Public-domain ebook
Lot & Company
Language: en511 downloads on Project Gutenberg
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In: Novels·American Literature
Public-domain ebook sourced from Project Gutenberg #69038.
The opening · free to read
A barkentine, her clipper-built hull of steel, her lines satisfying like the return of a friend after years. Along the water-line shone the bright edge of her copper sheathing; then a soft black line smooth as modelled clay where she muscled out for sea-worth, and covered her displacement in the daring beauty of contour. Still above was the shining brass of her row of ports on a ground of weathered grey, and the dull red of her rail. Over all, and that which quickened the ardour of Bellair’s soul, was the mystery of her wire rigging and folded cloths against the smoky horizon, exquisite as the frame of a butterfly to his fancy.
His emotion is not to be explained; nor another high moment of his life which had to do with a flashing merchantman seen from the water-front at San Francisco--square-rigged throughout, a cloud of sail-cloth, her royals yet to be lifted, as she got underweigh. He knew that considerable canvas was still spread between California, Australia and the Islands, but what a well-kept if ancient maiden of the Jade’s species was doing here in New York harbour, A. D. Nineteen hundred and odd, was not disclosed to Bellair until afterward, and not clearly then.
He knew her for a barkentine, and in the intensely personal appeal of the moment he was a bit sorry for the blend. To his eyes the schooner-rig of mizzen and main masts was not to be compared for beauty to the trisected fore. Still he reflected that square-rigged throughout, she would be crowded with crew to care for her, and that her concession to trade was at least not outright. Schooner, bark and brig--he seemed to know them first hand, not only from pictures and pages of print, though there had been many long evenings of half-dream with books before him--books that always pushed back impatiently through the years of upstart Steam into Nature’s own navigation, where Romance has put on her brave true form in the long perspective. Ships that really sailed were one of Bellair’s passions, like orchards and vined stone-work--all far from him apparently and out of the question--loved the more because of it.... He watched with rapt eyes now, estimated the Jade’s length at one-seventy-five and was debating her tonnage when a huge ox of a man appeared from the cabin (while the Jade slid farther out), waddled aft as if bare-footed, spoke to an officer there, and then held up two brown hairy, thick-fingered hands, palms extended to the pier--as if to push Brooklyn from him forever.... The officer’s voice just reached shore, but not his words. A Japanese woman appeared on the receding deck.
“_Jade of Adelaide_,” muttered Bellair, moments afterward.
A tug was towing her straight toward Staten. He thought of her lying off the glistening white beach of a coral island two months hence, surrounded by native craft, all hands helping the big man get ashore.... At this moment a young man emerged from the harbour-front door of the Hatmos office, locking it after him. Bellair came up from his dream. Such realities of the city man are mainly secret. It was the worn surface that Bellair presented to the stranger, a sophisticated and imperturbable surface, and one employed so often that its novelty was gone.
“Where’s she going?” he asked.
“Who?”
Bellair smiled at the facetiousness.
“The Jade,” he said gently.
“Just as far from here as she can get.”
“Round the world?”
“I doubt if she’ll come back.”
“You don’t see many of them any more----”
“No,” replied the other agreeably enough, “this old dame and two or three sisters are about all that call here. Hatmos & Co. get ’em all.”
“Will you have a little drink?” Bellair inquired. “That is, if you know a place around here. I’m from across.”
The other was not unwilling. They walked up the pier together. A place was found.
“Does the Jade belong to the Hatmos people?” Bellair asked.
“No. We’re agents for Stackhouse. By the way, he’s aboard the _Jade_--just left the office a half hour ago. The Hatmos son and heir went home in a cab, like his father used to, when Stackhouse blew in from the South Seas----”
“The big man who stood aft as the ship cleared?” Bellair suggested.
“Hairy neck--clothes look like pajamas?”
“Yes.”
“That must have been Stackhouse. He’s the biggest man in Peloponasia----”
Bellair wondered if he meant Polynesia. “You mean in size?”
“Possibly that, but I meant--interests. Owns whole islands and steam-fleets, but hates steam. Does his pleasure riding under canvas. Comes up to New York every third year with a new Japanese wife. Used to spend his time drinking with old Hatmos--now he’s trying to kill off the younger generation. Lives at the Florimel while in New York, and teaches the dago barboys how to make tropical drinks. If he had stayed longer, he would have got to me. Young Hatmos is about finished.”
Bellair breathed deeply, strangely alive. “Where does the Jade call first after leaving here?”
“Savannah--then one or two South American ports--then around the Horn and the long up-beat to the Islands.”
“Why, that might mean four months.” Bellair spoke with a touch of wistfulness.
They emerged to the street at length, and the New Yorker started shyly back to the pier. The Hatmos man laughed.
