T. S. Stribling

“ As I waited, I became sure for no reason in the world that the light came from L'wanna's chamber. A dozen queries beseiged my heart. Was she ill or lonely or unhappy that she arose at such an hour? Did the languid night tease her into restlessness as it did me? Or did she keep some vigil of her faith?
A sudden strange impulse, a sympathy—yes, a sympathy moved me to call across the patio and acquaint the girl with my own wakefulness. I hardly knew what I would say. My heart beat with queer excitement. ”

“ The little animal's trust sent a faint repugnance along his nerves at sacrificing it to Gogoma's table. He glanced around. The watery smell of the lake at evening, the deep orange note of the sunset over cliffs, and peaks and temple, the kneeling girl, brought a sort of wistful melting into Lassiter's breast.
There was no other human creature in sight except the small dark figure of Nunes far up the sand. They were alone. As the sun disappeared, Lassiter turned and tossed the lamb into the center of the net. ”

“ Lassiter stood looking at the three figures kneeling to the golden image of the sun. Their bodies were preserved, their hearts barely beat in the immortality of a spider's poison. They would never die; they would never live. Their bodies would persist on and on, exactly as if they were netted in the spider's web, waiting for a return of the monster to suck out their juices. ”

“ Smoke began to roll out of her turrets, and her crew came swarming out on her deck like a disturbed ant's nest. Through his glasses, Madden saw them hunched against the fire, working to launch a boat, when of a sudden there was a blinding flare; a huge cloud of smoke leaped from the sea, and after four or five minutes, a thunder heavily audible even amid the roar of battle rumbled in Madden's ears. It was the solemn note of a battleship destroyed by its own magazines. When the smoke cleared away there was left nothing save tossing waves and bits of flotsam here and there. ”

“ The thought of picking her up, of gripping her to his breast as he skirted down the jungle to his speed-boat, grew in Pompalone's veins like raw rum. Why, for a million years men had taken their women like that! Only in the last few centuries have they asked them, and talked and explained and argued—like street vendors quibbling over a penny! Oh, it was shameful! There is something quivering with shame when a man asks a woman's consent to marriage! ”

“ But such a fulgor lay over the water that toward the middle of the morning they were hardly able to see the reeds that marched down to the riverside, or the green parrots that passed over the canoe in great flocks and filled the sky with a harsh screaming.
The river stretched on, mile after mile, a vast moving plane that banished the shores to level lines almost at the horizon. At last Strawbridge came to paddle close to one shore, in order that their tiny canoe might not be utterly lost amid such an immensity. ”

“ It was these girls coming out of the crevices in the rocks that made this groveling existence human to Lassiter. Often these girl faces held that strange quality of wistfulness that belongs to youth and maidenhood. Of what they dreamed, Lassiter could not imagine. What they were to become, he saw too plainly: Hags in a hole, used and shapeless, flowers crushed in a sty.
And Zeke Birdsong came along and gave them little Spanish Testaments. ”

“ A procession of sad, wistful thoughts trailed through Peter's brain: his mother, and Ida May, and now Cissie. It seemed to Peter that all any woman had ever brought him was wistfulness and sadness. His mother had been jealous, and instead of the great happiness he had expected, his home life with her had turned out a series of small perplexities and pains. Before that was Ida May, and now here was her younger sister. Peter wondered if any man ever reached the peace and happiness foreshadowed in his dream of a woman. ”

“ The promoter peered at him through the gloom.
“Do you mean——”
“Si, señor,” and the whirlpool will be more dashing than still water, more fitting for caballeros——”
“It's all the same, Nunes.”
“But—but, señor,” pleaded the muleteer in a queer voice, “I hate going down alone—I hate it— I was standing here thinking— I will tell you——
“I meant to take the girl down with me in this bolsa. Ah, Señor Lassiter, that would have been a death! To be sucked down the whirlpool in her arms. Madre de Dios! What a death for a caballero! Kissing her scarlet lips, pressing her soft body! What a death!” ”

“ He was going to have his game, an aristocratic melodrama of mental brilliancy to spread before the Barbadian public. The psychologist walked along the hot respectable street of Bridgetown with a light gay feeling; and this gaiety, he realized, was based on his vanity. He smiled at himself and murmured audibly—
"What a cad I am!"
"Pardon?" ejaculated Hodges looking around at him interrogatively.
"I said," repeated Poggioli still smiling, "there is no such thing as art for art's sake; that saying is a sham and a humbug; art is for approbation's sake, to show people how wonderful we are." ”

