# McClure's Magazine/Volume 50/Number 11/'Poor Black Sheep

From the McClure's Magazine, Sept 1918, pp. 19–20, 37, 38, 40, 41. Accompanying illustration may be omitted.
Illustration: He faced her suddenly. “What would you say if I told you I was a thief?”
“Poor Black Sheep!”
There's a Big Scrap On and a Fighting Chance for All!
by Harold MacGrath
Illustrations by Fanny Munsell
ON the Bluff overlooking Mississippi Harbor, Yokohama, stood a man gazing seaward. It was four o'clock in the afternoon. An April squall was ruffling the streaked waters of the bay, and the sky was cold and yellow. He was a forlorn figure of a man. His suit, a blue serge, shiny at the elbows, purple across the shoulders and frayed at the cuffs and heels, hung dejectedly upon his gaunt form, except at moments when the wind whipped it against his legs and arms. There was rather a pitiful expression of jauntiness in the Norfolk pattern of the coat, an experimental apology to the world at large for the low estate into which it had fallen. The man's hat was a gray fedora, sweat-stained and broken fore and aft the center crease. His shoes were canvas with rubber soles; and they were gray, too, but with dirt, coal dust and street dust, ground into the cotton fabric.
His cheeks were hollow and his blue eyes revolved in caverns. His chin bristled with a bronze stubble, and this added to the general raggedness of his appearance. He had that morning left a hospital.
He was staring at a ship which was weighing anchor. From her stern a flag fluttered ruddily and cheerily his own. It was to see this flag that the man, weak from long illness, had climbed the Bluff, to see it homeward-bound, to watch it until it was a pink speck in the distance. He had done this many times in the past. A fire filled his eyes; and the tears which rose up and overflowed in no wise dimmed that fire. Old Glory! Never again should any man laugh at it, insult it, trample it. The flag of idealists, the brave and the magnanimous! America! War—for humanity, for right as against might! The man rubbed his eyes.
Oh, the infinite yearning to be aboard that ship, homeward-bound!
For three long bitter years he had striven to reach the goal, a ship, only to be tripped and flung back each time by a craving which he called The Thing, flung back a little lower each time, a little less fine in the grain.
The water boiled white at the stern of the ship. She swung in a half-circle, and the flag stood out clearly. The watcher took off his hat, squared his shoulders and intoned,
“Breathes there a man with soul so dead
Who never to himself hath said:
This is my own, my native land!”
War! And he had heard of it only that morning! He stood uncovered until the bit of pink reached the vanishing point, then he put on his hat and walked away.
Drink and pneumonia. Some men fight instinctively to live, and still die. He hadn't fought, and yet here he was, out in the world again. It had seemed to him that morning that death had no interest in human beings nobody cared for. But now every drop of blood in his body cried out to live. He had a fine unselfish thing to do; to make his body strong and straight, and then to say, “Here I am, take me!” He knew that he was going to do it.
He plodded on. By and by he found himself outside the grilled court of the Grand Hotel. He saw a newspaper in the gutter and eagerly picked it up. It was an English newspaper, printed in Hongkong, dated April tenth, six days old. He brushed the dirt from it and put it into a pocket. He would read it that night.
Two rickshaws rolled up to the curb. One contained a white-haired woman with a face serenely beautiful and hauntingly sad. Someone's mother, thought the man by the grill. Then his glance strayed to the passenger in the second rickshaw. His intake was so sharp that it nicked the sore spot in his lungs. It was as if the veil had suddenly been lifted and for the first time permitted him to see the depth of the pit toward which he had been drifting. Once, thousands of years ago, he had known young women like yonder one.
That the two were mother and daughter was made evident a moment later. The elder stepped down from her rickshaw and walked back.
“Want me to carry some of the bundles, Jeanie?”
“I can carry them, Mumsy.”
The daughter was dressed in heavy white flannel. She wore over this a white woolen sweater with a full collar. On one of the lapels was a flag-pin. In her belt was a small bouquet of white blossoms. From where he stood the outcast could not tell what they were.
The girl stepped out of the rickshaw lightly, turned and gathered up the bundles; but in turning away from the vehicle, she stumbled slightly, and the bundles toppled and went rolling about on the sidewalk.
THE man sprang forward and began picking them up. The stooping caused things to whirl for a moment. When he finally retrieved the last bundle and stood up, he saw the girl as through a fog.
“Thank you!”
Her eyes appraised him swiftly. She saw the indelible marks of recent illness, the stubble, the hollow eyes, the shabby clothes; and she started to open her purse.
“No, Miss!”
Something in his voice stirred her queerly. It was less a refusal of a gratuity than a protest against the supposition that he would accept one.
“I beg your pardon! Here, Mumsy!” The girl took the bundles and laughingly piled them up in her mother's arms. Then she plucked the flag-pin from the lapel of her sweater and the flowers from her belt. “They are clover blossoms,” she said with a friendly smile. “I found them in a hothouse on the Bluff. Aren't they wonderful! The flag is my country's.”
As the outcast took the blossoms in his hand, the actual world vanished. He saw meadows white with clover blossoms and sensed the perfume blowing down to the river's brim where a happy barefoot boy fished through the summer afternoon. His throat filled.
The girl noted with quickening sympathy the dank hair on his forehead. The poor thing! She smiled again; then she and her mother passed on into the hotel.
