The Savage Gentleman

by Philip Wylie

  "I have a little surprise for you," McCobb said.

  "New bird? Because if that's it--I had enough of birds the first time I saw those filthy creatures."

  "No."

  McCobb fished in his pocket and poured a handful of shining metal on the table.

  Stone stared at it. "Is it?" he asked finally.

  McCobb nodded. "Gold. Pure gold. I found it in those hills north of the lake. In rotten quartz. There's enough on the surface to sink a ship."

  Henry bent over the treasure. "Can I have some?"

  " May I have some," his father suggested.

  "May I?"

  "You may have it all, Henry. It's no good to me."

  "Unless," Stone suggested, "you want to go into the ornament business. It works easily--and it might be something for Henry to learn. There's a book about it around here.

  Benvenuto Cellini and so on."

  The Scot stared at the metal. "I wonder if I could do that sort of thing?"

  "Why not?"

  McCobb developed a new interest which eventually became almost a passion.

  The year 1905 they remembered as the year of 'the hurricane. It came at the turn of the monsoons.

  Henry was at his studies when McCcibb spoke about it to Stone.

  "Probably time for it now."

  "For what?" Henry asked, glad of an excuse to end his work.

  "A change of the prevailing winds," his father said. '' Go ahead, now. Seven plus six plus three divided by four is how much?"

  Outside the skies were thickening--not rapidly as in a northern thundershower, but slowly, as if more fury was to be reaped for patient effort. The sun went out before the morning "schoolwork" was finished. The sky where it had been was first white, then cream colored, then gray in darkening shades to black.

  Leaves withered and scant puffs of air made them swing heavily.

  The first lightning was very far away and merely made the beholders guess that they had caught a flash. Soon distant clouds were evanescently silhouetted. Thunder stirred.

  Then it was on them.

  The wind rose like a siren. The rain came slantwise and so rapidly that it collected on slopes, and the ground in the compound seemed to be bouncing with peas from a celestial hopper. It became impossible to talk in anything like an ordinary tone.

  Henry was Calm. He watched his father's face for his cues. But presently, as the speed and pressure of the gale grew, it became obvious that his father was worried.

  Henry bent toward his ear.

  "It's only wind and rain. They're soft," he shouted.

  His father answered with an absent nod.

  It grew cold--colder than it had ever been on the island. Jack lighted a fire in the grate, but a separate gust came down the chimney and blew it into the room. A second fire was extinguished by a rush of water.

  Henry stared through the window. It was dark outside but he could see the under sides of the nearest trees turned whitely upward in the wind.

  The thunder bowled directly overhead. Lightning never stopped but danced from place to place.

  The wind increased in pitch and velocity until those who sat in the shaking house believed it could increase no more, and until it became intolerable to their nerves, and then it did increase and renew and add to its ferocity.

  Henry was least terrified of all.

  His father thought that the house would go at: any moment. It was unsafe to leave, for huge trees were crashing in the forest and their roots were dragged like brooms across the land.

  Jack sat and rocked his body.

  The Scot muttered steadily.

  Henry bent near to the Negro and heard him wail, "I wish I was home, home, home!"

  When he went to McCobb, the Scot looked at his watch and shouted to him:

  "You better go to bed. That's where all good little boys and girls should be now."

  Henry went finally and sat beside his father on hassock. The thatch was ripped from the roof in a single blast and water began to dribble into the room.

  For six hours the terror was endured and then, abruptly, its last breath whistled over the Indian Ocean and peace was restored.

  The men relaxed.

  It was early night, and here and there a star briefly appeared. Everyone went outdoors to investigate the damage, but Henry was abstracted. He did not react in his usual way when Jack came running from the zebu pen and said that a man was lying under a tree.

  They went, armed, to see. They found a hairy back and a body that had a shape more or less human.

  But it was not a man. It had a tail and a fox-like head and it was dead.

  Stone stared at it.

  "That's a lemur," he said, at last. "A giant lemur. There were some in prehistoric times. They must be mighty shy--not to have showed themselves in all these years.

  Jack frowned. "That's not a man?"

  "No, Jack. Not a man."

  "Dawgone. That's what I saw the first night we was here. And now I recollect what was funny about that there man. He had a tail."

  The minds of McCobb and Stone harked back through time to the first hours of their arrival and they remembered Jack's "man." They exchange glances. Here was at last the final lifting of the long unspoken thought that perhaps somewhere in the secret places of the island a breed of men lived furtively. They turned over the dead animal and looked at Jack and smiled.

  But Henry had received two new ideas, born of the stress of the hurricane. He was scarcely interested in the lemur. He spoke of his ideas when his father came to his bedside before he had fallen asleep.

  Henry's blue eyes were wide and intent in the gloom.

  "Father!"

  "Yes, son."

  "Isn't this home?"

  "Yes, son. It's all the home we have." His silhouette, tall and supple, bent over the bed.

  "Then why did Jack say he wished he was home?"

  "Oh--did he say that?"

  "In the lightning."

  ' I'll explain all about it tomorrow, son. It's part of your geography lesson."

  "Oh."

  "Go to sleep."

  "Father!"

