The Ragged Edge, Harold MacGrath [great books of all time txt] 📗

South Seas-inertia.

The drunken beachcombers; the one-sided education; the utter loneliness of a white child without playfellows, human or animal, without fairy stories, who for days was left alone while the father visited neighbouring islands, these pictures sank far below their actual importance. He would always see the picture of the huge, raw-boned Dutchman, haranguing and thundering the word of God into the dull ears of South Sea Islanders, who, an hour later, would be carrying fruit penitently to their wooden images.

He now understood her interest in Taber, as he called himself: habit, a twice-told tale. A beachcomber in embryo, and she had lent a hand through habit as much as through pity. The grim mockery of it!-those South Sea loafers, taking advantage of Enschede's Christianity and imposing upon him, accepting his money and medicines and laughing behind his back! No doubt they made the name a byword and a subject for ribald jest in the waterfront bars. And this clear-visioned child had comprehended that only half the rogues were really ill. But Enschede took them as they came, without question. Charity for the ragtag and the bobtail of the Seven Seas, and none for his own flesh and blood.

This started a thought moving. There must be something behind the missioner's actions, something of which the girl knew nothing nor suspected. It would not be possible otherwise to live in daily contact with this level-eyed, lovely girl without loving her. Something with iron resolve the father had kept hidden all these years in the lonely citadel of his heart. Teaching the word of God to the recent cannibal, caring for the sick, storming the strongholds of the plague, adding his own private income to the pittance allowed him by the Society, and never seeing the angel that walked at his side! Something the girl knew nothing about; else Enschede was unbelievable.

It now came to him with an added thrill how well she had told her story; simply and directly, no skipping, no wandering hither and yon: from the first hour she could remember, to the night she had fled in the proa, a clear sustained narrative. And through it all, like a golden thread on a piece of tapestry, weaving in and out of the patterns, the unspoken longing for love.

"Well," she said, as they reached the hotel portal, "what is your advice?"

"Would you follow it?"

"Probably not. Still, I am curious."

"I do not say that what you have done is wrong in any sense. I do not blame you for the act. There are human limitations, and no doubt you reached yours. For all that, it is folly. If you knew your aunt were alive, if she expected you, that would be different. But to plunge blindly into the unknown!"

"I had to! I had to!"

She had told him only the first part of her story. She wondered if the second part would overcome his objections? Several times the words had rushed to her tongue, to find her tongue paralysed. To a woman she might have confided; but to this man, kindly as he was, it was unthinkable. How could she tell him of the evil that drew her and drew her, as a needle to the magnet?-the fascinating evil that even now, escaped as it was, went on distilling its poison in her mind?

"Yes, yes!" said the doctor. "But if you do not find this aunt, what will you do? What can you do to protect yourself against hunger?"

"I'll find something."

"But warn the aunt, prepare her, if she lives."

"And have her warn my father! No. If I surprised her, if I saw her alone, I might make her understand."

He shook his head. "There's only one way out of the muddle, that I can see."

"And what is that?"

"I have relatives not far from Hartford. I may prevail upon them to take you in until you are full-fledged, providing you do not find this aunt. You say you have twenty-four hundred in your letter of credit. It will not cost you more than six hundred to reach your destination. The pearls were really yours?"

"They were left to me by my mother. I sometimes laid away my father's clothes in his trunk. I saw the metal box a hundred times, but I never thought of opening it until the day I fled. I never even burrowed down into the trunk. I had no curiosity of that kind. I wanted something alive ." She paused.

"Go on."

"Well, suddenly I knew that I must see the inside of that box, which had a padlock. I wrenched this off, and in an envelope addressed to me in faded ink, I found the locket and the pearls. It is queer how ideas pop into one's head. Instantly I knew that I was going to run away that night before he returned from the neighbouring island. At the bottom of the trunk I found two of my mother's dresses. I packed them with the other few things I owned. Morgan the trader did not haggle over the pearls, but gave me at once what he judged a fair price. You will wonder why he did not hold the pearls until Father returned. I didn't understand then, but I do now. It was partly to pay a grudge he had against father."

"And partly what else?"

"I shall never tell anybody that."

"I don't know," said the doctor, dubiously. "You're only twenty-not legally of age."

"I am here in Canton," she replied, simply.

