# The Kiss (Wylie)

Extracted from Everybody's magazine, 1923 August, pp. 127–139. Accompanying illustrations by Harry Fisk may be omitted.
The Kiss
A Self-righteous Prig, Whose Ego Is Proof against a Battering-ram, Is Jolted into Decency by One Terrible Moment of Self-Revelation. An Exceptional Story
By I. A. R. Wylie
Illustration by Harry Fisk
THE motto of the old Miranda was: “Go anywhere; do anything.” Captain Guffry had given it, and he knew why, seeing that he and she had belonged to each other from the moment she left her slips on the Clyde and had weathered the war most gallantly in each other's company. Now that more prosaic days had come, the Miranda was still prepared to take on any job that offered itself. She would start from Tilbury laden with tin kettles and come back with her holds stowed tight with oranges or safety-razors or all the treasures of the Orient. Passengers she carried, too. Captain Guffry regarded passengers, in fact, as casual freight which could be dumped anywhere where the tin kettles or the oranges had not penetrated. He rather liked them. They paid well and, owing to the Miranda's mannerisms in a fairish sea, they usually ate little. Moreover, the kind of passengers that favored her—commercial travelers, gentlemen anxious to leave the country unobtrusively or odd fry, like myself—required no frills with their entertainment. And frills Captain Guffry, who had risen from the rank of cabin-boy, abhorred. He liked to be “at home on his own ship,” as he put it, and at home presumably he went about in his shirt-sleeves and roared out his old sea-dog's yarns, more or less suitable for domestic consumption, at the top of his enormous voice. But he was a good seaman and a good fellow generally, and when he had made sure that my overdelicate appearance—I had had a bad breakdown, which had driven me to share in the Miranda's happy-go-lucky wanderings—did not reveal a spinsterish and killjoy spirit, we became friends.
I suppose the queerest freight the Miranda had ever carried was the Reverend Evered Boldwyn. He came on board at Dudich-on-Sea, the Miranda's home port, and though, of course, Captain Guffry must have heard of his advent from the company, he certainly did not “realize” him until the next night, when they met at dinner for the first time. That the meeting was a painful one, to Captain Guffry, at least, was obvious to the most indifferent observer. There was nothing subtle or restrained about the captain. He looked like a very large man who had been caught by a very small man doing something supremely silly, and his swearing ostentatiously a moment afterward at the head steward only heightened the impression.
Mr. Boldwyn gave no sign at all. He made a correct little bow all round, and then said grace—in Latin. Nobody had asked him to, and nobody had expected it of him. Somehow, it was altogether out of keeping with the Miranda's tradition.
We were talking rather noisily at the time, to cover over the captain's patent discomfiture, but at the first sound of “Infunde, quæsumus, Domine Deus,” we might all of us have been shot dead. Even the head steward, a self-opinionated creature who liked to do things in his own time, stood paralysed, with the soup from half a dozen plates splashing over him. I almost expected the Miranda to stop rolling. As a matter of fact, she was giving an exhibition of her very worst paces, and from his appearance and from what I learned of him afterward, I know that Mr. Boldwyn was feeling deadly, hideously ill. But he held out, right to the bitter end of that meal, which must have been very bitter indeed—and returned thanks with his little lopsided-looking face absolutely livid. There was a queer streak of determination in his character which, if it hadn't clashed so violently with one's general dislike of him, one would have called “gameness.”
IN THE smoking-room afterward. Captain Guffry exploded. It was a noisy but not particularly illuminating explosion. I think most of us gathered that, angry as he was, Captain Guffry managed to suppress some very important factor in the situation. And I certainly had noticed Mr. Boldwyn's smile when they met at dinner—not so much a smile as a faint tightening of the small mouth that suggested a subacid benevolency not at all lovable. One felt that he had cracked a rather mean little clerical joke at Captain Guffry's expense.
“A spy,” Captain Guffry rumbled; “a dirty, mealy-faced, flint-hearted spy! I know him. Friend of a director of the company. Sky-pilot to poor old Dudich. Calls himself a Christian! Why, an honest seaman can't even be sure of his grog now that that pipsqueak's got going. Well—I'll show him; I'll teach him who's boss here. I'll make him wish he'd stuck to his mothers' meetings before he started giving thanks on board my ship without so much as a 'with your leave.' And in some blasted foreign lingo, too——”
The purser interposed nervously.
“He's been asking if he can have the saloon for Sunday service at eleven, sir. I said I supposed so, though I'd have to ask you first. It's the usual thing, ain't it?”
Captain Guffry gaped. He must have seen even then that, as a friend of a director, Mr. Boldwyn had the whip-hand. Then suddenly his expression changed. It became positively malevolent.
He rammed his tobacco home with a wicked thumb.
“We'll be in the thick of it going through the bay,” he said. “Anything that little whelk wants on Sunday he can have.”
It was an excellent joke. We roared in unison, and among ourselves Mr. Boldwyn remained the “whelk”—well, until Santa Monica, at any rate. As a description, it was so absolutely right.
Ever since I had been a boy I had dreamed of just such a voyage—on just such a rolling old tub of a freighter, with just such a foul-mouthed, golden-hearted old captain. And now it had come true, and I was still young enough to feel the wonder of it. Even my fellow travelers fitted into the picture. There were half a dozen in all. Not one of them would I have cared to introduce to my family, and each could tell a tale of life in distant parts of the world such as could never have been told in the sober township whence I hailed. We had all come together in Scotland, and Dudich was our first “call.” It was a mean, half-forgotten port, and I have my shrewd suspicions that Captain Guffry had manufactured business there in order to get another glimpse of his wife and home before setting out on his month's wanderings.