  Patiently now, "Yes, son?"

  "What are girls?"

  A long pause. A pause so long that it marked the mind of the child.

  "Girls?"

  "Boys and girls. I'm a little boy. What's a girl? Are they little, too?"

  Stone realized that they had grown away entirely even from the mention of women. His silence had been the result of his life. But the silence of McCobb and Jack was doubtless in deference to him.

  "Girls are part of another lesson, son. I'll tell you about them."

  "Now?"

  "Not now. Go to sleep."

  "'Night."

  "Good night."

  Chapter Six: THE MENACE

  THE years on the island passed with unbelievable speed, from the standpoint of retrospect. They mingled and telescoped in a memory of similar days and regular changes of the two seasons. Little things made separate days stand out. They recalled events, but they confused dates.

  A day when Henry was observed by his father floating in his boat on the pond-still harbor and looking intently overboard. His father stood on the beach and watched.

  He wondered what the boy was seeing.

  And then, suddenly, the water near the boat broke and there emerged a long and terrible arm, a sinuous arm, covered with saucer-shaped suckers and feeling in the unfamiliar air. Henry regarded the arm with interest but his father paled.:· .

  "Row, son, row! Come ashore!!"

  "There's an odd thing down here in the water--"

  "I know. Hurry--it's a devilfish."

  Henry rowed in obediently although reluctantly and his sweating father saw that the monster followed him nearly to the water's edge.

  Was Henry nine, then, or ten?

  How old was he when they began to talk in French and German instead of English? Eight for French? Seven?

  It was on his twelfth birthda
y that he showed his father the chalice he had carved from wood and covered with gold leaf. Its shape was handsome, but the horses he had engraved upon it were faintly like the pictures of horses but woefully unlike horses in the flesh.

  It was on his twelfth birthday that Stone discussed him with McCobb.

  Faithful McCobb. He had passed fifty. His eyes were still clear and his muscles firm--but his hair was salted with gray.

  "What do you think of the lad, McCobb?"

  "He's a grand lad."

  "And what are his faults?"

  "None," the Scotchman said loyally.

  "And what characteristics might become fault in him?"

  McCobb drew on his pipe.

  "That's different. He's independent and fearless. He's idealistic. You can have ideals here in this wilderness but the world would shock them rudely. He's willful and stubborn."

  "That's true."

  "And I've never seen a lad who had no contact with the lassies. It makes them strange. He's manly enough and he's polite. He'd make friends swiftly in any city--but he's strange. There's a look in his eye--an absent look--that's going to increase, Stephen, when he passes fourteen and begins to feel things he cannot define."

  Stone sighed. "I've told him, McCobb--all about women. About women as mothers. And I've recounted their sins. Their shortcomings. Their lack of imagination and their superficiality. I've tried to educate him--prejudice him, perhaps--without lying. He understands."

  "But will he understand when he begins to hunger--"

  "That hunger," Stone said with a quick anger, "is deceitful."

  "Deceitful, maybe--but it's strong, Stephen. It's mightily strong. And here it'll be like wanting the moon. Not even the moon--because you can see that."

  "Do you resent my plan, McCobb--after all these years?"

  "I do not. He's a fine lad. I was thinking only yesterday that I'd like to start him with the higher mathematics: You'll be well along to making a newspaperman of him, with your exercises and your editorial writing and your discussions of news and policy.

  But I can make an engineer of him, too, and it'll do him no harm. Jack's taught him to play the banjo--and we might as well combine to make him the cistern of all our knowledge. I'll teach him science."

  "You've done very well."

  The Scotchman chuckled. "I've done a little. He's learned his botany and his zoology. There isn't a plant on the island he hasn't gathered and we've invented names for the ones we cannot find in the books, as you know. But I made a mistake about not telling him of devilfish--having never seen one in these waters."

  "I don't think you should be blamed for that. He should have had the sense to see that it was an unwholesome thing."

  McCobb shrugged. "That's a characteristic of him. He has the sense--but his interest is always getting the best of his caution."

  Henry came round the house at that moment. He had been spading in the garden.

  His young shoulders were bare and his skin was Indian color. His hair had darkened a little and it now hung damply over his brow. He wore trousers of soft-tanned leather and shoes not unlike low riding boots.

  He grinned. "I got the new bed spaded. I'll plant it this afternoon."

  "Good work. You didn't have to finish it today. It was a two-day job."

  "You get full of energy," Henry said to his father. "And then--you want to work."

  "Even on your birthday."

  "Of course. What's the difference?"

  "I was going to give you a recess from your studies this afternoon."

  "I'd like that."

  "And you can choose what you want to do."

  Henry sat down on the step and considered.

  "Well-I'll fix that clock right after lunch. I've had it apart for four days now and every time I put it together there's something left over."

  He laughed.

  McCobb interrupted him. "He won't let me help."

  "I'll get it. Then I want to swim. I swam a hundred and six feet under water yesterday. McCobb measured it. After that--let's go for one of those pumas."

  That was when Henry was twelve.

  At fourteen or fifteen he sailed the big boat alone in the harbor and sometimes even outside the harbor. He went with his father and helped him build three signal fires--

  one on each claw of the land that surrounded the bay and one on the top of the mountain.