The outcast made no move. He had no eye for anything but the little metal flag and the bouquet of clover blossoms. The flag of his country and the breath of her meadows! A little kindness, a smiling kindness, when in all his life he most needed it. Even then he knew that he was never going to forget this girl.
At length, blinking desperately, he walked away, up Water Street, across town, into a quarter he had once investigated with a tourist's curiosity. It was growing dark when he stopped before a sign which informed passers-by that Tom Wu was ready to make clothes at half the price of his Water Street competitors. The man who had wrested from the muck of circumstance that day a high resolve opened the door and entered.
A Chinaman with an oblique cast to one eye looked up from his cutting table. He at once assumed an attitude which was meant to be truculent, but was only comic.
“Anybody got my room, Tom?” asked the visitor.
“No. Nobody lents looms. Nobody buys clothes. Clistians fight-fight; boom-boom! All gone to hellee!”
“I've been sick in a hospital, Tom. I'll pay you ten yen on account, if you'll let me have my trunk and room back. I'll square up in a few days. I can always get work as a clerk.”
The Chinaman seemed to be debating. “All light. Lemme see cash.”
The visitor laid down ten yen, which was half his store. “Thank you, Tom. You're a white man. I knew I could come to you.”
The Chinaman picked up his shears, and the prodigal lodger passed through the side door into the hallway and mounted the stairs to the third floor. The air was thick with the odor of joss-sticks. He hesitated before the familiar door, balancing the key on his palm. After all, what was it to be alone? Wasn't he always alone, even in crowds? He unlocked the door, and pushed it open.
There is an odor to empty rooms, a sepulchral odor; and the tenant sensed it as he groped his way toward the single window. Dimly he could see a cot, a trunk, a table and a chair, all crowded into one corner. He himself had arranged them thus, weeks before, in a vain attempt to hold in check the dismal loneliness of the room.
On a deal table stood a gin bottle with a candle stuck in the neck. He struck a match and fired the wick, Slowly the shadows retreated, but not far.
The lodger laid the newspaper, the flag-pin and the clover blossoms on the table, then went over to the trunk. There was every indication that the owner had sought to lose his identity. And yet there was a curious inconsistency. Below one of the handles was a little brass plate. While the lettering on this had been scraped by a penknife, a close scrutiny revealed the name and address: Arthur Collingwood, New York.
He had started out grimly and resolutely to complete the job, but something had held him back. Hope? Hope for what? He could not analyze this motiveless impulse any more than he could explain the reason for carrying around the contents of that trunk. Perhaps it was all due to a vague remembrance of a bit of writing he had once seen in a hotel Bible. “No man goes to hell directly. There are little obstacles in the path that serve to give him pause, a chance to turn about and fight back. So long as a man clings to some trifling material relic of his past, he is not wholly lost.”
Collingwood knelt, threw back the lid and stared down at the contents of the trunk. A white shirt, a white collar, a pair of dancing-pumps; and he had hung onto these trifles as a man hangs onto a life-rope. What silly reasoning had urged him to keep these futile bits of former grandeur, when many a time he could have sold them and dined? He let the trunk-lid fall.
“I will!” he burst cut. His voice sounded like thunder. The sleeping echoes, for ages undisturbed in that lonely room, awoke, surprised and resentful, for they flung back the challenge hollowly. “I will!” said Collingwood again, bringing his fist down upon the trunk fiercely. Then he bowed his head on his arms and sobbed: “I will, I will, I will!”
By and by he got upon his feet, heavily. He drew the chair up to the table and contemplated the flag-pin and the clover. America! He was going to take this half-wrecked body and make it straight and strong again, then he was going to give it.
“All right, old girl,” he whispered; “I'm coming. God alone knows how I'm going to do it, but I'm coming. Old Glory! I haven't anything left but my body, but I'll give you that!”
Boyishly he snatched up the clover and breathed the perfume. It was as if he were inhaling a tonic cleanliness. “Aren't they wonderful!” the girl had said. A little act of kindness when he had most needed it.
Suddenly he became conscious of The Thing.
“No!” he said, rising and swinging back the chair, as if to turn and face an actual Presence.
“Who cares? demanded The Thing. It was an old chantey, and Collingwood had heard it for eight years, with more or less regularity. “Who cares?”
“No, by God!” It was a whisper.
The Thing, realizing that this was to be nothing like those half-hearted scrimmages which had always ended in victory, loosed its legions of specious argument.
“A bit of whisky for the kindly kick in it; a little half-hour of cheerfulness. Think of the weeks of misery in that hospital! Think of the job that is in front of you! Just one more: something for old time's sake. Aren't you unhappy? Who cares, anyhow?”
Collingwood, desperately pressed, went over to the window. The sky was now filled with sparkling stars. Stars and clover blossoms, clean things. He looked up at the stars, then down at the clover which he held in his hand. As his glance dropped, there entered his eye obliquely the picture of an octagonal lamp. It hung against the wall across the street, and in dingy lettering one might read, “Hongkong Hotel-By Charlie.”, How often had he staggered out of there, up the stairs to this room whose echoes after all were broken self-promises?
“No!”
Quite calmly he put the clover into an inner pocket and pinned the flag to the lapel of his coat. He would make his body sound and give it to his country. He put on his hat, blew out the candle, and went out into the street. Whispering and urging and cajoling, The Thing fought the Idea all the way to the tables in the rear of the Hongkong Hotel.