"Very well. I'll cable to-night, and in a few days we'll have some news. I'm a graybeard, an old bachelor; so I am accorded certain privileges. Sometimes I am frightfully busy; and then there will be periods of dullness. I have a few regular patients, and I take care of them in the morning. Every afternoon, from now on, I will teach you a little about life-I mean the worldly points of view you're likely to meet. You are queerly educated; and it strikes me that your father had some definite purpose in thus educating you. I'll try to fill in the gaps."

The girl's eyes filled. "I wonder if you will understand what this kindness means to me? I am so terribly wise-and so wofully ignorant!"


CHAPTER XII


The doctor shifted his books and magazines to the crook of his elbow. He had done this a dozen times on the way from his office. Books were always sliding and slipping, clumsy objects to hold. Looking at this girl, a sense of failure swept over him. He had not been successful as the world counted success; the fat bank-account, the filled waiting room of which he had once dreamed, had never materialized except in the smoke of his evening pipe.

And yet he knew that his skill was equal to that of any fashionable practitioner in Hong-Kong. He wasn't quite hard enough to win worldly success; that was his fault. Anybody in pain had only to call to him. So, here he was, on the last lap of middle age, in China, having missed all the thrills in life except one-the war against Death. It rather astonished him. He hadn't followed this angle of thought in ten years: what he might have been, with a little shrewd selfishness. This extraordinary child had opened up an old channel through which it was no longer safe to cruise. She was like an angel with one wing. The simile started a laugh in his throat.

"Why do you laugh?" she asked gravely.

"At a thought. Of you-an angel with one wing."

"Meaning that I don't belong anywhere, in heaven or on earth?"

"Meaning that you must cut off the wing or grow another to mate it. Let's go up and see how the patient is doing. Wu may have news for us. We'll get those books into your room first. And I'll have supper with you."

"If only...." But she did not complete the thought aloud. If only this man had been her father! The world would have meant nothing; the island would have been wide enough.

"You were saying-?"

"I started to say something; that is all."

"By the way, did you read those stories?"

"Yes."

"Worth anything?"

"I don't know."

"Silly love stories?"

"No; love wasn't the theme. Supposing you take them and read them? You might be able to tell me why I felt disappointed."

"All right. I'll take them back with me. Probably he has something to say and can't say it, or he writes well about nothing."

"Do you believe his failure caused...."

"What?" he barked. But he did not follow on with the thought. There was no need of sowing suspicion when he wasn't really certain there were grounds for it. "Well, you never can tell," he continued, lamely. "These writer chaps are queer birds."

"Queer birds."

He laughed and followed her into the hotel. "More slang," he said. "I'll have to set you right on that, too."

"I have heard sailors use words like that, but I never knew what they meant."

Sailors, he thought; and most of them the dregs of the South Seas, casting their evil glances at this exquisite creature and trying to smirch with innuendo the crystal clearness of her mind. Perhaps there were experiences she would never confide to any man. Sudden indignation boiled up in him. The father was a madman. It did not matter that he wore the cloth; something was wrong with him. He hadn't played fair.

"Remember; we must keep the young fellow's thoughts away from himself. Tell him about the island, the coconut dance, the wooden tom-toms; read to him."

"What made him buy that sing-song girl?" Regarding this, Ruth had ideas of her own, but she wanted the doctor's point of view.

"Maybe he realized that he was slipping fast and thought a fine action might give him a hand-hold on life again. You tell me he didn't like the stuff."

"He shuddered when he drank."

"Well, that's a hopeful sign. I'll test him out later; see if there is any craving. Give me the books. I'll put them in your room; then we'll have a look-see."

The patient was asleep. According to Wu, the young man had not opened his eyes once during the afternoon.

So Ruth returned to her room and sorted the books and magazines the doctor had loaned her, inspected the titles and searched for pictures. And thus it was that she came upon a book of Stevenson's verse-her first adventure into poetry. The hymnal lyrics had never stirred her; she had memorized and sung them parrot-wise. But here was new music, tender and kindly and whimsical, that first roved to and fro in the mind and then cuddled up in the heart. Anything that had love in it!

The doctor comprehended that he also had his work cut out. While the girl kept the patient from dwelling upon his misfortunes, whatever these were, he himself would have to keep the girl from brooding over hers. So he made merry at the dinner table, told comic stories, and was astonished at the readiness with which she grasped the comic side of life. His curiosity put itself into a question.

"Old Morgan the trader," she explained, "used to save me Tit-Bits . He would read the jokes and illustrate them; and after a time I could see the point of a joke without having it explained to me. I believe it amused him. I was a novelty. He