Anyhow, we were to leave at midnight. And at eleven o'clock I was leaning over the taffrail, watching the final preparations, and thrilled with that sense of mystery and great adventure which a ship about to cast anchor gives us when all other thrills have failed. I found myself whispering, “Gibraltar—Majorca—Genoa—Naples,” as though they had been words of enchantment.
Then I saw Mr. Boldwyn.
It speaks well either for my intuitiveness or Mr. Boldwyn's power of impressing the full significance of his personality on you at first sight that my heart sank. He was standing on the quay, focused by the full glare of the Miranda's search-light, and to describe him I can only think—not of a whelk but of a frightened rabbit very much on its dignity. He looked at the ship as at an evil, threatening thing, and his wife and the two little girls who stood beside him amidst the pile of luggage looked at it, too, in just the same horrified sort of way, only that their horror was mixed with awe, as if they knew that the narrow-shouldered, insignificant man in the clergyman's coat was capable of subduing an enemy twice as big and twice as wicked.
And, oddly enough, there was a sort of power about him—you felt it at once—a kind of prim power, absurdly, comically sinister. The two little girls were exactly what you would have expected under the circumstances—white baby rabbits. You felt that if you clapped your hands they would jump around, showing their scared little scuds, and bolt. But his wife was like him, too. Which sounds impossible, because she was so pretty—and so timid and gentle-looking. I couldn't think at the time how he had managed to set his mark on her in that way. But you could read, 'She for God in him' written all over her.
They hardly spoke. Presently a steward—or what passed for a steward on board the Miranda—sauntered out of the shadow. Mr. Boldwyn lifted a finger at him. I knew the fellow. He was about the roughest diamond ever dug out of the soil. I myself would sooner have carried my traps unaided than lifted fingers at him. And, in fact, there was trouble enough indicated in his slouching descent on Mr. Boldwyn.
“Nah, then—who d'ye think you are?”
Then, suddenly, he wilted. He seemed actually to cringe. He passed behind me a few moments later, carrying two suitcases and a hold-all, and this time his remark was not a matter of conjecture.
“Thinks 'e owns the bloomin' ship!”
He said it to reinstate himself, but he could not make me forget that I had seen him touch his cap.
Then the “All aboard!” sounded, and Mr. Boldwyn kissed his family. I don't know whether or not he kissed them on the forehead, but it looked like it. From the top of the gangway he waved to them—or, rather, he lifted his hand very much as he had done to Sims, the steward; only, this time it was in benediction. He repeated the gesture as slowly the Miranda turned her blunt nose to the night and the sea, and the little group waved meekly back to him. I could see Mrs. Boldwyn, now only a fragile shadow in the murky lights of the quay, urging on the white baby rabbits to greater endeavor and perhaps telling them not to cry because daddy would be home soon. But I don't think they were crying. I don't think they felt like that. Only, Mrs. Boldwyn——
And yet, somehow, the trio made an oddly forlorn, pathetic little group. It was so late. The white baby rabbits ought to have been in bed long since. And there was their God and their All steaming from them further and further into the terrible Unknown.
WELL, all the passengers who could stand and as many of the crew as could be spared came to that Sunday service. The first mate, whose talent for vamping the latest music-hall ditties had betrayed him, played “For Those in Peril on the Sea” and we sang from the hymn-books which Mr. Boldwyn provided out of one of the suitcases. Captain Guffry stayed on his bridge, dogged and sullen-browed. His ally, the Bay of Biscay, had failed him. Mr. Boldwyn went out twice during the hymns and came back, looking, if possible, a shade greener, but still composed and perfectly master of himself and of us. I think he felt that he was a sort of lion-tamer in a den of lions, and that if he turned his back on us we would run amuck.
We never did. I had not realized before how a single man who is absolutely in the right and has nothing on his conscience can impose his will ruthlessly on a whole community. In three days, every one except the Miranda herself was behaving according to Mr. Boldwyn's standards. The sea-yarns with which Captain Guffry had adorned our meals died at birth. I could see him calling up all his resentful courage to begin, but he never got beyond the first sentences. Under Mr. Boldwyn's pale, attentive eyes he realized, I think for the first time, poor old fellow, either that his story was not true or that it was not nice. Our conversation degenerated at last to the weather and even politics.
We hated him. We would have gladly thrown him overboard, but short of that we were at his mercy. I think he knew it and was pleased in a prim, well-regulated sort of way. It was as if he had been challenged and had got the better of some one. But I was to understand.
From the start, Mr. Boldwyn must have recognized from my profession as a doctor and the creases down my trousers that we were kindred spirits in the midst of a savage tribe. At any rate, the morning after we had weathered the bay he came upon me sheltered under the lee of mysterious freight and, arranging a coil of rope, sat down beside me.
“I am not disturbing you?” he asked.
I had my pipe and my book, and, any way, he was about the last person on the high seas I wanted to talk to, but his manner was so absolutely correct, at once courteous and confident, that I could do no less than lie amiably.
“We two,” he said, with his little pale smile, “ought to know each other. Our professional interests are closely related, don't you think? And, moreover, for men of our upbringing and outlook, this ship—not to put too fine a point on it—is like a desert island.”
I felt oddly helpless, as if I were bound to agree with him, and consequently rather nettled.
“I don't know,” I answered. “For my part, I am enjoying the change. It does men of our type good to be tried against harder metal.”