Collingwood sat down at a table. He could feel the sweat across his shoulders. A frowsy waiter whose face was unfamiliar shuffled over. Waiters in Charlie's were migratory birds.
“A cup of coffee and a beef sandwich.” Collingwood did not recognize his voice. He felt an astonishing impulse to look around to see whence the sound had come.
“No!” Collingwood was not conscious that he spoke aloud. He drove his thoughts toward the flag, toward the girl. The Thing withdrew; but Collingwood was not to be fooled. It was only a respite. It would return again and again, and yet again.
He ate the sandwich and drank the coffee. They he got up. The ague was gone. He was going out of this sordid hole forever. He was through. But he stopped at the bar for a moment. He couldn't go away without saying a word to Mary, the barmaid. Many times she had been kind to him, lending him small sums.
“Hello, Mary!” he said.
Illustration: “Good-bye, soldier,” she added, with a brave smile. “Take care of yourself ... and come safely back”
The barmaid looked up from her spigots. Once upon a time she had been handsome. There was a ghostly hint of it in the contour of the face, the blue eyes and the curved lips. There was nothing bold or hard about the face, nothing brutalized. She was English.
“You? I thought you'd croaked!” She wiped a red hand on her apron and thrust it across the bar. “When they carried you out, you was fair done. I thought you'd croaked. Well,” wearily, “what's it to be to-night?” She had seen them come back so often!
“Never again, Mary.”
“You mean it?”
“Yes. I'm going home.”
“How?” Cynically.
“I don't know, but I'm going, Mary.”
“Have you got a home?”
“Yes, It's three thousand miles from the front door to the back door, with the sky for the roof.”
“Going to fight?”
“That's the ticket.”
“They won't take you; you're not fit.”
“But I'm going to be.”
“What brought you here, anyhow? You don't belong to this scum.”
“I was a fool, Mary; and I brought myself here. I haven't any alibi.”
Collingwood smiled, and Mary eyed him somberly. Neither knew anything of the other's past, though their acquaintance had ranged through three years. She was quite as taciturn in her way as he was in his.
“Good-bye, then; and stick it out.” She turned to her spigots because she did not want him to see the sparkle in her eyes. The only white man who had been decent to her in years! And he was never coming back.
Collingwood returned to his room, with only one thought: he had desperately wanted drink and hadn't taken it. Had he ever really said “No!” honestly, before?
To-morrow he would go to the American consul and ask for help. That would test this new-found pride. Months ago he had borrowed a hundred dollars from the consul to pay for passage home. True, he had left security in the shape of a ring, once his mother's. But he hadn't gone home. Instead, he had gone on a wild carouse that had landed him in Singapore. He had worked his way back to Japan via the stoke-hole. Since that day he had given the consulate a wide berth. But on the morrow he would present himself to the consul, tell the truth, and ask for assistance. Whatever his metal was composed of, it had first to go through the crucible of humiliation.
He blew out the candle and crept under the ragged coverlet. For an hour he stared at the star-spangled window. He had wanted a drink and hadn't taken it. A miracle had happened,
FROM eight-thirty until ten Collingwood sat in the consulate anteroom, awaiting his turn. Ship officers, tourists, they flowed in and out. The consul was a busy man these days. In this hour and a half Collingwood's shame dwindled and vanished utterly. He was calm and resolute when finally the clerk summoned him.
“Mr. Randolph.”
Collingwood answered to this name in Yokohama. He stepped into the private office. The consul was writing. When he had finished his letter and signed it, he looked up.
“So it's you, Mr. Randolph?” he said ironically, “I suppose you've been all the way to America and back since I last saw you.”
“I spent that money on a carouse,” replied Collingwood simply. “I wound up in Singapore.”
“You're frank about it, anyhow. Well, I can do nothing more for you. The ring you left as security isn't worth a hundred dollars. But for the curious wording of your note, I shouldn't have bothered to see you at all. I staked a lot on you that day, and you didn't make good.”
“No, I didn't. You'll think it odd, but it was pride that brought me here this morning.”
“Pride?”
“Pride in the knowledge that I'm going to make good. I haven't come to beg. I want to go home. It's my chance to do a decent thing—perhaps to die decently. I'll work my way back. I don't care what the job is.
“You mean you want to go home to enlist?”
“Yes. I want the feeling that I'm giving myself. It's my chance. I've just come out of the hospital, and I'm physically weak. I want work that'll build me up. I'm naturally strong. I'm only thirty-two. Perhaps it is the only chance I shall ever have again. Will you help me?”
The consul tapped his desk with his pen.
“What brought you here, anyhow?”
Collingwood looked down at his canvas shoes. Presently he met the consul's searching eye. “Morally I am a thief, but not legally. I am not in any way amenable to civil laws. I took what I thought belonged to me. More than that, I'm not ready to disclose. The only chance I may have! I hate to beg. It chokes me. But I'll beg.”
“Very well. Ill buy your ticket and give you twenty-five dollars. I don't suppose your name is Randolph; but no matter. Come in Friday.”
“You don't understand me,” said Collingwood. “I don't want a free ride. I want work, hard work, something to give me back my strength. As I stand now, there isn't a recruiting station in the world that would accept me.”
“On that basis I'll give you all the help I can.”
“Captain Chadwick!” announced the clerk, breathlessly.
“Show him in.”
The sea captain was red, vigorous and breezy. “War!” he boomed. “By the Lord Harry, I'm a happy man! I've got a piece of real bunting to break out on the breeze. Eh, man? A flag that nobody'll ever sneer at again. I sha'n't sleep o' nights thinking of it. Where's those bills and invoices?”
