By Arthur Colton

New York

Henry Holt And Company

1906

Original

Original

IN MEMORIAM

C. W. WELLS

DEDICATED TO

HARRY L. PANGBORN and

GEORGIA W. PANGBORN

CONTENTS

CHAPTER I—DR. ULSWATER

CHAPTER II—MRS. MINK

CHAPTER III—AND THE TWENTY PATRIOTS

CHAPTER IV—THE TROPIC AND THE TEMPERATE

CHAPTER V—FIRST DOCUMENT. DR. ULSWATER'S NARRATIVE: FIRST ADVENTURE

CHAPTER VI—SECOND ADVENTURE

CHAPTER VII—THIRD ADVENTURE

CHAPTER VIII—PROFESSOR SIMPSON AGAIN

CHAPTER IX—CONCLUSION OF DR. ULSWATER'S FIRST MANUSCRIPT

CHAPTER X—SECOND DOCUMENT. DR. ULSWATER'S NARRATIVE CONTINUES: SUSANNAH

CHAPTER XI—RAM NAD

CHAPTER XII—RAM NAD CONTINUED

CHAPTER XIII—CONCLUSION OF DR. ULSWATER'S SECOND MANUSCRIPT

CHAPTER XIV—DR. ULSWATER'S NARRATIVE CONTINUES: THE ISLAND OF LUA

CHAPTER XV—SADLER

CHAPTER XVI—AT THE PALACE

CHAPTER XVII—MRS. ULSWATER TAKES ACTION

CHAPTER XVIII—CONCLUSION OF DR. ULSWATER'S THIRD MANUSCIPT

CHAPTER XIX—DR. ULSWATER'S NARRATIVE CONTINUES: THE MYSTERY OF GEORGIANA AND DELORES

CHAPTER XX—THE BALLAD OF GEORGIANA AND DELORES

FOOTNOTES BY JAMES ULSWATER.

CHAPTER XXI—SUSANNAH AND RAM NAD

CHAPTER XXII—CONCLUSION OF DR. ULSWATER'S LAST MANUSCIPT

CHAPTER XXIII—I RESUME THE NARRATIVE. THE PORTATE ULTIMATUM

CHAPTER XXIV—THE ARREST

CHAPTER XXV—MRS. ULSWATER'S INSURRECTION

CHAPTER XXVI—THE TRUCE

CHAPTER XXVII—ON BOARD THE VIOLETTA

CHAPTER XXVIII—HANNAH ATKINS

CHAPTER XXIX—MR. JAMISON

CHAPTER XXX—MR. DORCAS

CHAPTER XXXI—SUSANNAH—END OF THE VOYAGE OF THE VIOLETA

CHAPTER XXXII—ZIONVILLE

CHAPTER XXXIII—WILLIAM C. JONES AND LOUISA

CHAPTER XXXIV—AMBASSADORS FROM ZIONVILLE

CHAPTER XXXV—THE END

CHAPTER I—DR. ULSWATER

IN the Fall of the year when Krakatoa blew its head off in the East Indies, and sent its dust around the world, I fell sick of a fever in the city of Portate, which is on the west coast of South America. Portate had the latest brand of municipal enterprise and the oldest brand of fever. But they call any kind of sickness a fever there, to save trouble, and bury the alien with as little trouble as possible. I started for home, and came as far as Nassau, which is a town in the Bahamas. There, a wasted and dismal shape, I somehow fell into the hands of one Dr. Ulswater, who tended and medicined by back into the world of sunlight and other interesting objects.

Nassau runs up the side of a bluff and overlooks a blue and dimpled harbour. Dr. Ulswater at last began to take me with him, to lie on the rocks and watch him search in the harbour shoals for small cuttlefish. He used a three-pronged spear to stir them out of their lairs, and a long knife to put into their vital points with skilful surgery. They waved and slapped their wild blistered arms around his neck and shoulders, while he poked placidly into their vitality. So, being entertained and happy, I recovered from yellow fever.

