The Savage Gentleman

by Philip Wylie

  Henry was a man, then--although his life had been such that he looked five years younger than his actual age. At his father's insistence he had grown a heavy, bronzed mustache which covered his lips and gave him an attribute of years which only emphasized his youthfulness.

  The event which postulated the changes in the men occurred during the shift of the monsoons--the time which had punctuated nearly all their mental permutations.

  It was a dramatic happening.

  An incredible happening.

  The monsoon had shifted with an unusual gentleness. There had been the ordinary rains, the regular winds, and the steady flow of gray clouds, but each particular of the phenomenon had been of low degree.

  Then the weather had settled. For two weeks they had enjoyed sun and calm.

  After that, however, the winds returned. They were forceful winds in comparison to a sea breeze or a down-draft from a mountain range, but they were less than gales. This meteorological variety interested the men. The new winds blew for two days and stopped.

  The sun shone.

  And then, again, came an abrupt alteration. On the 26th of April there was a squall and a lowering of the skies. The day darkened with sunset and the next dawn was black and stormy.

  Jack went out on the harbor to fish and gave up.

  "My boat blew around like a feather," he reported, when he returned to the house."

  Stone grunted and sipped his perpetual wine.

  McCobb came in from the shop where he had been working.

  "It's blowing hard," he said.

  "Where's Henry?" Stone asked.

  "He'll be in. He was helping me."

  The window-frames rattled and a door slammed.

  Stone fidgeted in his chair and growled at the elements.

  His son appeared

  "This is a fine monsoon. It finished its annual volume of business twice and now it's started in for the third time."

  "How's the glass?"

  "Falling again."

  "Did you fix the pig pen?"

  Henry nodded. "Jack did."

  "Well--you better look at it. Remember the last time. The pigs got out and bit the goats. The goats butted a hole in their corral--"

  "I know, father. It's all fixed. The pig pen won't blow over again."

  "Have a glass of wine."

  "No, thanks."

  "Keep the fever out of your bones."

  Henry looked at his father.

  The eagle's profile was still bold in old age but around the mouth were lines like scars and the mouth itself trembled sometimes with impotence and indecision.

  "Keep the fever out," he said cheerfully, "and bring the gout in. You're not well, father. I've noticed that you get out of breath often. You ought to take it easy."

  "Take it easy! That's a worthy axiom! In all my life I never took it easy. I--what's that?"

  "What?"

  A single pulsation had reached Stone's ears. An almost whispered sound, muffled and wind-torn.

  A sound like the hammering of a woodpecker on a pulpy log.

  A remote drumming.

  "I heard something. But it's gone. Tree in the wind, I guess. Now--about this taking it easy business--"

  Henry held up his hand. He, too, had heard the sound.

  He went to the window and looked out.

  The low clouds raced perpetually overhead, like newsprint running through celestial presses. Trees bent to the gale.

  "Funny," Henry murmured.

  On Stone's face was an expression of perplexity, of partial memory, or groping.

  Then the sound came so that both could hear it and it was a sound that did not stop.

  A soft purring sound that issued from outdoors.

  Henry was struck by a thought. A blinding thought. He rushed to the door and out on the porch.

  His father "vas behind him. He stared over the portion of the sea which was visible, but he could discover nothing save the rising and falling water.

  Jack ran from the kitchen--by then, the noise had permeated everything. Its intensity was increasing.

  Behind Jack came McCobb.

  And McCobb spoke:

  "It's an engine!"

  "Great God!" Henry said.

  "On the sea somewhere--" McCobb continued.

  Then Jack said:

  "There it is. It's—"

  "Where?"

  "There!"

  Jack pointed not out on the water but up in the air.

  They ran from the porch into the compound.

  They saw.

  From out of the lowering southwest a thing sped through the air. It was a speck at first, but it rushed toward them at an incredible speed.

  Probably all of them considered it as a gigantic and hideous bird for a fraction of a second. They watched with motionless attention.

  Stone spoke.

  "Man," he said softly, "man--has learned to fly, It's an aerial ship. With an engine."

  The plane came nearer. It was flying below the clouds and directly toward the island.

  They did not repeat the scene they had made when the ship approached their shore.

  The thing happened too quickly. It was too incredible, too monstrous, too inconceivably remote from their wildest dreams.

  They made observations barely loud enough to be heard by themselves.

  The wind pressed upon them.

  The sound of the motor overhead became an enthralling roar.

  "It's on wings that are stiff," Stone murmured.

  "There may be no men in it," McCobb said.

  They'll be here in a few seconds, Henry thought.

  Only Jack was silent. He had thrown himself on the ground. His numb mind identified the plane with an angel of the Lord.

  It flashed over, the island. The shining body was silver. The wings were black.

  The nose was crimson. There were letters marked along the fuselage and the word, Promise, which they realized later was the name of the ship.

  "It's turning" Henry bawled, suddenly.

  It did turn. It banked steeply, swung around in the gale, and came back across them.