“Ready for you, Captain. I say, here's a man who wants to work his way back to the States. Wants to get in shape to enlist.”
“That's the stuff! Come aboard the Shandon this afternoon. I'll help any man back on that proposition. Stoke-hole?”
“I'll take it,” said Collingwood without hesitance.
“Go get your dunnage. Twenty dollars at the dock in San Francisco.”
Collingwood then did a courageous thing. He knew before he spoke that these two men, out of their wide experience, would look with cynical distrust upon his request.
“Can you advance me that twenty?”
The sailor laughed. “I'd never see you again. If you don't like the terms, hunt for another job.”
“What do you want the twenty for?” asked the consul, kindly.
“I owe a Chinaman that money. His name is Tom Wu. He has been a white man to me, and I can't go away in his debt. It's the only debt I've got.”
The consul stroked his chin.
“That's right!” jeered the sailor. “Think it over, and give him the money. But kiss it good-bye, first.”
“Young man,” said the consul gravely, “I'm going to risk one more gamble on you. Here's your twenty and here's your ring. I'm trusting you against my natural inclination, in spite of my wide experience with your kind. But I look upon it as a patriotic duty to ship you home. Here's your chance. Pay your debt to the Chinaman. I know him. And go aboard the Shandon this afternoon. I sha'n't be able to help you again.”
“And look here, my hearty,” added the Captain, who was only cynical, not unkind; “come aboard with your dunnage this afternoon, and I'll add five to that twenty.”
“Thank you both. This kind of bucks me up. I'll pay it all back—if I come through.”
“You can pay me rather cheaply,” said the consul. “On the day you don Uncle Sam's uniform, have a tintype struck off and mail it to me. Good morning, and good luck.”
When Collingwood was gone, the sailor grinned and observed: “This is no job for you. You ought to be private secretary to a philanthropist.”
“By George!” exclaimed the consul, half starting from his chair.
“What's the row?”
“I promised to inquire of every ne'er-do-well if he happened to know a chap named Collingwood!”
THERE must be some celestial force in the human will, for it was not mere physical effort that carried Collingwood through his first watches in the stoke-hole. He was not a physical wreck, but he was a very weak man. From the bunkers to the furnaces and back to the bunkers, he panted and sweated, bringing up in his mind pictures which served (when his grinding teeth failed him) to lock his knees: meadows powdered with clover, a bit of bunting in the breeze, and the smiling face of a lovely girl.
They were crowding on all the steam the boilers would hold, for there were rumors of raiders and submarines in the Pacific; and Captain Chadwick purposed to make Honolulu on full speed
The volcanic flashes from the furnaces gave vivid pictures of naked and half-naked men. Yellow men and brown men and white men swarmed hither and thither and yon. The roar of the furnaces and ventilators, the never-ending slither of the coal, the shouts, the dust, the thud-thud of the engines, the greasy sheet-iron flooring, the insupportable heat—through it all Collingwood plodded on He was lifting himself by his boot-straps. There was one ceaseless thought: to make his body straight and strong, and then to give it to his country.
Twenty trips an hour, four hours to the watch: eight hundred genuflections toward that hellish black heap. He tottered, he slipped his loads. His heart shook his body, shook it as the beating engines shook the ship. But he dug his coal and rolled his barrow, counting, counting
At the end of the second hour of this first watch he stumbled and fell again. This time he did not get up. He had fainted. A Chinaman calmly seized a bucket of tepid sea-water and sluiced the heaving torso.
“I am dying!” whispered Collingwood
The Chinaman caught him by the shoulders and heaved him to his feet. After a glance into the black and ghastly face, the Oriental gave the sick man a shove toward the ladder
“Top-side!” he ordered; and picked up the barrow. There was no sentimentality behind this seemingly compassionate act. Sick men were in the way here.
Dimly Collingwood understood. He staggered toward the steel ladder and swayed perilously as he climbed it. Unmindful of his drenched condition, he plunged into his bunk and lay there for ten straight hours.
His watches were from noon until four and from midnight until four. At midnight he was hauled unceremoniously from his bunk. He drank his soup and went down into the hole again. He was like a man walking in his sleep. During this watch he fell twice, and twice someone gave him a bucket. He had muttered “I will” so long and incessantly that it became automatic. If anyone spoke to him he answered, “I will!”
For four days the idea obsessed him that he was living in a nightmare; but after the eighth watch the food began to take hold and build. He had spoken truly that he was naturally strong; and he also had the resilience of youth, young manhood. But for all that it was will alone that had carried him into the fifth day.
He had learned to listen for the concerted falling of the slice-bars—the end of the watch. He tipped his barrow and followed the men to the hose. The smack of the stream against the skin was like no tonic he had ever known—cold sea-water. He had been going up on deck every afternoon, but without any real idea of the fact. It was only on the fifth day that he realized he was under the blue sky and the sunshine.
HE flung himself on the hatch and slept with the mild breeze ruffling his hair. At six someone yelled “Chow!” in his ear. He was still bone-and-muscle tired, but he was hungry; and this unexpected zest for food was the turning point. He saw sanely. The little tricks he had picked up in a former experience of this order came back, serving to lighten the labor. He saw human beings in the glare; they ceased to be shapes out of hell. The thud-thud of the engines now became friendly; it talked; it said, “Going home! Going home!”
