"It"s my plan to save Chris Wickwire," returned the mate firmly, "and I"m bound to try it on. Just as it says here. "Sirs," it says, "sirs, I will practice on this drunken man--""
He held out the shabby octavo and, considering it again with heightened amazement, of a sudden I knew where I had seen it before.
"Why," I cried, "that"s the Book you got for the chief. I can tell from the gilt cross on the cover. That"s Wickwire"s Bible!"
"It is the book I got for the chief," he said slowly, making plain the case against himself, "and it has a cross on the cover. But it"s no Bible. Only an old collection of plays I bought to gammon him with.
Shakespeare wrote it.
"There was no cover to it either, so I bought an old cover off a hymn book and pasted it over. You can see for yourselves--the cross is upside down." And, in fact, that we might miss nothing he showed us the cover, wrong way with the pages. "I remember the chief, taking lessons from me but having only the cross to go by, d"y"see--the chief used always to hold the book wrong side up. I remember," he added with an odd smile, quite mirthless--"I remember how I laughed. I used to think it funny."
Someway that made the captain froth. Since our invasion of Colootullah he had been increasingly rigid toward the mate, and here he broke out.
"So we"ve had nothin" but your d.a.m.n" lyin" tricks from the start! All the time you was readin" to him--"
"Only gammon, sir. I used to experiment on him with choice bits--calling "em truth and Scripture."
"And now you"re after more fool games of the same kind! Can"t you look what"s come of "em? Look there!" He pointed to the stark figure.
"I see what"s come, sir," said Sutton, and though he was white under his stains he never flinched. "And Wickwire, he saw what _would_ come. He was trying to stop me the night I dropped him into the river--when we quarreled. Because, d"y"see, from fooling with the works of life just to learn how they"re made I"d begun fooling with the works of h.e.l.l. And he had found me out."
"Ah," said Raff, with one of his rare flashes. "_That_ was how you knew the road to Li Chwan"s!"
"To Li Chwan"s--and--other places. I"ve been hitting it pretty regular for six months or so. The chief tried to save me, but I wouldn"t hearken, and there, as you say--there"s the result. It"s just as if he"d done it all as a sacrifice, to show me. It"s just as if--as if he"d paid for mine with the price of his own immortal soul!"...
We stared at him, a tattered ruin but an upstanding youngster, and we could sense no flaw in him now. He had come to grips with raw truth for once without failing--not without a falter, you understand, for he had to put aside a boy"s pride and a last illusion in himself--but clear-eyed, the straight way, as every man likes to think he might have done in his own youth.
"Well," said Raff at last. "What"s your notion?" Sutton drew a deep breath.
"You know, sir, the chief never took any note of time. One day or another--one month or another, it was all alike to him. Well, here it is: Why can"t we strike out these seven weeks and three days from his memory--as if they never had been? We"re fixed just as we were when we lost him. He"s in his own bed, the ship"s in the same berth, just coaled: same weather, same crew, same folk about him--same everything.
He wakes up--wouldn"t he think the whole mess had been a dream?...
Wouldn"t he? Couldn"t we make him, just as they did with the Johnny here?" He hammered the book for emphasis. "_"Would not the beggar then forget himself?"_"
We winked as it burst upon us. Here was one beggar who had forgotten himself, anyway: his vanity, his posing, his weakness, in the fervor of a real idea.
"Perhaps there"s something in make-believe after all--some merit.
Perhaps it"s got some truth in it too. It mightn"t work, but I feel it must and will. I got the tip from the very book I gammoned him with, from the very pa.s.sage he must have marked himself at random--d"y"see?
And if he should come right--"
"Whist!" breathed the captain. "He"s stirrin" now!"
The lank form on the bunk had moved. The bandaged head turned, and Chris Wickwire looked up from his pillow. His gaze traveled slowly over the bare, familiar details of the cabin, the racks and lockers, the deck beams above, the panels on the bulkhead, his own spare garments on their hooks--pa.s.sed over our huddled group by the door and rested at the open port, its bra.s.s rim shining with the new daylight. He lay so for a time, tossed a little restlessly, and seemed to seek something. And then--
"Whaur"s that pipe?" he muttered.
Our hearts stood still....
"Whaur"s that blisterin" pipe?" he demanded, and raised himself with an effort, groped along the shelf beside him, found what he wanted by the tobacco jar, and proceeded leisurely to ram and to charge--his old clay cutty!
Raff had dragged Sutton and his tatters into the thwart-ship pa.s.sage, out of sight, but I was clinging in the doorway when the dour old eye nailed me.
"Feeling better, chief?" I managed somehow to gulp. "You got quite a b.u.mp last night. Your head"ll be sore for a bit--and--and the captain will want to know right away if the bandage is comfortable."
He considered me a s.p.a.ce.
"Whaur"s the mate?" he asked, and added quickly: "Did he go ash.o.r.e?"
"No, sir. He stayed to tend you. He says he"s lost his taste for sh.o.r.e leave, anyhow." I gasped, for Sutton"s hand had caught mine in the pa.s.sage, and it nearly crushed my fingers. "He says--he says he"ll wait till you can go with him if you like."
Wickwire paused as he was lighting his pipe.
"Does he say that?" he queried, in a tone you would never have thought possible on those grim lips. "Fetch him here to me, will ye now?"
I stumbled away blindly. When I returned some minutes later he was propped quite comfortably at the end of the bunk.
"Beg pardon, chief--" I began.
"Hey?"
"Mr. Sutton can"t come just now. I--I didn"t care to disturb him--"
"How"s that?"
"Well, it seems--the fact is--I--I left him in his cabin on his knees, and it looked--anyway it seemed to me as if he might, perhaps, be--praying!"
For the first time in my knowledge of him, his normal self, the chief smiled, and it was like the struggling ray of early sun that pierces the gray dawn. I should have left him then with that last glint of a picture to close the affair, and with Sutton"s last word of it in my mind.
"He"s forgotten!" he had cried to me, in a clear bell note. "We did make him forget!"
I say I should have gone away with that image and that word. But just at the instant I saw a curious thing--and heard another. From the spot where Sutton had dropped it, Chris Wickwire had retrieved the book. He opened the volume on his knee and turned it around and over with a gesture entirely casual.
"Aye," he said, as he settled himself contentedly on his pillow.
"Aye--well, I"ll just sit here with this for a while. It"s a grand book, beyond the pen o" men an" angels; I often wunner how I got along without one. Ye"ve no notion what comfort I"ve found just to sit an" haud in my twa hands such a staff o" immortal truth!"...
Had he forgotten? Had he anything or any need to forget? I could not tell: but this I know and this I saw while he twinkled at me through a puff of smoke before I fled from the doorway, that the book on his knee as he turned it and rippled its worn pages--the book, I say, was _right side up_!