“You think our companions are of harder metal?” he asked.
“I shouldn't care to back myself against the captain; would you?” I retorted.
I can't say that he looked contemptuous. It was something much too aloof.
“You are speaking of things physical,” he said. “I should call most of our companions weak men.”
“They have their faults,” I admitted, “but I think that underneath it all they are good fellows—with their own peculiar virtues, which, perhaps, we lack.”
He answered without any symptom of impatience. I might have been a child to whom he was explaining something elementary.
“What you call 'faults' I should call 'vices.' Vicious men are fundamentally weak. However strong and courageous they may be—and I take it that courage and strength are two of the virtues you have in mind—they are at the mercy of their vices and, for that matter, at the mercy of pure virtue.”
I wish I could describe him as he sat looking primly down at his neat little hands. But his were the sort of features that are forgotten as soon as they are out of sight. In any case, they were completely subjugated by the overweening forehead, the more remarkable because of the scanty, colorless hair which receded from it like a tide on the ebb. His pallor was intense—a kind of glistening gray—out of which his blue eyes stared with a vaguely wistful protuberance. His eyes were, in fact, rather disconcerting to your dislike of him. They reminded you that in his time he, too, had been a white baby rabbit.
BUT, at any rate, I had seen light. I knew now why even the cook, who was notorious, had returned to the Miranda sober at Marseilles. Pure virtue! Why, he had the whip-hand of us all. We were like helpless, overawed children. I wanted to laugh. But, somehow, I felt too soured.
“You must find that fact pretty useful in your work,” I said, with unsuccessful sarcasm.
He assented gravely.
“Dudich is a difficult parish—was, I should say. My predecessor had been a man rather of your outlook—if you will forgive my saying so—slack and sentimental, and prepared to see extenuating circumstances everywhere. As a part consequence, Dudich was one of the most dissolute seaports on the west coast. For it is amazing and terrifying to see how one responsible man in a small town can set the tone. In the old days it was not possible to go out at night, even in the respectable residential quarters, without meeting some drunken seaman reeling his way back to his ship. Well, all that is changed now. Even on the water-front, which was considered an impregnable fortress, we have set our flag. We have a mission-hall there, where we have weekly meetings—” He paused and then added, “It was there, in fact, that I met Captain Guffry for the first time.”
I said “Indeed?” hiding my real curiosity, and he asked,
“I wonder if the story of our acquaintance would interest you?” as if he wanted to make quite clear how it was he had got into such bad company.
“Yes; he came to see me in my office there one evening after a meeting. It was in reference to one of my parishioners—a girl whose name I need not mention. It appeared that she was the daughter of one of his old shipmates, who had been drowned at sea. She had gone wrong—run away with a married man—and the adventure had turned out badly. She had come home, but her family would have nothing to do with her. Captain Guffry wanted me to reinstate her—go bail for her, as he put it. He actually wanted me to get her a post with one of my wealthy parishioners as a sewing maid, and when I naturally refused, suggested that she should be made caretaker of the church—a position then vacant. I said to him frankly that I could not recommend such a girl into any decent household, and that if she was not fit to enter a decent human home she was not fit to have care of the House of God—that was obvious.”
Mr. Boldwyn waited, and I said, “Quite,” as though I had been hypnotised. He nodded, well satisfied with me.
“With a man like Guffry, one has to hit straight from the shoulder. He did not like it. He promised that he would break up my meetings in the future, and he kept his word. The next night the hall was invaded by a gang of roughs, and the police had to come to the protection of my female helpers. I myself remained in the hall till they had tired themselves out. When, as I thought, the last of them had gone, I prepared to return home——”
He stopped again, and I looked at him curiously. As I said before, there was that queer streak of “gameness” in him. I was sure that he had faced the howling mob unruffled and unafraid—Mr. Evered Boldwyn and his “unconquerable soul” together.
“And then?” I suggested.
“Captain Guffry joined me. I was just crossing one of the most deserted quays and there was no one within hailing-distance. I remember, too, how dark it was. Captain Guffry caught me by the arm. For the moment I thought he meant to throw me into the water, for he is, as you know, a man of violent and undisciplined passions; but, instead, he dragged me with him up and down the quay-side, shouting at the top of his voice—blaspheming——”
A CURIOUS change had come into Mr. Boldwyn's face. Was it the keen sea-wind that had lashed up that faint color in his pallid cheeks, or was it anger—resentment—an old humiliation? His eyes had lost their vagueness and fixed themselves on me with a cold intensity.
“He was drunk, disgustingly drunk. I suppose to you that would seem a mitigating circumstance, Dr. Masters. To me it rendered the whole scene indescribably detestable. I wish I could forget the things he said. They were half grotesque, half horrible. One might have imagined that the Almighty and he were old shipmates—boon companions. He raved about the sea as though his acquaintance with the element gave him a kind of right to—to admonish me on my ignorance of men and life, to plead with me as though I were a soul trembling on the verge to perdition—yes; actually, Dr. Masters, absurd though it sounds, that is what he said. He was so violent—so elemental that I seemed to feel myself in the grip of a typhoon. In the end he wept—nauseatingly. I did not know what to hope—whether that a policeman would relieve me or that no one should find me in such a humiliating predicament.”
I lit my pipe to save a reply. I saw it all now—the poor old captain drinking himself to the point where he could burst through his own rough crust and pour out his muddled philosophy, his shamefaced tendernesses and reserves, his pity and his dear-bought wisdom over this little squiff who had seen in him only a nauseating spectacle of human degradation. I knew now why the captain looked like a beaten schoolboy.