By that time my handsome name, given by parents who recognised my merits, “Christopher Kirby,” had come down handily in Dr. Ulswater's usage to “Kit,” and we loved each other as two men can who are to each other a perpetual entertainment.

Dr. Ulswater was a large, bushy man in the prime of a varied life. Born an American, he had studied in German universities, practised medicine in Italy, and afterward in Ceylon. One of his hobbies was South-American archaeology. He owned a silver mine in Nevada, and kept a sort of residence in New York at this time, and was collecting specimens for a New England museum. So that he was what you might call a distributed man, for he had been in most countries of the globe; yet he was not a “globe-trotter,” but rather a floater,—in a manner resembling sea-weed, that drifts from place to place, but, wherever it drifts or clings, is tranquil and accommodating. He seemed to me suitable to the tropics and their seas,—large, easy, and warm of body; his learning like the sea, mysterious and bottomless; his mind luxuriously fertile, but somewhat ungoverned. His idioms were mixed, his conversations opalescent; his criticism of himself was that he had not personality enough.

“No, my dear,” he said, wrapping a dead cuttlefish up neatly in its own arms, “I am like a cuttlefish whose vital point is loose. You are an ignorant person, with prepossessions beyond belief, and absurd deferences for clothing and cleanliness; but you have personality and entertaining virtues. Therefore I will let you smoke two cigars to-night instead of one, and to-morrow maybe three, for your sickness is becoming an hypocrisy.” Then we went over the rocks to our boat and the sulky sleepy negro boatman, the doctor with his flabby bundled cuttlefish, and I with a basket full of coral and conch-shells. The boatman rowed us out over a sea garden with submerged coral grottos; pink and white coral, branching and the “brain” coral, sea-fans and purple sea-feathers, coral shrubs, coral in shelving masses; also sponges, and green hanging moss, and yellow, emerald, and scarlet fish, silver, satin, ringed, fringed, spotted;—all deep beneath in their liquid, deluding atmosphere,—a cold vision, outlandish, brilliant, and grotesque, over which we floated and looked down.

“Hypocrisy, pretence, illusion!” went on Dr. Ulswater. “Yet we attach to these words a meaning of praise or condemnation which begs the question. The personality is all, the point of view. To observe an alcyonoid polyp through thirty feet of water, an ineffable vision! or under a microscope which pronounces the ineffable vision hypocrisy, pretence, illusion!—in which is there more truth? Is not my hypocrisy an intimate truth of me? Hanged if I know! There is a new yacht in the harbour. We will go to it.”

And we moved across the calm glassy harbour toward the long white steam yacht.

It was a handsome sea-going vessel. Its brasses glistened in the afternoon sunlight. Violetta was its gilt-lettered name. Sailors were busy forward, and a striped awning was over the after-deck. As we drew near, a woman stood up under the awning and came over to the rail; she had some knitting in her hands. I asked if we might come aboard, and the doctor grumbled at me in disgust,—something about “frizzle-brained women.”

“Of course you can,” she said, decisively. “Wait till they bring the steps,” and she disappeared.

“Ha!” he said, “steps! And a Middle West accent! Very good.”

We went aboard, leaving the negro in his boat, and under the striped awning made the acquaintance of Mrs. Mink and a stout, blond-bearded sailing-master, Captain Jansen.

CHAPTER II—MRS. MINK

MRS. MINK was a pleasant looking woman, though somewhat thin, and with sharp gray eyes. She wore a plain, neat black dress, such as a self-respecting woman might wear to church in some small inland city. A large flowered rug covered the deck, a round mahogany table in the middle of it. There were a hammock and a number of upholstered chairs, each with a doily on the back of it. A work-basket stood on the table, brimming with sewing materials. A white crocheted shawl hung on the back of a chair, a red paper lampshade over the electric bulb.