  This time, through glass windows, they saw two down-peering men.

  One of them lifted his arm and waved.

  The sound of the thing was intolerable. Its size was enormous. McCobb threw himself in an attitude of supplication. Henry, seeing it, did likewise. Stone waved back toward the miracle that had come in the storm.

  The plane zoomed up into the teeth of the gale and swept back a second time.

  Then they saw the men again, and the one at the window first clasped his hands together and shook them. After that he nodded vigorously and then pointed toward the east. The last thing they saw was his friendly wave.

  The plane turned with the wind again and roared away from the storm.

  Its sound died rapidly.

  From the ground Henry rose. He helped McCobb to his feet.

  Together they raised Jack.

  Stone motioned them toward the house.

  When they were inside, Stone fell upon his knees with his face over the seat of his chair.

  "Oh, God," he said in a trembling voice, "if there is a God, speed these men back to--other men. Put wisdom in their minds so they will understand our dire distress and let them bring rescue to us. Forgive us our debts--"

  He choked.

  In the plane one of the aviators stared at the fast vanishing island.

  His eyes were wide with wonder.

  He moved through the tiny cabin and stared at an immense map pasted on a table.

  A dotted line ran across an empty sea. He added a few dots, after a moment of calculation, and he drew in an island in the shape of a sting ray where before had been unmarked blue.

  Then he sat down beside the man at the controls.

  "That's something, Chuck."

  "My God, yes."

  Both of them shouted--the cabin was dizzy with din. "Those poor devils may have been there for years."

&
nbsp; "Must have been. Did you see the house?"

  "Yeah. And their boat was on the beach--what was left of it."

  "We'll send somebody back from Hobart;"

  "If we get there ourselves."

  "Nuts."

  They flew on.

  It became afternoon and night.

  Light shone on their instruments.

  The wind increased.

  They sat side by side, grim, taut, listening.

  In the night there was a break in the sound of the engine and they exchanged terrified glances. . . .

  "It had wheels on the bottom."

  They were sitting at the dinner table, drunk with excitement.

  "I saw them."

  "It must run along the ground until it gathers momentum and then rush into the air."

  "It was driven by a screw--like a ship." McCobb's eyes danced. "Man, what a craft!"

  "That there engine," Jack said over their shoulders, "sure did rattle."

  They laughed too loudly.

  "They must have an immense cruising range. It's fully two thousand miles to anything."

  "And speed!"

  Henry's reminder silenced them.

  Stone drew all the tablecloth with a knife and said at last:

  "How much, Henry? How much, McCobb?"

  The engineer considered aloud:

  "Well--she came by with the wind--going at double the speed of the clouds, or more. When she bucked the wind--tacked square into it--she must have gone as fast as any locomotive. I should hate to guess--but I wouldn't be surprised if in still air she could do--a hundred miles an hour. Maybe a hundred and fifty."

  "Great Jehovah!"

  Henry became hysterical with laughter. They pounded his back and gave him a drink.

  "Let's see," he said finally. "Ten hours--say, twelve hours to the mainland."

  "Twelve hours. Why--they'll be landing soon, then. In a few minutes."

  Stone nodded. "And the cables will begin to hum. The world will be told. They'll telegraph it all over United States. My own Record will come out tomorrow morning with the news of castaways. A new island. They could certainly see down here well enough--although they went by so fast that they probably missed a good many of the details."

  There was a little silence.

  Henry had the courage to voice the thought so far unspoken.

  "I presume that those things do--have accidents--once in a while."

  If they had known the hazards of a long trans-oceanic flight, they would not have been so jubilant.

  There was an interval of deeper stillness. McCobb broke it:

  "They looked as if they knew their business."

  Everyone leaped avidly upon that thought.

  "They were confident!"

  "They smiled," Henry said, in defiance of his fear.

  "They clasped hands and waved and pointed. They understood what we needed, all right."

  "Maybe they'll send one of them back for us," McCobb hazarded,

  "One of them there airships?" Jack asked nervously. "Sure. Why not?"

  "No, sir. No, siree! I'm a-going to wait for a boat. I don't want to go fooling around among the birds. Not me."

  An uproar of laughter in which Jack joined.

  "How fast do you suppose their ships can go?"

  The use of they to mean all the other people in the world was pathetic--but the islanders did not realize that.

  "Maybe twenty knots," McCobb guessed.

  He figured with a pencil on the tablecloth while everyone bent forward.

  "Twenty knots into two thousand. One hundred hours. Four--say, five days--

  counting the flying. But—"

  "But what?"

  "What do we know about it? One of those things may be back tomorrow. Perhaps with the mail."

  "By God! I hadn't thought of that!"

  "Jack--get your banjo!"

  It was an ecstatic evening, a long, hilarious night.

  Then--day.

  Henry went--almost I without sleep--to the bay and sailed out a little distance in his boat. The storm had abated but heavy swells were moving in rows through the mouth of the harbor. He sat there on the water watching the sky.