I saw Mr. Boldwyn, too—helpless, resentful, for the first time in his life spiritually browbeaten. It was an offense he would never forgive or forget, unless——
“And so,” I said at last, “you chose the Miranda for a cruise.”
“That is so. It happened that one of my congregation is a director of the line. He had noticed that my wife—that I, rather—had seemed in need of a change, and he offered us both a cruise in one of their first-class steamers. It was my opportunity, Dr. Masters. I exchanged the original offer for a berth on board this ship.”
I thought sourly of the little pale-faced woman gazing up with such wistful hunger out of the shadows of the quay-side.
“Your wife must have been disappointed, Mr. Boldwyn.”
“I am accustomed to disappointments of that nature. It was to me a matter of duty——”
“To try issues with the captain?”
He smiled his little, pale, confident smile.
“I'm afraid such an idea must seem very absurd to you.”
“Not at all. It's not the body but the spirit that matters—eh, Mr. Boldwyn? I have noticed the change on the ship already.”
“I'm glad of that. Yes; after that night either the captain or I had to predominate in Dudich. I think in time we shall reach an understanding. Captain Guffry will realize that sheer brute force is not the only force in the world.”
“You infernal little bully!” I thought. And I could have patted the Miranda on the deck, for she, at any rate, was beyond his mastery. She was rolling like the drunkenest sailor that had ever reeled down Dudich High Street in its palmy days, and I could see the greenish pallor creep back into Mr. Boldwyn's cheeks. Aloud, I said:
“It must have been a sacrifice. To spend a holiday away from your family—those nice little girls——”
He rose at once. Either the Miranda was too much for him or he felt the reference to his children to be slightly indelicate.
“My calling demands sacrifices.”
“And the girl?” I asked.
He stayed to overwhelm me with a look of absolute rectitude.
“I found her a home in a suitable institution,” he said. “As a Christian, I could do no less.”
I STOOD that night on the bridge with Captain Guffry. It was dark and stormy, and the Miranda chugged and pitched her way through the steady head wind in her most ungainly fashion. The binnacle-lights threw a warm glow up into the captain's hard-bitten, resolute old face. Here, at any rate, he was master, and I was glad of it. I had hated to see him so humiliated on his own ship.
“How do you think the whelk's enjoying this—eh, Captain?”
He gave me a queer, one-sided glance.
“Been talking, hasn't he?”
“Quite a lot.”
“Hm. Poor little Kitty Blake——”
“But, I say—she—er—she did, didn't she?”
Guffry's answer was illogical and satisfactory. He swore.
“Oh, yes, she did. Damn him!”
We were in Oporto two days, but Mr. Boldwyn did not go ashore. He stood occasionally on the shore side and looked at the place with an aloof disparagement. It seemed that he had never been abroad and did not want to go. England was enough for him, and sightseeing in more or less disreputable foreign parts was not his business. On the other hand, he was no fool. I got that clear in our subsequent conversations. At college he had swept all before him. He had written a commentary on the Fourth Gospel which was already a standard work. Dudich, after all, meant only a stepping-stone.
“I mark time there,” he explained. “I am not suited for that kind of work. My sermons are above the heads of my people, and in any case organization on a large scale is more suited to me.”
“A diocese?” I suggested slyly.
He cast a really comically unconscious glance down at his thin legs.
“One does not pry too much into the future,” he said.
But I knew that he had seen the episcopal gaiters as in a prophetic vision.
This was the Reverend Evered Boldwyn who saw Santa Monica at sunrise.
I could not guess what had brought him on deck so early, for he could not have known, as I knew, that in that unearthly, translucent light of morning, Santa Monica would look like a fragment from the Book of Revelation which had somehow wedged itself between a sapphire sea and the crest of the high hills, clad in rich olive and festooned with ropes of shining orange groves. The walls of the white houses gleamed with the radiancy of alabaster, and one knew that the streets must be paved with jasper. It was impossible that a macaroni factory should be the Miranda's real concern in the midst of such fairy loveliness.
Mr. Boldwyn was leaning against the taffrail, gazing at it all with a curiously prim, repressed expression.
“Not quite of this world, eh?” I asked.
He did not care for my way of putting it.
“It seems pretty,” he said.
But later on he consented to come ashore with me in one of the cockle-boats which bobbed hopefully about the Miranda's flanks in quest of passengers. It was manned by a handsome brigand, and it was typical of Mr. Boldwyn that, though he knew no word of Italian and I was a fairly fluent scholar, it was he who conducted the bargaining. He did it pretty well, too, without noise or loss of dignity. He held up his fingers to signify the extent of his offer, and held them immovable through the wildest eloquence until his enemy, with a gesture that called heaven to witness the shamefulness of the bargain, capitulated. Then Mr. Boldwyn climbed calmly down the ship's side.
I could see that he was pleased with the incident. He had power over men—the power of the spirit. Even here, where no one knew who he was, it did not matter that he was small and insignificant-looking.
I shall never forget that brief transit. It remains for me one of those strangely out standing episodes in life which one can never look back upon save with emotion. I think when I am dying I shall see again those ethereal colors and hear the drip of the oars like a distant tinkling music. A peace beyond understanding breathed over us like a benediction. Even our brigand felt it. His indignation had blazed up and gone. He looked at us kindly.
“Molto bello, signor,” he said, and waved a brawny, eloquent arm round the world.
I doubt if he was even clean. He was too black and brown for one to feel any certainty on the matter, and his clothes were made up of unrecognizable fragments, like the sails of a fishing-smack whose patches the sun and wind have stained to a dozen mellow shades.