After this, he was one of the first to gain the deck. He snoozed on the hatch or lolled against the rail, brooding. He had in his pocket a clipping from the newspaper he had picked up out of the gutter. Each day he read it. The crispness had departed; the slip of paper had become limp and rag-like; still he treasured it.
Then came the last temptation. He was leaning against the rail, reading the newspaper clipping, when someone nudged him.
“Have a nip, ol' scout?” The speaker was one of Collingwood's barrow mates.
The sight of that bottle with its amber fluid awoke The Thing. That irresistible urging, that calamitous flash of desire, swept over Collingwood, and his hand went out, only to pause in mid-air. He had never taken his liquor slowly, with relish. He had taken it in gulps, furious gulps, like a blind man striking in the dark. The supreme inconsistency of his attitude lay in the fact that if he contemplated the poison he might not touch it! His hand, poised in the air, sank slowly. Over and beyond the man who was offering the bottle streamed a cheery banner. To make his body straight and strong, and then to give it to his country.
“No!” he said. He laid his head on his arms. If ever there had been a real call for alcohol it was now; if ever there had been a time when he knew he must not touch it, it was at this moment. “Take it away, my friend; in God's name, take the stuff away!”
“All right, ol' scout. I didn't know but you'd like one kick. Where we're headed for it's goin' t' be scarce. This is my last bottle, believe me. I'm going t' re-enlist. Will they take this ol' hulk? Well, say! Eight years in Mindanao, an' ain't got a bellyful yet! Gee, but this is goin' t' be th' real article. 'Hike, yuh son of a sea-cook, hike!' Sow-belly an' good coffee every day. Well, if yuh won't take a nip, yuh won't. I seen yuh handlin' coal when yuh didn't know it from tapioca. Stick it out. An' t' hell with Bill Kaiser! Th' poor ol' goat thinks we can't fight! Th' ol' flag, huh? Look at her! Mine, by God! I've been a booze-fighter, a waster, I ain't lived as clean as I might've; but when I was under her I never did nothin' that wasn't white an' square. So I'm goin' back.”
Collingwood raised his head. He could see that the man was half-seas over.
“You talk like a white man; act like one.”
“Whadda yuh mean by that?”
“Chuck it over now.”
“Chuck it over?”
“Yes. I did. If you can't do as much, your talk is hot air. Chuck it over.”
The ex-trooper scowled and turned the bottle around and around in his hands. Then he sailed it into the sea.
“I'm game for anything—once. But that was good whisky, ol' scout, an' I ain't expectin' yuh t' kiss me for givin' it th' boot. I ain't sayin' I'll never touch it again, neither. But yuh called me an' I had t' show yuh.”
“Will you shake hands?”
“Sure; but I don't aim t' kiss yuh.”
At the rail above stood two interested spectators, a young woman and the first officer.
“Did you see that?” she asked.
“Yes. On a trip like this we're not over-particular. All the white men in the hole are going back to enlist, so I understand. I wonder what the younger fellow said to make that Hercules toss his grog over? The black sheep! Each one of them has the vague idea that this war is going to be his chance of redemption. I've seen lots of black sheep in my time, but I never saw one show the white feather in a pinch. I begin to believe that they are a race apart, wild, untameable things; and we call them black sheep because nobody really understands them.”
“Nobody but God,” murmured the girl. “Thank you for talking like that. But that young man down there who had his head on the rail—I've been watching him every afternoon. He leans against the rail, takes something out of his pocket, it looks like a newspaper clipping, and reads it. Then he stares and stares at the horizon so long that it gets on my nerves. I wonder what it is he reads and rereads?”
“Would you like me to inquire?”
“Wouldn't it be impertinent?”
The sailor laughed. “That's a word the black sheep have forgotten. Better let me speak to him.”
“Then bring him up. I don't know what gives me the idea, but I believe I've seen him somewhere before.”
“I'll bring him up.”
She watched the encounter closely. She saw the derelict raise his eyes in her direction, start and stare intently, then nod. When he finally stood before her, she gasped in astonishment.
“Why, you're the man who picked up my bundles!”
“I was very glad to do it.”
The girl took quick note of these words. An ordinary man would have said: “Yes, Miss.” She also recognized the fact that if there was any embarrassment it was on her side.
“Perhaps my curiosity goes a little too far,” she said hastily, “but I could not help wondering what it was you read every afternoon, down there by the rail. Am I impertinent?”
“Not in the least. You are welcome to read it.” He gave her the clipping. As he did so his shoulders stiffened perceptibly and his chin rose a little. To bring himself back socially to this wonder-creature's level, was his thought. The girl who had intermittently occupied his reveries, not because she was lovely but because she had been kind!
The girl read aloud without consciousness of the act: “The day has come when America is privileged to spend her blood and might for the principles that gave her birth and happiness and the peace that she has treasured. God helping her, she can do no other.”
The first officer touched the visor of his cap. He too stiffened. There was a fire in the girl's eyes her sudden tears could not quench,
“You are going back to enlist?”
“If they will take me.”
“My name is Jeanie MacKenzie. Will you shake hands with me?”
Collingwood turned his hand over this way and that, speculatively. “It is not very clean.”
The girl laughed happily. The tears in her eyes twinkled for a moment, trembled and went back. “I shall be very proud to shake your hand.” With her small white hand in his grimy, calloused one, she added: “One's country; to love it and to die for it if need be!”