“ As Madden stood on the bridge in the skirling wind, the little Vulcan, the seaweed drifts and the cruisers reminded him of nothing so much as a rabbit flying across cotton rows in front of four greyhounds; only here there were no friendly briar patches or fence corners in which to double or hide. Never had the Sargasso appeared so vast, so empty, so brilliant, so hot.
"Any chance?" he shouted to Caradoc above the rumble of machinery and the whistling of the wind.
"There's always a chance! They might foul in these weeds!" ”

“ This discovery brought back to his mind the idea that had been edging in when Birdsong's remark had interrupted. Was it possible some man had visited them during the night with a noiseless airplane? Did an unknown civilization exist in the hinterlands of the Andes that manufactured a silken cordage out of some unknown colloid?
The moment Lassiter hit on this theory, the various threads in this snarl of facts began to straighten. The killing of the mules, the selection of the spot, the light he had seen in the abyss, all became amenable to human motives. ”

“ From out on the piazza came the tumult of the people clamoring for their babies. It might have been the roaring of the sea against the coast.
“Why have you told me this, Gogoma?”
“So you can tell your friend, Señor Birdsong.”
“Birdsong?”
“Si, señor. Tell Señor Birdsong that he may become the high priest, that his God may become the God of Motobatl, if he will only preserve the web of the sun. That alone is necessary. Señor Birdsong would make a good high priest. He is hard and cruel, and unmarried. He seems to have no desire for marriage.” ”

“ PLAZA SAN FRANCISCO, the live stock grain market of Quito, is a colorful, noisy place set in the cold brilliance of mountain sunshine. A babble of bastard Spanish, Aymara and Quichua dialects fill the air. The air is rank with the smell of animal ammonia, straw, droppings, mules and burros. Buyers and venders come and go with strings of donkeys, mules and high-necked llamas. Over the plaza are ponchos of every color, greens, yellows, oranges, reds, stripes, checks and fanciful designs. There is much sombrero tipping and courtly address between all men, rich or beggarly. ”

“ If we remained motionless our fate was even more certain. I whispered the danger to L'wanna without shifting my eyes.
She made some reply, but her whisper faded into silence, for at the faint sound the jaguar had come sharply ahead as noiselessly as the moving of a shadow. A crawly feeling went over my body. At the same time, even in the midst of our imminent danger, I suddenly understood and realized the fantastic deviltry of Jesu Diabolo.
He had spread his lure all about the Brazil tree, which he knew was our photographic field. ”

“ But to a negro idleness is an increasing balm; it is a stretching of his legs in the sunshine, a cat-like purring of his nerves; while his thoughts spread here and there in inconsequences, like water without a channel, making little humorous eddies, winding this way and that into oddities and fantasies without ever feeling that constraint of sequence which continually operates in a white brain. ”

“ It was as if the river were in some mysterious travail.
The passage of the army flushed white egrets from along the bank, and once six flamingos arose and winged slowly away, making a crimson line against the sky. Along the sand-bars huge caymans slept in an ecstasy of heat. Their long whitish bellies fitted over stones and the curves in the sand with a kind of disgusting flexibility.
Some time later the line of march veered away from the river and lost itself in the endless, almost imperceptible undulations of the llanos. ”

“ Unless a person actually witness a murder, he cannot imagine the shock and dreadfulness of seeing one man shot down, writhe, gasp, grow pale and cease struggling. To picture ten men murdered simply stuns the mind. An effort to realize hundreds, thousands, millions of men mangled, wounded, bayoneted, crushed, blown to atoms by shells and mine—all this becomes vague, formless, a dim, dreadful picture that is as unreal as a dream, or history.
"What caused it?" asked Madden in a strained tone.
"I don't know," whispered the mate huskily. ”

“ Always at the end of the plaza stood a charming old Spanish church, looking centuries old, with its stuccoed front, its solid brick campanile pierced by three apertures in which, silhouetted against the sky, hung the bells. In each village the church was the focus of life. And the only sign of animation here was the ringing of the carillon for the different offices. The bell-ringings occurred endlessly, and were quite different from the tolling which Strawbridge was accustomed to hear in North America. The priests rang their bells with the clangor of a fire-alarm. ”