“Molto bello,” he insisted eagerly.
Mr. Boldwyn met his eye coldly, and the ruffian broke into the wide, unshadowed smile of an amused child. I could see how disconcerted Mr. Boldwyn felt under that radiance. For one thing, the man had tried to cheat him, and, for another, people never smiled at him like that. It was insolent—an encroachment on his personal dignity. His thin mouth tightened. He stared back without a flicker of expression. Our boatman laughed and shrugged.
“Inglese!” he said. “Non capisce——”
But Mr. Boldwyn did not like that, either. He had understood. It was the boatman who had failed to understand.
“The man's half-witted,” he said, with more emotion than I had ever heard from him.
TAKING Mr. Boldwyn as he was, I can forgive his feelings toward Santa Monica. As we approached, it was like lifting a veil from a face that you had supposed beautiful and meeting the lewd glance of some scandalous old harridan. The jasper-paved streets were cobbled and strewn with refuse. Its houses looked at once to be indestructible and on the brink of tumbling about their own ears. They climbed the hills in straggling terraces; they grew out of the rocks; they sprawled and lounged in the warmth, like the idle good-for-nothings who lived in them and who now watched our boat like a flock of placid vultures. Their colors were the stains of lime and dirt which the sun had used for its artistry. And out of the open doors issued smells of garbage—of garlic—of heaven knows what.
I think Mr. Boldwyn would have turned back. But it was too late. Our boat ground against the stone steps of the little breakwater and we were delivered up. A dozen brown hands received us, and a moment later Mr. Boldwyn stood like a lonely, beruffled blackbird caught by a tatterdemalion crowd of noisy, voracious sparrows. He looked at me, and I have never seen an expression of such mingled disgust and chagrin and impatience.
“Are they all beggars?” he asked.
They looked like it. If there was any one working that day in Santa Monica, he had hidden himself in the macaroni factory. The quay swarmed. Some were worse than others. They displayed horrible infirmities with a brazen air of satisfaction. They seemed indecently unaware that they were making Mr. Boldywn sick.
“Soldi, signor; soldi!”
“Carozza, signor; carozza?”
The owner of the so-called carriage with the fleshless horse must have been brother to the boatman. He had the same passionate eloquence, the same limitless optimism. He followed Mr. Boldwyn, gesticulating and clutching him by the arm. I knew that Mr. Boldwyn loathed being touched. I could see his expression. He turned involuntarily to the little undersized guardia regia in the shabby uniform, and the guardia regia looked back placidly.
“Soldi, soldi, signor!"
“Good God!” said Mr. Boldwyn.
The children were the worst. They buzzed about us, barefooted and grimy, their rags fluttering in festoons behind them and their voices rising to a shrill, nerve-racking chant. Their leader was like a monkey, with a monkey's eyes of wicked innocence. One brown leg was withered and twisted, but he danced agilely in front of Mr. Boldwyn, his dirty paw extended.
“Soldi, soldi——”
I put my hand to my pocket. Mr. Boldwyn stopped me.
“No; certainly not! It's disgraceful.”
He was shaking, and there was perspiration of sheer nausea on his pale face. I think as nearly as ever in his life he lost his temper. He made a sweeping gesture of dismissal, and the monkey-faced baby lost his balance and rolled over in the dust. A chorus of sound rose. It might have meant anything in Mr. Boldwyn's ears. Perhaps he expected to be stabbed in the back. Probably he was past caring. He went on blindly, and as suddenly as the hubbub rose, it died away. His persecutors returned to their former placid contemplation, lounging against the walls of the quay or stretching themselves on the sun-baked steps like drowsy yet alert lizards
“Thank God!” said Mr. Boldwyn.
There was only one pursuer. We both heard him. The uneven tap-tap followed us up the winding coast-road, growing fainter and fainter till, with the little panting, dust-choked voice, it seemed no more than an echo in our brains.
“Soldi, soldi, signor——”
I would have stopped and thrown him his precious soldi.
“He tumbled,” said Mr. Boldwyn. “It's a sort of blackmail.”
And it shows his power even over men who disliked him as bitterly as I did that I did not so much as look back.
And presently there was no sound at all.
WE HAD reached the point where the highroad drops down into the plain of Pompeii, and there was the bay before us like a floor of sapphire. Mr. Boldwyn brushed the perspiration from his face. He did see that it was beautiful, and I think he was glad to be sure that its beauty was a snare and a delusion.
“It's like sin,” he said. “Beneath that fair seeming, nothing but rot and ruin.”
Neither of us could have guessed that at that very moment his fate and the fate of the white baby rabbits and their pale, gentle mother and perhaps of Kitty Blake and even of Dudich hung in the balance.
We were not alone. A man was seated on the wall. Apparently he was an artist painting busily, and to me, who recognized him, not without a sinking of the heart, there was something pathetic in that bowed, earnest figure. It was as if he were afraid the scene before him might vanish into nothing—or as if life were too short for all he had to do. Then suddenly he heard Mr. Boldwyn's voice. In a trice he was off his perch and limping toward us, and in the outstretched hand were his masterpieces—post-cards—crude and ludicrously painted water-colors—smears not even dry.
“Ecco—signor—ecco——”
He himself was tattered, filthy. A grimy beard half covered a withered old face out of which peered one eye—one astonishingly bright and eager eye.
Mr. Boldwyn shrank back in horror.
“Ecco, signor; wa-ater colorès—wa-ater colorès, signor——”
“No, no!” said Mr. Boldwyn.