  With the corning of night he and the others were ready to admit that possibly no airship was being sent to them.

  Or else that they had--overestimated speeds.

  Or that it took considerable time to prepare a ship.

  Or--

  Rationalization made everything less obvious.

  They built a fire on the bare rock at the headlands--a huge fire that made a star visible over many miles of water.

  They fired the heap of débris on top of Mount McCobb.

  Jack tended the headland fire. Henry carried wood all night to the flames on the mountain.

  Occasionally he lay down beside them and tried to sleep, but his ears were always attuned to catch the magical sound of a motor.

  They ate very little.

  On the second day the fires were still going, although they had relented the pace of feeding them.

  On the third, exhausted, they all slept. Not all at once--but by turns.

  "Probably," Stone said, and his first assumption was very close to the truth, "they only fly out to sea once in a great while. Probably they're sending a boat. In a day or two-

  -"

  Keep the fires going. Make them into smudges by day. Huge columns of smoke--

  like the Lord leading the Children of Israel--stiff-standing above the summit of McCobb and swinging in the little wind over the water.

  On the fourth day they were worn by the strain. They sat silent most of the time--

  attending to the fires regularly, climbing the mountain until all were footweary--hurrying to the beach with axes.

  On the fifth day they remained beside the shore, straining their eyes.

  The sixth was like it. The sun came out and it was warm.

  Beds in the house went unmade. Weeds gained in the gardens. No one shaved.

  A week after the electrical day found them still in good spirits. There were plenty of possibilities.

  "Any day, now. Maybe they can't travel in airships or in boats as fast as we'd thought."

  "Any day. Of course. I believe that those fellows didn't know within a long way of where they were. Too cloudy to navigate and probably hard in a thing like that anyway.

  They've doubtless sent a ship and it may take a long time for that ship to locate us. Maybe even a month."

  Henry swallowed his impatience:'"

  "A month?"

  "Why not? It's a big ocean and the island's a small speck. Keep the fires going."

  "Maybe--"

  Someone frowned at Henry. Maybe the ocean was too big and the island too small.

  Maybe the airship had never reached--land.

  Stone sat on the porch, his cane between his knees. Henry lay on his back at his father's feet. Both men seemed weary. There were circles under their eyes and their skins wee haggard and drawn over their cheek bones.

  Down on the headland a fire--a small fire in comparison to those which once had raged there--sent a single desultory plume of smoke into the vacant air.

  It was a month, that day, since the visitor from the skies had fled overhead.

  "It couldn't happen to us twice," Henry said in a strangled voice.

  His father did not answer.

  McCobb appeared at the door and murmured that it looked like rain.

  As if in answer, a string snapped on Jack's banjo, which had been lying mute in the living-room for thirty days.

  Stone never rebounded from the catastrophe. He lost all interest in the schemes which the others invented to explain the silence.

  Once, when Henry suggested that the men in the air vessel had possibly believed the islanders were there as free men and had merely reported the existence of the island, and that someone sooner or later would come to verify the report, Stone had said:

  "Bosh."

  It was h
is last spark. A negative spark. An admission of surrender.

  He had borne for a great many years a full knowledge of the awfulness of his misdeed. He had paid a hundred times over for its rashness.

  Stone had been a mighty man. New York had called him brilliant and aggressive.

  Paris had called him Spartan. In London he was evaluated as shrewd and acquisitive.

  He had planned to perfection one of the most audacious human experiments ever made--to perfection if it may be overlooked that he neglected to supply a way for the return of his adventurers.

  In the early years of the colonization of Stone Island it had been his brain and his spirit which furnished the driving force. He had led three men from despair to actual joy.

  He had founded and energized a new world.

  But now his strength was taken away. Remorse and disappointment had shorn him.

  The eagle was fallen.

  Day after day he sat beside the window in his chair, an old man, a Napoleon on Elba, planning escapes he was impotent to perform, hoping for miracles, and knowing that his doom was to be both certain and slow.

  If one ship flew over, another will.

  He did not even react to that.

  They tried everything to bring him from himself. Their attempts were pitiful--

  because in them was the humiliation and misery of their own souls.

  McCobb made a special omelet. Eat, a little, Viking. Eat. You've sat there with no food and only your wine for days.

  Days.

  Henry brought a necklace from the ruins.

  Look, father, it's beautiful. A word carved on every stone. Handiwork unparalleled in Egypt or even Greece.

  Silence.

  They tried mock anger."

  Get yourself out of it. This is no behavior for a man.

  Words used to children--and he was a child, sitting there and staring at emptiness.

  By and by he got up. He shaved. He made his bed. He changed his clothes. He dined with them. He went out in the sun and weeded in the garden.

  But he never smiled again.

  He seldom spoke.

  One day his hair turned snow-white. A pompom of white hair above the crag of his brow.

  His steps faltered.

  "What shall we do?" Henry asked anxiously of McCobb.

  "What can we do, son? His fire has burned out. Like the fires down on the point.

  With them."

  "But--"