“ The old gentleman thumped the arm of his chair with a translucent palm. "Yes, sir, negro slavery was God's great lesson to the South in altruism and loving-kindness, sir! My boy, I do believe with all my heart that the institution of slavery was placed here in God's country to rear up giants of political leadership, that our nation might weather the revolutions of the world. Oh, the Yankees are necessary! I know that!" The old Captain held up a palm at Peter as if repressing an imminent retort. "I know the Yankees are the Marthas of the nation. ”

“ The nerves of the crew frayed out in the heat. By night they slept amid tantalizing dreams of food; by day they sprawled in dreary silences under awnings which held heat like sweat boxes. The high metal walls of the dock caught the sun's rays and threw out a furnace heat. The men endured it in net undershirts clinging to dripping bodies; their eyes ached against the glare, their stomachs rebelled, their brains sickened with monotony and despair.
The men developed little personal traits that exasperated their mates unreasonably. ”

“ She breathed heavily, and moved restlessly in the old four-poster. As Peter stood up he saw that the patched quilts were all askew over her shapeless bulk. Evidently, she had not been resting well.
Peter's conscience smote him again for worrying his mother with his courtship of Cissie, yet what could he do? If he had wooed any other girl in the world, she would have been equally jealous and grieved. It was inevitable that she should be disappointed and bitter; it was bound up in the very part and parcel of her sacrifice. A great sadness came over Peter. ”

“ As the motor whirled cityward, the bull-fighter sat with both hands gripping the front seat, staring intently as the wedding music of the peons came to them, with its long-drawn, melancholy burden.
Strawbridge leaned back, listening and looking. He was still thinking about the play in New York and regretting the fact that in real life one never saw any such dramatic openings. In real life it was always just work, work, work—going after an order, or collecting a bill—never any drama or romance, just dull, prosy, commonplace business ... ”

“ Every stroke they made created bright phosphorescent rings in the lifeless sea. Their blades drove through the water in a flame. The navvies cried out at this phenomenon. A sufficient disturbance of the sea beyond the schooner would almost explain the strange light dancing through the rigging. But what made that disturbance?
Reflections of the shining spars made a wavering path over the weed-strewn water, and up this path the dinghy moved amid its own flashing fires. It formed a queer spectacle, a glowworm creeping up on a bonfire. ”

“ As Peter stood staring up the Ohio River, it occurred to him that perhaps, in some queer way, the morals of black folk were not the morals of white folk; perhaps the laws that bound one race were not the laws that bound the other. It might be that white anathemas were black blessings. Peter thought along this line peacefully for several minutes.
And finally he concluded that, after all, morals and conventions, right and wrong, are merely those precepts that a race have practised and found good in its evolution. Morals are the training rules that keep a people fit. ”

“ Seen from this perspective, the fact that the dictator had abandoned Dolores, who did not love him, for peon girls who did, no longer appeared the high crime which the American had held most harshly against him. It occurred to Strawbridge that there must have been sides to the general which he had missed, or but dimly apprehended.
The drummer's thoughts swung away from the general, to the long line of dictators who had arisen and oppressed Rio Negro. Each tyrant no sooner gained power than immediately he fell into some madness peculiar to himself. ”

“ The enormous dock leaped and shivered under his feet. Huge waves roared by, of such vastness that Madden could hear their crests crashing and thundering high above the level of the bridge. These moving mountains shook tons of black water into dim, ghostlike spray, and sent it hissing down into cavernous troughs. The weight of the wind-swept spume flashing out of darkness through the binnacle light almost took the boy off his feet. It pounded his oilskin, stung his face. The enormous iron dock groaned and clanged under the mad bastinado. ”

“ Peter knew that Jim Pink, who now made a sorry figure in their rear, would one day give a buffoon's mimicry of this his walk to death. He thought of Tump, who would have to serve a year or two in the Nashville Penitentiary, for the murder of negroes is seldom severely punished. He thought of Cissie. He was being murdered because Cissie desired him.
And then Peter remembered the single bit of wisdom that his whole life had taught him. It was this: no people can become civilized until the woman has the power of choice among the males that sue for her hand. ”