The scene wakened sleeping associations of mine. Just such a shawl my maiden aunts wore in Connecticut, just such doilies were on their rocking chairs, just such flowered carpets were in their parlours. They dressed like Mrs. Mink too, but, to the best of my recollection, were not so agreeable to look at.

That weird glistening sea garden of coral and purple feathers and improbable fish was fresh in my mind, with Dr. Ulswater's talk, both undomestic, paradoxical, and showing coloured objects slumberously afloat in a transparent and deluding element. The wide blue harbour; the steep white town buried in tropical foliage; the big spruce yacht, too; the yellow-bearded Swede Jansen, and the crew in flat caps and jumpers—all these belonged to the world as I had known it of later years. With the line of the awning came the abrupt change; there ruled the flowered carpet, the centre table, the doilies, the provincial feminine touch, the tradition and influence of a million parlours and “sitting rooms” of the States. One missed the wall paper, and mantelpiece, the insipid and carefully framed print, and the black stove; but Mrs. Mink seemed to have made herself at home, so far as she was able, and the effect was homelike.

All this while Mrs. Mink looked critical, and Dr. Ulswater was introducing himself and me, and presently I became aware that Mrs. Mink was telling Dr. Ulswater her story.

It appeared that she came from the small city of Potterville, Ohio, whose aspect might be inferred and pictured—a half-dozen brick business blocks, a railway station, a dozen churches, dusty streets, board sidewalks, maples for shade trees—mainly young and not too healthy—clapboarded frame houses with narrow piazzas, a thin, monotonous current of social talk, a limited and local existence.

Until the year before, the fortunes of Mrs. Mink had hardly led her beyond the borders of the State, nor away from Potterville for more than a few days.

Mr. Mink, a silent, plodding man—as I gathered—a banker, counted a well-to-do citizen, but not suspected of unusual wealth, had died the year before, of a natural and normal sickness. There must have been a secretive element in him, something now forever unexplained. He had sat at his desk in his bank. Away from the bank he had never alluded to business. He had not liked any habits to be altered. No one in Potterville, not even the bank cashier, certainly not Mrs. Mink, suspected that Potterville harboured a millionaire. But when Mrs. Mink found herself a widow of extensive and varied wealth, she set herself to consider the situation. So far the story was partly inferential. Mrs. Mink spoke with some reserve.

When the size of her income was explained to her by her lawyer, who was also her neighbour, she cried, in some alarm, “What shall I do?”

He said: “Get a steam yacht. Go into high society, and found a college. Spend it on the heathen. Make your name immortal in Potterville.”

“But,” said Mrs. Mink, narratively, “I thought those were too many different things. But when I was little I often wished I could see the equator, and now I rather wanted to see the heathen, and the idols that have pictures in Sunday-school quarterlies. The more I thought of parrots and monkeys and bananas and Foreign Missions, the more I knew what I ought to do first. Because I knew more about Foreign Missions than about colleges, and I thought tropical countries would be nicer than high society.”

“Admirable!” cried Dr. Ulswater, suddenly. “What logic! For subtle inference and accurate reasoning, look at that!”

Mrs. Mink looked surprised.

“But I felt sure that it would be better to be comfortable while I was examining the missions, so I went to the lawyer, and he sent me to some people who made ships. After that everything was plain.”

“Plain!” cried Dr. Ulswater. “It's a syllogism.”

“The ship-dealer was very kind,” said Mrs. Mink, reflecting. “He got the Violetta and Captain Jansen. It has been quite pleasant so far. But——” She hesitated.

“But you haven't yet seen what you seek for,” said Dr. Ulswater. “You have taken but a step into the imperium of the tropics. You have far to go. I have been on the road these twenty years. Imprimis, I will show you the model upon which the heathen idol is constructed.”

He brought up the cuttlefish from the boat and unbundled it. Mrs. Mink thought it was somewhat uglier than any pictures of heathen idols.

