The Ragged Edge Part 20

After a moment Spurlock said: "Perhaps I am an ungrateful dog."

"That's better. Remember, if there's anything you'd like to get off your chest, doctors and priests are in the same boat."

With no little effort--for the right words had a way of tumbling back out of reach--he marshalled his phrases, and as he uttered them, closed his eyes to lessen the possibility of a break. "I'm only a benighted fool; and having said that, I have said everything. I'm one of those unfortunate duffers who have too much imagination--the kind who build their own chimeras and then run away from them. How long shall I be kept in this bed?"

"That's particularly up to you. Ten days should see you on your feet. But if you don't want to get up, maybe three times ten days."

There had never been, from that fatal hour eight months gone down to this, the inclination to confess. He had often read about it, and once he had incorporated it in a story, that invisible force which sent men to prison and to the gallows, when a tongue controlled would have meant liberty indefinite. As for himself, there had never been a touch of it. It was less will than education. Even in his fevered hours, so the girl had said, his tongue had not betrayed him. Perhaps that sealed letter was a form of confession, and thus relieved him on that score. And yet that could not be: it was a confession only in the event of his death.

Living, he knew that he would never send that letter.

His conscience, however, was entirely another affair. He could neither stifle nor deaden that. It was always jabbing him with white-hot barbs, waking or sleeping. But it never said: "Tell someone! Tell someone!" Was he something of a moral pervert, then?

Was it what he had lost--the familiar world--rather than what he had done?

He stared dully at the footrail. For the present the desire to fly was gone. No doubt that was due to his helplessness. When he was up and about, the idea of flight would return. But how far could he fly on a few hundred? True, he might find a job somewhere; but every footstep from behind...!

"Who is she? Where does she come from?"

"You mean Miss Enschede?"

"Yes. That dress she has on--my mother might have worn it."

He was beginning to notice things, then? The doctor was pleased.

The boy was coming around.

"Miss Enschede was born on an island in the South Seas. She is setting out for Hartford, Connecticut. The dress was her mother's, and she was wearing it to save a little extra money."

The doctor had entered the room fully determined to tell the patient the major part of Ruth's story, to inspire him with proper respect and grat.i.tude. Instead, he could not get beyond these minor details--why she wore the dress, whence she had come, and whither she was bound. The idea of this sudden reluctance was elusive; the fact was evident but not the reason for it.

"How would you like a job on a copra plantation?" he asked, irrelevantly to the thoughts crowding one another in his mind. "Out of the beaten track, with a real man for an employer? How would that strike you?"

Interest shot into Spurlock's eyes; it spread to his wan face. Out of the beaten track! He must not appear too eager. "I'll need a job when I quit this bed. I'm not particular what or where."

"That kind of talk makes you sound like a white man. Of course, I can't promise you the job definitely. But I've an old friend on the way here, and he knows the game down there. If he hasn't a job for you, he'll know someone who has. Managers and accountants are always s.h.i.+fting about, so he tells me. It's mighty lonesome down there for a man bred to cities."

"Find me the job. I don't care how lonesome it is."

Out of the beaten track! thought Spurlock. A forgotten island beyond the s.h.i.+p lanes, where that grim Hand would falter and move blindly in its search for him! From what he had read, there wouldn't be much to do; and in the idle hours he could write.

"Thanks," he said, holding out a thin white hand. "I'll be very glad to take that kind of a job, if you can find it."

"Well, that's fine. Got you interested in something, then? Would you like a peg?"

"No. I hated the stuff. There was a pleasant numbness in the bottle; that's why I went to it."

"Thought so. But I had to know for sure. Down there, whisky raises the very devil with white men. Don't build your hopes too high; but I will do what I can. While there's life there's hope. Buck up."

"I'm afraid I don't understand."

"Understand what?"

"You or this girl. There are, then, in this sorry world, people who can be disinterestedly kind!"

The doctor laughed, gave Spurlock's shoulder a pat, and left the room. Outside the door he turned and stared at the panels. Why hadn't he gone on with the girl's story? What instinct had stuffed it back into his throat? Why the inexplicable impulse to hurry this rather pathetic derelict on his way?