She returned the clipping. For a space he looked into her eyes. The intensity rather flustered her. But she understood. He was only photographing her in detail in order to remember her if ever they chanced to meet again.
Collingwood turned toward the ladder, but as he did so he saw another hand, deeply tanned—a sailor's.
“You're not going without shaking my hand, too, are you?” asked the first officer.
It was Collingwood's turn to be flustered He shook hands embarrassedly, turned again and went down into the waist. He kept on straight to the companion. He wanted to be alone with all this marvelous inner sunshine. The girl who had given him the clover blossoms!
“Poor black sheep!” said the girl. “Mr. Henderson, I shall always remember your pity. My mother and I—we know all about black sheep. And that is why we step out of our way to be kind to one when we meet him. God send them all home!”
AFTER that, Collingwood would come up at four and Miss MacKenzie would manoeuver to get around to the cross-rail a that hour. If he happened to look in he direction—which he always managed to do once—she nodded. But he never went near the ladder; and so far as he could see she never made any direct sign that she wanted to speak. From the corner of his eye he would watch her, while pretending to gaze out to sea. He saw that generally her book did not hold her interest. She, too, seemed to find something more satisfying in the rim of the sea.
He was not aware of the subtle transformation taking place in his heart. He thought he was only grateful and interested.
There are some love stories that really have no beginning and never come to any ending. These belong to a species of day dreams: something we want to come true but which we know never will. We write ourselves fairy stories and live through them in fancy. Collingwood made believe he had fallen in love with Miss MacKenzie. This was a habit. He was always building fairy stories around the pretty women he saw—at a distance. He was like the little child before the candy-shop window, saying, “I choose that!” He built all sorts of fantastic adventures in which he and Miss MacKenzie were comrades.
It was at Honolulu that he saw the mother and daughter again, coming up the gang-plank after a day's jaunt in town. The girl nodded brightly, and said something in an undertone to her mother. The latter turned quickly and stared at Collingwood, who was lounging against the main-deck rail. The stare confused him, for there was something so direct in it, something so searching, that he felt his soul bared for a moment. But almost instantly the light of expectancy died out of her face, leaving the serene mask. The two disappeared into the companion.
One afternoon, it was the third day out of Honolulu, Miss MacKenzie went down the ladder to the waist. She manoeuvered her way daintily among the sprawled bodies of sleeping Chinamen, Hindus, Japanese and white men. In her pongee and Panama, she looked like some fairy who had stumbled among the Forty Thieves. When she reached the man leaning against the rail, she lightly touched his arm.
Collingwood turned. There was on his face the rapt expression of a man who has been away on the wings of a pleasant dream. But when he saw who it was, a gasp escaped him. He had just been building one of his dreams about her, and here she was at his elbow! Tongue-tied, he could only stare at her.
“You mustn't be afraid of me,” she said, with a companion to the smile that had gone so warmly into his heart that first day. “I thought perhaps you'd like to talk with someone ... who was of your own people.”
“My own people!” he managed to repeat.
“Yes. Didn't you once know people like me?”
“Never quite like you, Miss MacKenzie.”
“You remember my name, then?”
“I shall never forget it. It was a fine thing you did that day. I needed a smile, only God knows how badly I needed it! And all the wealth of Golconda could not have purchased those clover blossoms.”
“I'm glad,” she said. “But certainly you knew young women like me.”
“I'm afraid not. Seeing me at this moment, they would have passed by quickly enough. And I shouldn't blame them.” His gaze went back to the sea. It was hard work to look at her and think clearly at the same time.
“But you are going back; you are going to start all over again?”
He did not answer.
“I don't want you to think that I am just curious,” she said. “I think what you are doing is fine. You are going back to fight for your country. Whatever the past was, you are on the way to balance the account.”
He faced her suddenly, an intolerable bitterness surging over him. “What would you say if I told you I was a thief?”
It shocked her. She felt an inclination to step back, but she conquered it.
“But you are sorry?”
“Sorry? I don't know that I am sorry for the deed. I may be only sorry because it brought me to this.”
“You are sorry for the deed. You couldn't help being sorry.”
“What makes you believe that?”
“You speak and act like a gentleman. You have breeding, and that comes from race. You made a mistake; but you are going back to make good. You are going to give your life to your country.”
“I have been a drunkard,” he said, doggedly. He would never lie to this girl.
“But you will never touch liquor again.”
“No. But how do you reason out these things? Why should I interest you?”
“I had a brother who made a mistake. He ran away from the wrath of a father whose justice was not qualified by mercy and understanding. On my father's deathbed he asked mother and me to search for Robert and bring him home. But Robert had already gone home. We found his grave in Singapore.”
“I'm sorry.”
“So, when I saw you staring moodily off to sea, I thought I would come down for a little talk with you—of books, old plays, pictures, music. There might be things we mutually liked.”
“Miss MacKenzie,” he said in a voice which was not very steady, “I did not know that God still peopled the world with women like you.”
“Nonsense!” she countered brightly “There are millions of us.”
“I am a thief—theoretically. What I took I thought belonged to me. I was over there eight years. I had good jobs, but I couldn't hold any of them long—drink. Nobody cared, so why should 1?”
“But you're going back,” she insisted. “I know. The first officer has told me. You took the hardest work you could find to build your body up. No matter what the past was, God will smile kindly on a man who resolves to do what you have resolved, Mr. Randolph.”