“You fall for the sailing-stuff, don’t you?”
“Yes, it’s got me. Do they take passengers?”
“Sure, if you’re in no hurry. Here and there, some one like you--just for the voyage. Two or three on board from here.... One a preacher. He’d better look out. Stackhouse hates to drink alone.”
“Thanks. Good-bye.”
The Jade, far and very little among the liners, had turned south to the Narrows and was spreading her wings.... The world began to shut Bellair in, as he crossed the river again. Sunday night supper at the boarding-house was always a dismal affair; by every manner and means it was so to-night. The chorus woman of the Hippodrome was bolting ahead of the bell, to hurry away to rehearsal. Nightly she came up out of the water.... He tried three sea-books that night--“Lady Letty,” “Lord Jim” and “The Phantom,” but couldn’t get caught in their old spell. A new and personal dimension was upon him from the afternoon. He fell to dreaming again and again of the _Jade_--the last misty glimpse of her at the Narrows, and the huge brown hands pushing Brooklyn away.... There is pathos in the city man’s love and need for fresh air. Bellair pulled his bed to the window at last, surveying the room without regard. Long afterward he dreamed that he was out on the heaving floor of the sea, and that a man-monster came down from the deck in pajamas, and pressing his hands against the walls of the cabin, made respiration next to impossible for the inmate. There was a key to this suffocation, for the air in his room was still as a pool. A lull had fallen upon the city before a gusty storm of wind and rain.
BELLAIR regarded himself as an average man; and after all perhaps this was the most significant thing about him. He was not average to look at--the face of a student and profoundly kind--and yet, he had moved in binding routine for five years that they knew of at Lot & Company’s. His acquaintances were of the average type. He did not criticise them; you would not have known that he saw them with something of the same sorrow that he regarded himself.
Back of this five years was an Unknowable. Had you possessed exactly the perception you might have caught a glimpse of some extraordinary culture that comes from life in the older lands, and personal contacts with deeper evils--the culture of the great drifters, the inimitable polish of rolling stones. As a usual thing he would not have shown you any of this. At Lot & Company’s offices, men had moved and talked and lunched near and with him for years without uncovering a gleam of a certain superb equipment for life which really existed in a darkened room of his being.
Perhaps he was still in preparation. We have not really completed the circle of any accomplishment until we have put it in action. Certainly Bellair had not done that, since the Unknowable ended. He had made no great friends among men or women; though almost thirty, he had met no stirring love affair, at least in this period. He had done the most common duties of trade, for a common reward in cash; lived in a common house--moved in crowds of common men and affairs. It was as if he were a spy, trained from a child, but commanded at the very beginning of his manhood, not only to toil and serve in an insignificant post--but to be insignificant as well. It was by accident, for instance, that they discovered at Lot & Company’s that Bellair was schooled in the Sanscrit.
Before usual he was astir that Monday morning, but late at the office for all that. A drop of consciousness somewhere between shoe-buttons, and a similar trance between collar and tie. In these lapses a half hour was lost, and queerly enough afterward the old purports of his life did not hold together as before. A new breath from somewhere, a difference in vitality, and the hum-drum, worn-sore consciousness given to his work with Lot & Company, had become like an obscene relative, to be rid of, even at the price of dollars and the established order of things. It had been very clear as he drank his coffee that he must give quit-notice at the office, yet when he reached there, this was not so easy, and he was presently at work as usual in his cage with Mr. Sproxley, the cashier.
The Quaker firm of Lot & Company was essentially a printing establishment. During the first half of the period in which Bellair had been connected, though he was not stupider than usual, he had not realised the crooked weave of the entire inner fabric of the house. Lot & Company had been established for seventy-five years and through three generations. Its conduct was ordered now like a process of nature, a systematised tone to each surface manner and expression. All the departments were strained and deformed to meet and adjust in the larger current of profit which the cashier had somehow bridged without scandal for twenty-seven years. Personally, so far as Bellair knew, Mr. Sproxley was an honest man, though not exactly of the manner, and underpaid.
The cashier’s eyes were black, a black that would burn you, and unquestionably furtive, although Bellair sat for two years at a little distance from the cashier’s desk before he accepted the furtiveness, so deeply laid and set and hardened were his first impressions. They were hard eyes as well, like that anthracite which retains its gleaming black edge, though the side to the draft is red to the core.
Mr. Sproxley’s home was in Brooklyn, an hour’s ride from the office--a little flat in a street of little flats, all with the same porches, brickwork and rusty numerals. An apartment for two, and yet Mr. and Mrs. Sproxley had not moved, though five black-eyed children had come to them. The cashier of Lot & Company was a stationary man--that was his first asset.... A hundred times Bellair had heard the old formula, delivered by firm members to some caller at the office:
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