He was livid. But the demon of obstinacy had risen up in arms. He was not to be badgered by a loathsome beggar. He held his ground, intolerant and outraged, while I stood by, like a false friend, hoping the old man would not recognize me. And, strangely enough, he did not even look in my direction.
“Wa-ater-colorès, signor——”
“I don't want them,” said Mr. Boldwyn.
The old man seemed puzzled, a little hurt, but very patient. He displayed other varieties of his art. He held them in a better light.
“Ver' chip—wa-ater-colorès—ver' chip, signor——”
Mr. Boldwyn maintained silence and, sighing, his tormentor returned to his extempore easel and his labors. He painted passionately, like one inspired, but when we turned at last to go, he accepted the movement as a signal for renewed hope. He waved to us.
“Wa-ater-colorès, signor—ver' chip——”
“It's like a nightmare,” said Mr. Boldwyn.
Yet one other little incident was to complete his sense of outrage. It was dusk as we made our way back—a romantic dusk, shimmering with color, in which anything might happen—and as we passed a house built out of the rock I looked up, and at the barred but open window I thought I saw the pale gleam of a woman's face. I heard a laugh—and a whir as of the fall of a dead bird. It was a rose. It fell just at Mr. Boldwyn's feet. It lay in the dust and shone there like a bright yellow jewel. And Mr. Boldwyn stared down at it and then at me. I could have laughed out loud—and yet there was something ridiculously sad about it, too. No one had ever thrown a rose to him before.
“Really—really—” said Mr. Boldwyn, and passed on.
But I picked up the rose and kissed it to the high-up window. It seemed the least that I could do and, coward that I was, I knew that Mr. Boldwyn could not see me.
AT MIDNIGHT, three days later, the Miranda, obese with macaroni, was to lift anchor and turn homeward, and in the afternoon Mr. Boldwyn went ashore for the last time. His destination, as he explained to us with an air of one seeking out the barbaric customs of a heathen people, was the Campo Santo, perched like a great white bird on the hilltop.
“And may they bury you there!” Captain Guffry muttered.
But as dusk grew to night he sought me out.
“There's some row or other going on ashore,” he said anxiously. “You can hear it from here. Maybe the whelk's been making himself too popular. I wish you'd go——”
There was certainly a row. It sounded as if some one had stirred up a hornets' nest with a stick, and the thought of rescuing Mr. Boldwyn from the results did not appeal to me. I went reluctantly. At the breakwater a man met me and half dragged me ashore.
“For the love of God, signor,” he panted, “if you would come at once——”
I ran with him, asking no questions. Thinking of the white baby rabbits and their mamma made me run quite fast.
The rest is Mr. Boldwyn's story as he told it to me under the stars.
Mr. Boldwyn has been ashore every day. He loathed the place. Its dirt, its smells, its undisciplined, happy-go-lucky ways revolted him. I think he went to the tawdry Byzantine cathedral just to see the people spit on the marble pavement and to feel that such things could never happen in his parish. Besides, the place had challenged him, just as Captain Guffry had done, and he would never have believed in himself again if he had funked the issue.
But Santa Monica was a tougher enemy than the old captain. For one thing, the inhabitants neither knew nor cared that Mr. Boldwyn was the friend of a director or that he ran a parish like a regiment or that he had written a commentary on the Fourth Gospel. To them he was simply a member of that pathetically mad but opulent tribe of Inglese, who bulged with lire and who at any moment might burst like a cloud and scatter manna over them. They never lost hope.
Most hateful of all to Mr. Boldwyn was old “Wa-ater-colorès.” That one-eyed artist with his unsold masterpieces had taken up a place at the end of the breakwater so that it was impossible to come ashore without arousing the cry of: “Wa-ater-colorès—ver' chip—ver' chip—signor!” which never lost its accents of unalterable faith. And then there was the little boy with the crutch who hopped after Mr. Boldwyn along the dusty highroad like a wounded sparrow, chirping, “Soldi, soldi, signor!” till he could chirp no more.
I believe in his heart Mr. Boldwyn had murdered them both several times over—or confined them to a suitable institution.
Well, that last day he started out for the Campo Santo. If you know Santa Monica you know that to reach the Campo Santo is not the easy business it looks from the sea's edge. You start off along the Street of the Thousand Mills, with its rushing tor rent at your elbow, and in five minutes you are in a rabbit-warren of dark, unsalubrious passages and steep stairways which seem to be leading into the bowels of the mountain. It was early afternoon when Mr. Boldwyn left the Miranda, but in those treacherous, mysterious byways it was dusk when it was not night. Here, too, the peculiar odors which had so disgusted Mr. Boldwyn had been imprisoned for generations and become unspeakable. So that at the end of an hour Mr. Boldwyn sickened of his project. He began to retrace his steps, but somewhere he mistook a turning, and after that he floundered up and down, now to the right, now to the left, beginning to move faster and faster under the urge of a mounting panic.
You have to imagine Mr. Boldwyn a little man in a foreign land, among a people whom he knew to be sunk in vicious ness, lost in wicked-looking, evil-smelling passages which ran in and out of cavernous, evil-looking houses. And the night coming on, already stealing like a black tide through the befouled channels, and overhead the fading glow of sunset. As Mr. Boldwyn ran up one flight of moldering, slippery steps and down another, faces appeared at the black, gaping doorways—malevolent, curious, astonished faces. And here and there an oil-lamp, to make the shadows blacker.