“That is not my name,” he said. How warm his weary heart was! “My real name is Arthur Collingwood.”
Collingwood. She was sure that she had heard it, but when and where escaped her at that moment.
Two more wonderful afternoons, and then bad weather set in; and Collingwood did not see her again until they landed in San Francisco. He met her at the customs barrier.
“Would you like to write to me?” she asked. “Here is my address. Do write. Tell me how you are getting along, what troop you join, and where. I'll write, too, if you wish. What you men in the trenches will need are cheery letters. Good-bye!” Her lips broke into a whimsical smile. “I should say au revoir, for we shall meet again.”
He watched her until she disappeared outside with her mother. Meet again? He doubted it.
Fairy stories! And yet there wasn't any bitterness in his heart, even though it ached dully. He knew that the bright loveliness of her face would always abide in his heart. Jeanie MacKenzie—and clover blossoms!
With a jerk of his head he dismissed the dream, and went off in search of the nearest recruiting station.
“Sorry,” said the examining surgeon, “but there's a spot on one of your lungs.”
“Any hope?”
“Barrels of it! Go down to Los Angeles and get a job on a farm. You'll come around all right. This war isn't going to be over to-morrow. Good luck!”
But Collingwood did not go to Los Angeles; he went east. He stole rides on freight, worked in the alfalfa fields, washed dishes in a cheap restaurant, hoed potatoes, and eventually landed in Omaha. Here he was again rejected, but again he was given hope. He fought on, patiently, doggedly; since there was hope he would never lay down the task he had appointed for himself.
THE offices of the Henry Collingwood Realty Company occupied the left of the twenty-story gray brick shaft in lower Broadway. The building was one of the company's many assets.
At four o'clock, on a September afternoon, a soldier with corporal's chevrons stepped out of the express elevator and stood still for a moment, looking around. A vigilant red-headed boy stepped forward.
“Business?”
“Yes.”
“Name?”
“Collingwood.”
The boy's eye, and a boy's eye is the most terribly appraising thing in existence, ran its glance over this soldier who said his name was Collingwood. He saw clear eyes, brown skin, the air of alertness which always is the hallmark of mental and physical vigor.
“Who juh wanta see?”
“My father.”
“Gee!” said the boy, in an awed kind of whisper. “He's in his office.”
“Thanks. I know the way.”
The last time he had entered this office! The last time he had blindly rushed out of it! He strode down the long aisle. He did not knock at the president's door. He opened it quietly, stepped inside, closed the door and stood straight and grim, with a truculent slant to his jaw.
By and by the man at the flat desk raised his head inquiringly. It was a grim, austere face he discovered to the stalwart young man by the door, the face of a vigorous, indomitable man. The thatch of snow-white hair only served to accentuate the eagle's beak, the hard firm mouth, the hard blue eyes. Slowly amazement softened these characteristics. The face resumed its hardness; and yet neither the eye nor the mouth was quite so hard as it had been.
FATHER and son stared into each other's eyes, with the searching glance of eagles. “I want you to let me speak first,” began the son. “For eight years I've thought of this moment, vaguely and indeterminately I came into this building with a storm in my heart, but it's gone. We are still flesh and blood. No doubt you have believed me dead all these years. In a sense I have been. I had to let you know. Soon I shall be in France. I may not return. But I had to let you know that there was a Collingwood over there. I could have written, but I wanted you to see me. When I took that money I wasn't quite sober. Some day it would be mine, so what mattered it if I took a little against the future? Suddenly and unexpectedly you had refused to settle my bills as usual. I was stunned. I had to have money. The debts I had contracted had to be paid. So I took that eleven thousand, squared up, and came to you and told you what I had done. If I had been a thief I shouldn't have come back, for I was an unhappy youth. But I came back. Coldly and without understanding, you told me to clear out. You had no son. You threatened me with prison if I remained in New York. You had no sen. Because I had your blood in me, I did not beg. I cleared out.”
The son took off his hat and tossed it on a chair. The face under his burning gaze remained unchanged.
“You never understood me. You never made the least effort to. After grandmother died I was the lonesomest little boy in all the world. I used to watch you and hunger, but you never took me on your knee. I didn't seem to exist. You bought toys and dumped them at my feet. I had to find out how they worked. Money, servants, but never a hand-touch. How I suffered! You paid my bills later, but you never taught me the value of money. You let me run free and unbridled; and then one day you put saddle and curb on at once. You can't tame a wild thing and break it all at once. And the funny thing is I loved you. You were a kind of god to me, and I was afraid to come near you.”
The shoulders of the man seated seemed to sink a little. There seemed to be more folds of flesh under the chin. But his eyes never wavered,
“I've come back to say good-bye. I had to let you know that there was something in me that could not be crushed. Something I had inherited from warrior ancestors—love of country. She called, and I knew I must answer. When a man can weep at the sight of his flag, there's hope. I wept. I knew then what I was going to do. I've gone through seven hells to get into this uniform. I willed it. I took a broken body and made it strong and straight. I took a blight that I had inherited from your side of the family and throttled it. I'm a man now, by God, bone and muscle, heart and mind!” Swiftly the fire left his eyes, the tenseness his body. He stretched out his hand impulsively. “Will you take it, sir, before I go?”
The father rose. His face was working now. There was a tremble to the lower lip no other man had seen. He crossed the room and stopped within a foot of the hand which was shaking now. But he did not take it. Instead, he brought his two hands down upon the khaki shoulders. He stared intently into the brown face which tilted backward slowly under this scrutiny.