CHAPTER XV

Previous to his illness, Spurlock's mind had been tortured by an appalling worry, so that now, in the process of convalescence, it might be compared to a pool which had been violently stirred: there were indications of subsidence, but there were still strange forms swirling on the surface--whims and fancies which in normal times would never have risen above sub-consciousness.

Little by little the pool cleared, the whims vanished: so that both Ruth and the doctor, by the middle of the third week, began to accept Spurlock's actions as normal, whereas there was still a mote or two which declined to settle, still a kink in the gray matter that refused to straighten out.

Spurlock began to watch for Ruth's coming in the morning; first, with negligent interest, then with positive eagerness. His literary instincts were reviving. Ruth was something to study for future copy; she was almost unbelievable. She was not a reversion to type, which intimates the primordial; she suggested rather the incarnation of some G.o.ddess of the South Seas. He was not able to recognize, as the doctor did, that she was only a natural woman.

His att.i.tude toward her was purely intellectual, free of any sentimentality, utterly selfish. Ruth was not a woman; she was a phenomenon. So, adroitly and patiently, he pulled Ruth apart; that is, he plucked forth a little secret here, another there, until he had quite a substantial array. What he did not know was this: Ruth surrendered these little secrets because the doctor had warned her that the patient must be amused and interested.

From time to time, however, he was baffled. The real tragedy--which he sensed and toward which he was always reaching--eluded all his verbal skill. It was not a cambric curtain Ruth had drawn across that part of her life: it was of iron. Ruth could tell the doctor; she could bare many of her innermost thoughts to that kindly man; but there was an inexplicable reserve before this young man whom she still endued with the melancholy charm of Sydney Carton. It was not due to shyness: it was the inherent instinct of the Woman, a protective fear that she must retain some elements of mystery in order to hold the interest of the male.

When she told him that the natives called her The Dawn Pearl, his delight was unbounded. He addressed her by that t.i.tle, and something in the tone disturbed her. A sophisticated woman would have translated the tone as a caress. And yet to Spurlock it was only the t.i.tle of a story he would some day write. He was caressing an idea.

The point is, Spurlock was coming along: queerly, by his own imagination. The true creative mind is always returning to battle; defeats are only temporary set-backs. Spurlock knew that somewhere along the way he would write a story worth while. Already he was dramatizing Ruth, involving her, now in some pearl thieving adventure, now in some impossible tale of a white G.o.ddess. But somehow he could not bring any of these affairs to an orderly end.

Presently he became filled with astonishment over the singular fact that Ruth was eluding him in fancy as well as in reality.

One morning he caught her hand suddenly and kissed it. Men had tried that before, but never until now had they been quick enough.

The touch of his lips neither thrilled nor alarmed her, because the eyes that looked into hers were clean. Spurlock knew exactly what he was doing, however: speculative mischief, to see how she would act.

"I haven't offended you?"--not contritely but curiously.

"No"--as if her thoughts were elsewhere.

Something in her lack of embarra.s.sment irritated him. "Has no man ever kissed you?"

"No." Which was literally the truth.

He accepted this confession conditionally: that no young man had kissed her. There was nothing of the phenomenon in this. But his astonishment would have been great indeed had he known that not even her father had ever caressed her, either with lips or with hands.

Ruth had lived in a world without caresses. The significance of the kiss was still obscure to her, though she had frequently encountered the word and act in the Old and New Testaments and latterly in novels. Men had tried to kiss her--unshaven derelicts, some of them terrible--but she had always managed to escape. What had urged her to wrench loose and fly was the guarding instinct of the good woman. Something namelessly abhorrent in the eyes of those men...!

She knew what arms were for--to fold and embrace and to hold one tightly; but why men wished to kiss women was still a profound mystery. No matter how often she came across this phase in love stories, there was never anything explanatory: as if all human beings perfectly understood. It would not have been for her an anomaly to read a love story in which there were no kisses.

This salute of his--actually the first she could remember--while it did not disturb her, began to lead her thoughts into new channels of speculation. The more her thoughts dwelt upon the subject, the more convinced she was that she could not go to any one for help; she would have to solve the riddle by her own efforts, by some future experience.

"The Dawn Pearl," he said.

"The natives have foolish ways of saying things."

"On the contrary, if that is a specimen, they must be poets. Tell me about your island. I have never seen a lagoon."