Mr. Boldwyn thought of the money hidden in his inner pocket. He thought of his wife and the two little pale girls. He wanted desperately to be back among them—back where his big, indomitable spirit could impose itself, where it wasn't so small and helpless and afraid.
Presently he had to stop. He was exhausted and could no longer hide the truth from himself. He was lost hopelessly. And just then a woman, like a ghost, came out of the gloom and peered at him. He spoke to her. It shows how terribly far gone he was that he spoke to her in English and that it never occurred to him that she could not understand. She, in turn, spoke to some one behind her, and in a moment the whole passage that had been wrapped in the silence of death came to life like a swarm of startled ants. Men and women and children crowded down the steps. They gazed at Mr. Boldwyn as at some startling apparition. They questioned him and the woman to whom he had appealed, and their voices grew shriller and more excited. They pressed closer against Mr. Boldwyn, jamming him against the wall in their eagerness to have a sight of him, and in the heat of their bodies and the stench of garlic he felt himself turn sick and faint.
“They are like beasts,” he thought; “like beasts.”
Then in that Dantesque inferno there appeared a familiar, one-eyed, detested face.
Even at that moment Mr. Boldwyn could not suppress a movement of exasperated aversion. There was something peculiarly hateful in that one, beaming eye. The mechanically uttered, “Wa-ater-colorès—ver' chip—ver' chip,” made Mr. Boldwyn wince. Yet the imbecile came as a rescurer. He knew Mr. Boldwyn. He knew whence Mr. Boldwyn came. Mr. Boldwyn clutched at him. He took out his bundle of precious notes and displayed a whole five-lira piece.
“Cinque—returno—comprendo?”
It was all that he had the power to say. But the painter of post-cards had understood. He addressed the mob eloquently, and taking the shrinking Mr. Boldwyn by the hand, led him at the head of a giant procession, which lengthened at every turn of the passage till it seemed to Mr. Boldwyn that the whole town clamored sinisterly at his heels. He felt like a helpless victim of a bloodthirsty revolutionary mob driven to slaughter. He cursed himself for having shown that handful of money. He knew that they could kill him—no one would ever know how. His body cast into the torrent at the Thousand Mills would be out to sea in an hour.
Then suddenly it was over. They were in the market-place. There were the lights of the Miranda. There was the guardia regia, as shabby and as placid as ever. And Mr. Boldwyn alive and safe.
The first thing that Mr. Boldwyn felt was anger, broken up by all kinds of queer cross-currents of shame and disgust and resentment. If he hadn't been Mr. Boldwyn, one would have said that in that revulsion of emotion he became slightly hysterical. He had been afraid—he couldn't get away from that. This riffraff had frightened him—deliberately, with the devilish purpose of getting the better of him at the last. He had held out so long—and now they would get their soldi. Their dirty, greedy palms were already outstretched. And there was the five lire he had actually promised.
Mr. Boldwyn, pale but outwardly dignified, put his hand to his pocket. The money was gone!
THEN he knew. The whole truth broke in upon him like a flood of glorious daylight. It had been a plot. Every dread that he had suffered had been justified to the hilt. With the strength of his indignation, he threw off his tormentors. He gesticulated. It was extraordinary how eloquent his gestures became, and how, from being a mere helpless straw on the flood, he became suddenly the master, the dominating spirit, so that the tossing multitude fell back from him and the guardia regia burst into official activity.
“Chè cosa ha, signor?”
Mr. Boldwyn pointed with the steady finger of justice.
“That man has robbed me,” he said. “Arrest him.”
The guardia regia, who understood authority but no English, thereupon seized the one-eyed, open-mouthed painter of post-cards by the collar.
THE court of Santa Monica is just a fair-sized room which smells, like most official rooms all the world over, of stale tobacco, dusty deeds and fusty clothes. On that particular evening it smelled worse than usual, for the good reason that half Santa Monica was there. Those who had not been able to squeeze over the threshold hung outside the windows, peering through the bars like monkeys. Even the little lame boy had survived the struggle, and, perched on a friendly shoulder, gazed with wide-opened, startled eyes.
And there was something more in the room. It pounced on you like some invisible beast whose breath tainted the already stifling atmosphere with an acrid bitterness—rage, violence, passion lashing itself up to madness.
I had to fight my way through to reach the narrow clearing in which the real drama was being enacted. There, at a raised table, sat the pretore—I can see him now—a jolly little nut-brown man with a mustache that bristled in loyal imitation of the portrait hanging behind him, and in front of him stood Mr. Boldwyn and the guardia regia, the latter still holding on to what remained of his prisoner's collar.
One didn't need to look for the accuser. Mr. Boldwyn saluted me composedly. In that moment I confess I admired him. He was quite alone, and as far as I could tell there wasn't a man or woman in that room who didn't want to tear him limb from limb. And he knew it. And he didn't care. If they had fallen upon him and slaughtered his body, his great, indomitable soul would have been translated in triumph. You see, he was in the right. He had been in the right all through. No one had deceived him, and if he had been frightened for a moment, in the end he had reestablished his position. In this fierce mob he stood out with all the dignity and power of a pure and fearless conscience confronting evil.
“I'm glad you have come, Dr. Masters. You will help to elucidate matters. Please explain that this old man robbed me of a roll of notes—a thousand lire in all—which I had in my pocket twenty minutes ago. He was beside me all the time. There can be no doubt in the matter.”