“The faith of the savage is based upon fear in the midst of wonder,” said Dr. Ulswater. “This is an incarnate terror and obscure nightmare seen moving through ineffable sea gardens. Behold the seed of religions. You are wise, madam, in desiring to see and to hear, to know the miracle of the world. Everywhere two miracles confront each other, the visible world and the soul of man beholding it, but custom and usage are blinding; that is to say, the more you get used to a thing, the more you don't see it.”

Mrs. Mink nodded.

“The soul of the heathen,” continued Dr. Ulswater, musing, “and that of the missionary are both remarkable.” Mrs. Mink looked suspicious; but he continued, musing: “There is, at this moment, an insurrection in Haiti, a bad-tempered mountain blowing up in Peru, and ten thousand miles from there a large brown idol, that I know well, sitting in the woods in Ceylon, with green jade eyes and silver finger-nails. And they're all turned over once a day.”

Something about Mrs. Mink, self-contained, quiet, and decisive, looking at him with shrewd, unbewildered eyes, seemed to rouse him to conversation; or else he had an object in being entertaining. Captain Jansen and two or three blue-capped sailors were near, and stood at the corner of the cabin listening, while he talked on, talked immensely, talked gloriously, talked like the power of Niagara, until the tide ran out and the sun set, and Mrs. Mink said, “Now you'll stay to tea,” so decisively that we stayed to tea.

In the cabin were green curtains and pink lamp-shade, wall paper and framed prints, a radiator, biscuits, cake, preserves, a red-haired Irish servant-girl named Norah, and Mrs. Mink at home. She was thoughtful.

“Do you have to collect cuttlefish?” she asked at last.

“I? No. I do what I like. Why?” Dr. Ulswater's innocence of manner was perhaps too elaborate. “My curly-haired young friend must not go back to his job for some weeks in South America, for he is not yet a grizzly-bear. He is languid, like a jelly-fish.”

“Well, I shouldn't dare ask any one away from business. But I have some spare rooms, and I would be pleased if you and Mr. Kirby would visit me. It would be a great help, if you aren't too busy.”

“We are your grateful guests,” said Dr. Ulswater, elaborately.

When we came to go, the sulky negro and his boat had disappeared. Captain Jansen offered to take us ashore. Dr. Ulswater bundled up his cuttlefish. Mrs. Mink said, “He's dreadfully untidy.”

“Admirable!” cried Dr. Ulswater again. “It's a select word, a creative description! He's a regular litter. His very vital point is loose.”

We slid away in the starlight.

“What personality!” muttered Dr. Ulswater. “What point of view! Untidy! The very word! She buys a steam yacht, furnishes it in the style of Potterville, Ohio, and starts off to examine Foreign Missions. Why, sure! That's easy!”

Captain Jansen chuckled: “I see men try sheet her more'n once, but they don't. She have a head.”

“Untidy!” muttered Dr. Ulswater. “Untidy!”—as if he foreboded trouble in that word.

CHAPTER III—AND THE TWENTY PATRIOTS

WE left Nassau the following morning. On the third day we passed the Inaguas and sighted Tortuga. They were days rich with the tropical outpourings of Dr. Ulswater, into whose warm Gulf Stream of conversation Mrs. Mink now and then dropped cool comments and punctuations that excited his luxuriant praise. What Mrs. Mink thought of Dr. Ulswater was not so clear.

The green cliffs of Haiti overhung a white surf, and the lapping mouths of half-submerged caves below; above was the tangle of the forest, great pendant leaves, sweeping and coiling creepers. It was the hot morning of the fourth day. There was a thin, shining mist about, and Dr. Ulswater quoted:

“... soft and purple mist

Like a vaporous amethyst,

... red and golden vines

Piercing with their trellised lines

The rough dark-skirted wilderness.

“Vaporous amethyst!” he murmured, sentimentally. “Gaseous spirit of jewel! Ah, Mrs. Mink! Lyric poetry, is it not a religion?”

Mrs. Mink shook her head.