  He read about the use of the lasso, at that time, too, and the idea enthralled him.

  He made a lariat and practiced throwing it with such intensity that it wail difficult to make him study for several weeks. He became proficient in the use of his lasso, and startled his father by announcing that some day he was going to find where the big lemurs lived and rope one of them so that he could bring it home alive.

  In those years they had one very long and wet rainy season. They opened a good many of the copper drums which Stone had stored in the cellar. Jack caught a fever which kept him in bed delirious for a long time; and once, while Henry was taking care of him, the Negro raved for an hour and more about a girl named Clara.

  In those years they moved the garden from the stockade to the broad pampas where the zebus lived in their corral and they worked the ground by setting the steam winch in the middle of the place selected and pulling in the plow and harrow, so that the patch resembled a huge wheel with furrows for spokes. Henry ran the winch and Jack dragged back the implements after each inpull.

  Stone was stung by a scorpion and was incapacitated for many days. McCobb filled his room and the shelves in the living-room with golden ornaments and statues arid vases and bowls which he made in his shop. Henry often helped him work.

  In those years Henry's voice broke into sudden bass notes and returned two octaves to its childhood pitch until it finally settled in a rich baritone.

  Jack taught him to sing parts. Stone forbade the ballads about women. They made brand-new furniture for the house and they developed Rower gardens inside the stockade.

  Henry grew rapidly--too rapidly, for awhile--so that his towering back and spreading shoulders were gaunt and thin. But when he began to fill that frame with sinew it became apparent he would be a majestic man. His boyhood handsomeness took on some of his father's sculptured aquilinity.

  They found where the lemurs lived--in the thick, forest--on the other side of the mountain. They found sapphires in a rusty escarpment of one of the lesser hills.

  Henry made a dozen maps of the island and it was he who became fatigued with the familiar terms, The Island, The Mountain, and The Lake.

  He changed them to Stone Island, McCobb Mountain and Jack's Lake.

  To him, all the years were divided into happy and fascinating days. The world was his. He was having the romance of a Robinson Crusoe with the equipment that might have been provided by a Jules Verne. He was the modern man and the dawn man.

  No better life could have been arranged for a boy. None more exciting, none more healthful, none mbre adventuresome. '

  Then, in 1915, a strange cloud passed over them.

  It began with the change of the monsoons. This time they blew almost with hurricane violence, but steadily. Day and night the stormracked trees bent and sang. The surf turned the color of canvas and toiled mightily over the reefs beyond the end of Stone Island.

  Henry read and studied in his farher's dog-eared library.

  He counted the hours of the storm and waited patiently for it to abate. There was nothing else to do.

  But, after the seventy-fifth hour, the rain ceased falling and the wind continued.

  The vegetation shook itself dry. The sea piled up prodigiously, so that its smash upon the shore could be heard above the gale. The skies cleared a little and illumination came with the hours of dawn.

  Henry grew restive. He went finally to his father and shouted that he was going for a walk. His father bade him be careful, and he left.

  He went along the more exposed land arm of the bay. He forced his way against the wind-which
penetrated even the undergrowth.

  He came out on a rocky headland where the sea broke. It moved in lofty, sullen billows. They bent forward, stumbling on their green bases, and wrecked themselves upon the rocks, changing into foam and hurling ragged spray into the wind. The spent waves were sucked back. New waves came.

  That spectacle Henry watched with mature composure.

  He had an inward desire to throw out his arms and shout back at the surf with all his power, but he controlled it and stood still, watching the unreasoning fury of the sea before and below him.

  In a few moments he was drenched with spray. He tossed back his hair and grinned a personal taunt at the water. He felt exalted. He felt strong.

  He stayed for an hour, watching the tumult. Then he was joined by McCobb, who picked his way carefully over the slippery headland and shouted something in his ear which could not be understood and which was vaguely explained by signs.

  McCobb, too, felt the majesty of the sight. McCobb at heart was an artist. His northland exterior hid a multitude of appreciations and sensitivities.

  They were like two men listening to a great orchestra--each delighting in the fact that his companion also heard and comprehended.

  Then, suddenly, Henry felt McCobb's fingers bite into his arm. He looked with surprise it the Scotchman and found that his face was chalky and his arm extended.

  The boy's eyes followed the arm. Far out at sea, beyond the place where the waves individualized themselves, there was a ship.

  Henry froze.

  McCobb screamed in his ear:

  "Get your father."

  Henry ran back. 'He ran like a madman, ignoring the ripping brush and the irregular ground. In his mind's eye was a picture of the ship--a distant, diminutive hulk with bare spars sticking up against the inhospitable horizon.

  He burst furiously into the house.

  "A ship!"

  His voice clove through the tempest's uproar.

  His father read assurance on his face. "His father rose gropingly. Into his eyes a fever came and he shook like a leaf. He trotted to the kitchen, plucked Jack's arm, and together they followed Henry.

  McCobb was dancing and screaming on the head-land. He whirled his arms.

  Stone looked. Then he regarded his son, whose soul was in his eyes.