“ There will come a time, Señor Strawbridge, when our beloved valley will be decked with great and smiling cities; when men and women will live with no tyrant to make them afraid; then, carved in letters of gold in the pantheon of that happy people, will shine the name of Tomas Strawbridge, hero of San Geronimo!"
The President was moved. His eyes were misty as he drew from his pocket and pinned on the drummer's lapel a little gold decoration pendent from a rainbow-colored ribbon. It was the Order of the Libertador, for heroic action. ”

“ The wind snatched at the clothes and bandages of the intent men. Masses of seaweed swept like gray blurs down the sheer of the tug's wake. Just beneath them the propeller rushed with watery thunder.
"Yonder she rises!" cried one of the watchers, pointing at two wireless masts that rose like the fins of a racing shark above the green surface of the Sargasso.
"Yonder she rises!" repeated a voice amidship, and more faintly still came the repetition from the bridge, "Yonder she rises—hard a-port!"
A sudden shift of the rudder shook the Vulcan from peak to keelson. ”

“ Indeed, no white Southerner knows his own village so minutely as does any member of its colored population. The colored villagers see the whites off their guard and just as they are, and that is an attitude in which no one looks his best. The negroes might be called the black recording angels of the South. If what they know should be shouted aloud in any Southern town, its social life would disintegrate. Yet it is a strange fact that gossip seldom penetrates from the one race to the other.
So Peter Siner sat in the Jim Crow car musing over half a dozen villagers in Hooker's Bend. ”

“ What human agency would operate so mysteriously in this hot, stagnant sea? Why should any group of men entrap the helpless crew of the Vulcan with such a display of mystery and power? It was useless. It was ridiculous. It was shooting a mosquito with a field gun.
All his thoughts ended in utter absurdity. He felt that he had run up against some vast power. The schooner Minnie B, the tug Vulcan, were but trifling units in the enigma of this deserted, weed-clogged sea. It must be some power whose operations were ocean-wide. ”

“ The minstrel had succeeded in making Peter's walk very uncomfortable, as somehow he always did. Peter went on thinking about the matter. If Jim Pink knew of Cissie's visit, all Niggertown knew it. No woman's reputation, nobody's shame or misery or even life, would stand between Jim Pink and what he considered a joke. The buffoon was the crudest thing in this world—a man who thought himself a wit.
Peter could imagine all the endless tweaks to Cissie's pride Niggertown would give the octoroon. She had asked Peter to marry her and had been refused. ”

“ Those who didn't speak aloud their heart's desires thought them. Fortune had shown her golden form to these crude men for a fleeting instant, and dreams, long hidden in their hearts, suddenly leaped to life. They were poor dreams, selfish dreams, foolish dreams, but for the moment they poised, like liberated fairies, for a flight to the land where dreams come true.
"We sail in the morning," explained Madden, "for a South American port. Is there anyone in this crew who knows anything about running a marine engine?" ”

“ Cissie had served sandwiches and coffee on a little table in the arbor, and then had kept Peter hours afterward. Around him still hung the glamour of Cissie's little supper. He could still see her rounded elbows that bent softly backward when she extended an arm, and the glimpses of her bosom when she leaned to hand him cream or sugar. She had accomplished the whole supper in the white manner, with all poise and daintiness. In fact, no one is more exquisitely polite than an octoroon woman when she desires to be polite, when she elevates the subserviency of her race into graciousness. ”

“ He recalled the words of the navvy on the London dock, "Everything is unreasonable at sea." Certainly that was true of the vast stewing labyrinth of the Sargasso. He had lived abnormally so long that it seemed strange to him now to think that there were comfortable, well-ordered places on the face of the earth. Just as one cannot imagine snow and ice in the depth of summer, so Madden could not imagine the simple comforts of life. It seemed to him the whole world shriveled under a furnace heat. ”

“ As Peter and his mother came over the brow of the river bank, they saw a crowd collecting at the other end of the street. The main street of Hooker's Bend is only a block long, and the two negroes could easily hear the loud laughter of men hurrying to the focus of interest and the blurry expostulations of negro voices. The laughter spread like a contagion. Merchants as far up as the river corner became infected, and moved toward the crowd, looking back over their shoulders at every tenth or twelfth step to see that no one entered their doors. ”