“You see a distinction. You are right. You would say, in the worship of beauty the ethical element is too subsidiary. You would point out the lack of rigidity and purpose.”

Mrs. Mink did not commit herself. We watched the smoke of a steamer coming toward us from the east.

“I see the deep's untrampled floor!” murmured Dr. Ulswater.

The steamer, a dilapidated side-wheeler, drew nearer, and a small cannon was plainly to be seen in the prow, but the only men in sight were a negro at the wheel and another walking the bridge. As they came within hailing, the cannon went off suddenly, the ball boomed overhead, and struck, spat! against the cliff, and on the deck a crowd of negroes sprang up and fell to dancing, howling, waving their guns. Mrs. Mink said, “For goodness' sake!” while Dr. Ulswater and I went to join Captain Jansen.

“Yas,” he said, “I didn't know. If I know, I got avay.”

Three boat-loads of negroes were coming to board us. In the prow of the first was one tall and thin, with a gold-laced regimental coat, a tasselled sword, a wide-brimmed straw hat, and the dignity of a commodore. They drew under the side, and Dr. Ulswater and this Commodore talked Haitian French.

Then they scrambled aboard, marched aft in an orderly manner, squatted on the deck against the rail at the edge of the flowered carpet. Most of them grinned sociably and chattered to each other. The crew of the Violetta remained forward discussing them. Dr. Ulswater, the Commodore, Captain Jansen, and I sat down under the awning in the upholstered chairs, together with Mrs. Mink. Dr. Ulswater explained, cheerfully:

“He says he's an insurrection. He admits that we're not the enemy, but says he's got to have the Violetta in order to triumph over the tyrant of Haiti. When he has triumphed we will be rewarded,—meaning he'll be in a position to pay damages. He thinks our consciences will reward us, too. He thinks that's a strong point,—maybe stronger than the other. He has only that one war-ship, and he needs another in order to attack the navies of the tyrant. If you ask whether he's innocent or clever, why, I give it up, but I guess he's superlatively one of them. He appears to be calm.”

“Do you mean he wants me to give him the Violetta?” asked Mrs. Mink, sharply.

“Something resembling that, and it's not so unnatural,”—Dr. Ulswater waved his hand balmily,—“you know, from his point of view——”

“Nonsense! I sha'n't do anything of the kind!”

“But—well—I gather his innocence is such that he might get up and take it.”

“I'd like to see him! Who is he?”

She was sharp-voiced, alert, and keen. Dr. Ulswater seemed bewildered.

“Yes, but I gather he's a sort of patriotic pirate,—piratical so far that it might not do to irritate him.”

Mrs. Mink softened a degree: “Is he patriotic?”

“My experience in this neighbourhood,” said the doctor, “has been that patriotic leaders, who are down on the tyrant, are generally looking for his job. But now, as they appear to be some two or three to one of us, and armed, and, technically speaking, to have the drop on us,—why, there's a West-Indian proverb to the effect that 'A spider and a fly don't bargain,' but I would suggest something diplomatic, something perhaps a little yielding. Something of that kind.”

The Commodore all this while sat stiffly upright, with one hand on the hilt of his tasselled sword and no expression on his face, glaring away from us across the sea. It seemed to me that his bearing couldn't be natural to a being with human weaknesses, and that it went beyond the real requirements of his uniform. I judged he had gotten it off an equestrian statue.

Dr. Ulswater began to talk with him again. Of the military, on the edge of the flowered carpet, some looked genial, some murderous—most of them genially murderous. Captain Jansen pulled his beard and looked meekly at Mrs. Mink, and Mrs. Mink examined the Commodore critically.

“He says,” resumed Dr. Ulswater, “that it's a military crisis, and he must have another war-ship or go under. When he has conquered the ships of the tyrant, he will reward us. His remarks, like his manner, are a bit monotonous, but I gather he's nearly, what you might call, on his last legs. He rather intends to put us all ashore.”

“Fiddlesticks!”