“Hell!” was all he said, the hardness going out of his face and an expression replacing it such as the son had never seen there before. It was a fierce, possessive kindliness.
Collingwood junior felt his contracted heart let go and fill to bursting. And as his father's arms slid around his shoulders and tightened into a bear's hug, his own stole up and under. So they stood for a long time, with an occasional pat of the hand. When they drew apart their eyes were wet, but their lips were smiling.
“I was a pig-headed fool, my son. So you enlisted! A son of mine, fighting for his country; my blood and bone! I used to think there wasn't any God, but I guess there is, I guess there is. I didn't know what flesh and blood were until this war broke out and I knew that sooner or later we were going to be dragged into it. Then I began to see things. I learned a lot by that window there. How many times have I sat there looking down the Bay, crossing oceans, continents, in search of you! I ate my heart out. I waited for you to come crawling back, forgetting that folks of my blood never crawled. A son of mine, giving all he has—his body—to his country! Don't mistake me, son. I'd have put my arms around you if you had come in rags. I didn't have a gray hair in my head when I sent you away. I'm white now. When I laid a course, I always followed it. I took the precepts of business and applied them to flesh and blood.... Hell! Come over to the window where I can have a good look at you.”
The son, blinking hard, permitted himself to be led to the window.
“Mine! Why, God bless you, son! A soldier, flesh of my flesh! And you willed it. That was Henry Collingwood's blood. You willed it. All the other things were your mother's gifts; but the will to do anything was mine. I dumped you into the muck, but you willed yourself out of it. Will you forgive me, son?”
“With all my heart, father.”
“How long is your leave, son?”
“I've got to report in the morning.”
“All right. We'll have dinner at the house, and start life all over again. So you willed it! And you couldn't sneak off to your transport without giving me a chance, could you? You were a Collingwood—angel-devil breed. Suppose we go down to the car and spin around town until dinner?”
The rest of that afternoon was very hazy to Corporal Collingwood. Home! A real understanding between this grim old father and himself! He had stormed into the office with fire in his heart and burning reproaches on his tongue. And what had happened? After he had poured forth the vials of his wrath, he had thrust out a hand, and the old boy had hugged him! And here they were, hobnobbing, riding around New York, and slapping one another on the knees, choking every once in awhile and trying to hide it with laughter which cracked ominously! It was almost unbelievable.
At half-after six they drove up to the old home. Collingwood felt himself propelled into the hall. He had hardly dropped his hat on the old hat-rack bench, when the same hand propelled him up to his old room. He stood on the threshold, gaping in wonder. The room looked exactly as on the day he had left it. There were his old military brushes, his shaving-set, his old bath-robe hung from the closet door.
“Did—was this room—did you leave it like this, father?”
“No, son. Your things were up in the garret. I had them brought down the other day.”
“The other day?” the son repeated mechanically.
“I knew you were coming back, Arthur. I knew you wouldn't pile off to France without dropping in on me. You were a Collingwood. We might have had another row: but you'd have come to my office just the same—to tell me what you thought of me! I knew where you were, what you were doing, for weeks. No questions! Wash up and come down as soon as you can.”
Collingwood washed, brushed his hair and reached into the handkerchief drawer, and found a handkerchief. All these actions were automatic, unthinking; they expressed the extreme astonishment of his mind. He tiptoed down the heavily carpeted staircase. He heard voices in the parlor, and the light laughter of a happy woman!
Slowly and without sound he pulled apart the portières and looked within. The mystery of all this wonderful half-day was solved. But almost instantly a transformation took place. He saw himself standing by the grilled court of the Grand Hotel in Yokohama. Two rickshaws rolled up. A white-haired woman stepped down first. The other.... The perfume of clover! He saw himself picking up the bundles. He saw the friendly smile on her lovely face as she extended the homely bouquet, blossoms which reposed that very moment in the pocket of his regulation blouse, and clearly he heard her say,
“Aren't they wonderful!”
“YOU'RE not sorry for what I've done?” she said later, as they stood in the hall. In a moment he would be leaving for his train. “When you told me your name was Collingwood, I knew I had either heard it or seen it somewhere. It did not take me long to solve the riddle. I had seen your father's advertisement. I wrote him at once, and I told him everything. Whenever you wrote me, I wrote him. We left you in the dark because we wanted you to fight it out all alone. I saw him frequently. You're not sorry?”
“Why, God bless you, I did not know that I ever could be so happy again! Would you like to see something I've been carrying around—next to my heart?”
He took out the dried clover blossoms.
“You kept them?”
“Why not? I didn't know it at the time, but I fell in love with you over there when you turned a drab day into sunshine. I'm not asking anything. I only know that wherever I go from here, I shall always see your face. It shall be the last I shall see ... when I die.”
She held out her hand, her eyes brilliant as stars. “Let me take them.” She kissed the blossoms he gave her and gave them back. “Good-bye, soldier,” she added, with a brave smile. “Take care of yourself ... and come safely back.”
“To what?”
“Well ... to me!”
This work is in the public domain in the United States because it was published before January 1, 1929.
The longest-living author of this work died in 1932, so this work is in the public domain in countries and areas where the copyright term is the author's life plus 91 years or less. This work may be in the public domain in countries and areas with longer native copyright terms that apply the rule of the shorter term to foreign works.
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