“ The Englishman was a beautiful taper from his great shoulders to his small aristocratic feet. His muscles were long, graceful and knitted across his arms, chest, and stomach like lace leather. He was built for swift enduring action and could only have sprung from a race of men who had spent their lives in play and luxury.
Farnol Greer, on the other hand, was as heavily moulded as a bulldog. His arms were short and blocky; his shoulders welted with brawn; his chest was two hairy hills, like a gorilla's, while across his stomach muscles lay ridged like ropes. ”

“ Up and down its street flows the slow negro life of the village. Here children of all colors from black to cream fight and play; deep-chested negresses loiter to and fro, some on errands to the white section of the village on the other side of the hill, where they go to scrub or cook or wash or iron. Others go down to the public well with a bucket in each hand and one balanced on the head. ”

“ Hogan, Deschaillon, and two navvies caught him by the legs and arms. Madden lifted the bleeding head from which the blood still ran in a steady trickle. The crowd gave back and the five men with their grewsome burden passed through the galley's door into the dark passage.
Just then a sudden vibration went through the whole ship, as if the Vulcan had been struck by some enormous force. The men carrying Smith staggered. There burst out a blare of confusion, amazed cries, shouts of terror. There was a stampede in the narrow passage. Flying men bumped into the bearers of the sick man. ”

“ The black audience clustered around Jim Pink in his pinstripe trousers and blue-serge coat. They exhibited not the least curiosity as to the mechanics of the tricks, but asked for more and still more, with the naïve delight of children in the mysterious.
Peter Siner walked down the street with his Messianic impulse strong upon him. He was in that stage of feeling toward his people where a man's emotions take the color of religion. Now, as he approached the crowd of negroes, he wondered what he could say, how he could transfer to them the ideas and the emotion that lifted up his own heart. ”

“ CARADOC SHOWS HIS METTLE
Heat, that grew more terrific as the dock drifted southward; hunger, that gnawed like rats at the empty stomachs of the crew; withering heat, aching hunger, growing despair—that was life on the floating dock.
Of all the crew only Gaskin remained in good condition. It would have required more than a hero to cook food and go hungry, but the crew made no such allowances. They berated the dignified Gaskin, they eyed each other's scant portions jealously. Their quarrels over food at last forced Madden to weigh each man's allowance to the fraction of an ounce. ”

“ Actions never grow out of theories; theories grow out of actions. A theory is a looking- glass that reflects the past and makes it look like the future, but the glass really hides the future, and when humanity comes to a turn in its course, there is always a smash-up, and a blind groping for the lost path.
Now, in regard to Cissie Dildine, Peter was not precisely afraid of Tump Pack, but he could not clear his mind of the fact that Tump had been presented with a medal by the Congress of the United States for killing four men. ”

“ He wondered whether or not Galton really knew anything of marine engines? If the dock would be discovered by a passing ship? If the tug's crew had really gone demented and leaped overboard? If there were any connection between the fate of the Minnie B and the Vulcan?
It seemed to Madden that he had been in the heat and brilliant garishness of the Sargasso for centuries. He wondered if the men would become so starved that they would draw lots to see who should be killed and eaten. ”

“ He would show black men that to hate the whites, constantly to suspect, constantly to pilfer from them, only riveted heavier shackles on their limbs.
It was all so clear and so simple! The white South must humanize the black not for the sake of the negro, but for the sake of itself. No one could resist logic so fundamental.
Peter's heart sang with the solemn joy of a man who had found his work. All through his youth he had felt blind yearnings and gropings for he knew not what. ”

“ The submarine stood well out of water and skimmed along in the pink gleam like a long, slender missile. Its flat deck, wireless masts and conning tower stood etched in black against the morning light. She was consuming a fairish stretch of open water at a high speed.
"She's game for a long chase," observed Hogan, gently shifting a wounded arm in its sling.
Leonard Madden replied without removing his eyes from the rushing boat, "She has to be. All of Germany's naval plans depend on her destroying us." ”

“ Every man in the crew seized axe, saw, anything, and rushed forward in a fury of impatience, hacking, chopping, sawing, working through the wreckage and cutting the ropes with jackknives, in an effort to clear the tug of debris. After an intolerable while, the last ratlines snapped like pistol shots, the whizzing end of a rope struck a sailor and laid him out as if clubbed, then the foremast fell away and the Vulcan rushed forward again.
"Look ahead, Madden!" shouted Caradoc in the uproar. "We've got to run among thicker fields than these!" ”