at quarantine earlier in the morning there had been a mist, through
which passing ships loomed up vague and shapeless; but now the sun had
dispersed it and a perfect May morning welcomed the Santa
Barbara home.
Kirk leaned on the rail, looking with dull eyes on the city he had left
a year before. Only a year! It seemed ten. As he stood there he felt an
old man.
A drummer, a cheery soul who had come aboard at Porto Rico, sauntered
up, beaming with well-being and good-fellowship.
"Looks pretty good, sir," said he.
Kirk did not answer. He had not heard.
"Some burg," ventured the drummer.
Again encountering silence, he turned away, hurt. This churlish
attitude on the part of one returning to God's country on one of God's
own mornings surprised and wounded him.
To him all was right with the world. He had breakfasted well; he was
smoking a good cigar; and he was strong in the knowledge that he had
done well by the firm this trip and that bouquets were due to be handed
to him in the office on lower Broadway. He was annoyed with Kirk for
having cast even a tiny cloud upon his contentment.
He communicated his feelings to the third officer, who happened to come
on deck at that moment.
"Say, who is that guy?" he asked complainingly. "The big son of
a gun leaning on the rail. Seems like he'd got a hangover this morning.
Is he deaf and dumb or just plain grouchy?"
The third officer eyed Kirk's back with sympathy.
"I shouldn't worry him, Freddie," he said. "I guess if you had been up
against it like him you'd be shy on the small talk. That's a fellow
called Winfield. They carried him on board at Colon. He was about all
in. Got fever in Colombia, inland at the mines, and nearly died. His
pal did die. Ever met Hank Jardine?"
"Long, thin man?"
The other nodded.
"One of the best. He made two trips with us."
"And he's dead?"
"Died of fever away back in the interior, where there's nothing much
else except mosquitoes. He and Winfield went in there after gold."
"Did they get any?" asked the drummer, interested.
The third officer spat disgustedly over the rail.
"You ask Winfield. Or, rather, don't, because I guess it's not his pet
subject. He told me all about it when he was getting better. There was
gold there, all right, in chunks. It only needed to be dug for. And
somebody else did the digging. Of all the skin games! It made me pretty
hot under the collar, and it wasn't me that was stung.
"Out there you can't buy land if you're a foreigner; you have to lease
it from the natives. Poor old Hank leased his bit, all right, and when
he'd got to his claim he found somebody else working on it. It seemed
there had been a flaw in his agreement and the owners had let it over
his head to these other guys, who had slipped them more than what Hank
had done."
"What did he do?"
"He couldn't do anything. They were the right side of the law, or what
they call law out there. There was nothing to do except beat it back
again three hundred miles to the coast. That's where they got the fever
which finished Hank. So you can understand," concluded the third
officer, "that Mr. Winfield isn't in what you can call a sunny mood. If
I were you, I'd go and talk to someone else, if conversation's what you
need."
Kirk stood motionless at the rail, thinking. It was not what was past
that occupied his thoughts, as the third officer had supposed; it was
the future.
The forlorn hope had failed; he was limping back to Ruth wounded and
broken. He had sent her a wireless message. She would be at the dock to
meet him. How could he face her? Fate had been against him, it was
true, but he was in no mood to make excuses for himself. He had failed.
That was the beginning and the end of it. He had set out to bring back
wealth and comfort to her, and he was returning empty-handed.
That was what the immediate future held, the meeting with Ruth. And
after? His imagination was not equal to the task of considering that.
He had failed as an artist. There was no future for him there. He must
find some other work. But he was fit for no other work. He had no
training. What could he do in a city where keenness of competition is a
tradition? It would be as if an unarmed man should attack a fortress.
The thought of the years he had wasted was very bitter. Looking back,
he could see how fate had tricked him into throwing away his one
talent. He had had promise. With hard work he could have become an
artist, a professional, a man whose work was worth money in the open
market. He had never had it in him to be a great artist, but he had had
the facility which goes to make a good worker of the second class. He
had it still. Given the time for hard study, it was still in him to
take his proper place among painters.
But time for study was out of his reach now. He must set to work at
once, without a day's delay, on something which would bring him
immediate money. The reflection brought his mind back abruptly to the
practical consideration of the future.
Before him, as he stood there, the ragged battlements of New York
seemed to frown down on him with a cold cruelty that paralysed his
mind. He had seen them a hundred times before. They should have been
familiar and friendly. But this morning they were strange and sinister.
The skyline which daunts the emigrant as he comes up the bay to his new
home struck fear into Kirk's heart.
He turned away and began to walk up and down the deck.
He felt tired and lonely. For the first time he realized just what it
meant to him that he should never see Hank again. It had been hard,
almost impossible, till now to force his mind to face that fact. He had
winced away from it. But now it would not be avoided. It fell upon him
like a shadow.
Hank had filled a place of his own in Kirk's life. Theirs had been one
of those smooth friendships which absence cannot harm. Often they had
not seen each other for months at a time. Indeed, now that he thought
of it, Hank was generally away; and he could not remember that they had
ever exchanged letters. Yet even so there had been a bond between them
which had never broken. And now Hank had dropped out.
Kirk began to think about death. As with most men of his temperament,
it was a subject on which his mind had seldom dwelt, never for any
length of time. His parents had died when he was too young to
understand; and circumstances had shielded him from the shadow of the
great mystery. Birth he understood; it had forced itself into the
scheme of his life; but death till now had been a stranger to him.
The realization of it affected him oddly. In a sense, he found it
stimulating; not stimulating as birth had been, but more subtly. He
could recall vividly the thrill that had come to him with the birth of
his son. For days he had walked as one in a trance. The world had
seemed unreal, like an opium-smoker's dream. There had been magic
everywhere.
But death had exactly the opposite effect. It made everything curiously
real, himself most of all. He had the sensation, as he thought of Hank,
of knowing himself for the first time. Somehow he felt strengthened,
braced for the fight, as a soldier might who sees his comrade fall at
his side.
There was something almost vindictive in the feeling that came to him.
It was too vague to be analysed, but it filled him with a desire to
fight, gave him a sense of determination of which he had never before
been conscious. It toughened him, and made the old, easy-going Kirk