I translated obediently, with a tight, dry throat. The brief silence broke into a hiss of anger. The sea of humanity tossed fitfully, and here and there a white face was flung up like the broken crest of a wave. The pretore wrote diligently at his notes. But I looked at old “Wa-ater-colorès” and thought sadly, “My poor friend, why did you choose him of all people in the world?” And at sight of me his lips moved, and I was sure they were saying in a kind of dazed, agonized appeal,
“Ver' chip—ver' chip, signor—”
“Search the prisoner!”
I translated that, too, for Mr. Boldwyn.
“It will be useless,” he said. “He had confederates in the crowd. There was no one else on that side of me. No one else could have taken it.”
I translated. The pretore blew out his round cheeks.
“Quite so.”
He blinked uncertainly. I could see what was in his mind. He, at any rate, didn't want to be torn limb from limb. On the other hand, it wouldn't do to have tourists offended, and a few weeks in the local jail would serve the prisoner right, anyhow. His mouth opened.
Then, for the first time, it seemed to dawn on old “Wa-ater-colorès” what was being done to him. He cried out. He appealed to us, wringing his hands. Hadn't the English signor asked him for his help and offered him a whole cinque? And hadn't he done his best—and got nothing for it? What was it that we all wanted of him?”
I felt my eyes burn. I said to Mr. Boldwyn between my teeth:
“Let him go. I know him. He's quite harmless. Drop the matter, for God's sake. I'll give you the money myself.”
It was intolerably hot. In the yellow murk Mr. Boldwyn's colorless, impassive face glistened with sweat. And yet there was no impatience in his bearing—no desire for vengeance, you understand—just calm, overweening recitude. What a sermon he would make of it all one day!
“I'm sorry,” he said. “But even here one must make an example——”
He drew out his handkerchief to mop his face, and the roll of notes fell to the ground.
IT WAS deadly still. I suppose we were breathing—all of us—but you couldn't hear it. Even the abject “ver' chip—-ver' chip” had died into nothing. No one looked at any one. It was horrible—the most horrible thing of all—a kind of withering, vicarious shame, as though a fellow creature had been stripped naked before our eyes. But I was glad—fiendishly glad. I thought, “He'll never lift his head again.”
That was what Mr. Boldwyn felt. He told me. He said it was as if he hadn't a rag left on him. He said he felt like a filthy beggar with all his sores and infirmities displayed to the world. His achievements, his intellectual and spiritual powers were as nothing to cover him. And for the first time in his life he saw himself for what he really was—a mean little man, with a mean, spiteful soul in a mean, ugly body. Perhaps if he hadn't suffered so much that afternoon—hadn't been frightened out of his life—the revelation wouldn't have come to him as it did. But his personality had been cracked—and now it shivered and broke and went all to pieces. He had been in the wrong. He had been vengeful and unjust and cruel. Before this mob of good-for-nothings whom he had despised he had been branded. He waited for their howl of exultant laughter. The sound of it and of their hatred and mockery would hound him to the end of his days. The poison of it would never be exorcised from his blood. He loathed himself. In his shame, he loathed the whole world.
He lifted his head at last. And there was old “Wa-ater-colorès” looking at him. And in the one dim eye was pity, compassion, infinite compassion and understanding. So they remained for an instant. Then the beggar threw off the hands that held him and ran to Mr. Boldwyn and put his arms about him and kissed him.
I don't quite know what happened then. It was as if a breath of clean sea air had blown in upon us. The next thing I remember clearly was Mr. Boldwyn holding “Waater-colorès” by the arm and shouting something at the pretore—no one could hear what—Mr. Boldwyn crying openly, shamelessly, like a child. And at last, because, I suppose, no one could understand, he made a pantomimic gesture—an incredible gesture—of pouring something into a cup and drinking it to the dregs—of sweeping, reckless invitation.
The pretore bent over and shook Mr. Boldwyn by the hand and kissed him, too, on both cheeks. And the whole of Santa Monica burst into a shout of joyous understanding.
“Viva il signor Inglese—bravo—bravissimo!”
That was at six o'clock. At eleven-thirty Mr. Boldwyn came on board. He came down the breakwater at the head of a procession with some sort of band playing it didn't know what. And every boat in Santa Monica, weighed down to the gunwales, put out that night and bore Mr. Boldwyn home in triumph to the Miranda.
And from the taffrail Mr. Boldwyn addressed the multitude. I don't remember what he said. It's a pity, because I don't suppose he will ever preach a sermon like that again. But I can see him now, standing with his arms outstretched in a kind of universal embrace—his queer, lopsided little face transfigured in the starlight.
“Sh-shgentlemen and brothers: Shthis night I have seen God.”
“He's very drunk,” said Captain Guffry tenderly. “It's that vino what-you-call-it. A little goes a long way.”
It was stifling in the cabin, so we laid Mr. Boldwyn near the fo'c's'le with his back to a case of macaroni and the wind in his face. And I stayed all night with him while the Miranda steamed homeward with the grim glare of Vesuvius staining her silver track. And Mr. Boldwyn held my hand and told me everything that had happened and cried a good deal.
Of course it was the vino what-you-call-it. And a great deal more.
At any rate, I often stay with the Boldwyn family. They are still at Dudich. The white baby rabbits have become quite charmingly aggressive children with a marked tendency to trample on their parents. And Mrs. Boldwyn has a laugh which she must have lost and found again.
They are all very much beloved. But I have my doubts about that bishopric.
Another story by I. A. R. Wylie will appear in September Everybody's.—Out August 15th.
This work is in the public domain in the United States because it was published before January 1, 1930.
The longest-living author of this work died in 1959, so this work is in the public domain in countries and areas where the copyright term is the author's life plus 65 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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