Fate Knocks at the Door | Page 2

fair (and in the socket
of the fruit-bowl when the weather-frames were on), a ready-filled pipe.
This he took to hand when coffee was brought.
His voice was seldom raised. He found great difficulty in expressing
himself, except upon affairs of the ship; yet, queerly enough, there were
times when he seemed deeply eager to say the things which came of his
endless silences. As unlikely a man as you would find in the Pacific, or
any other merchant-service, was this Carreras; a gentleman, if a very
bashful one; a deeply-read and kindly man, although it was quite as
difficult for him to extend a generous action, directly to be found
out,--and his mind was continually furnishing inclinations of this
sort,--as it was to express his thoughts. Either brought on a nervous
tension which left him shaken and drained. The right woman would
have adored Captain Carreras, and doubtless would have called forth
from his breast a love of heroic dimension; but she would have been
forced to do the winning; to speak and take the initiative in all but the
giving of happiness. Temperate for a bachelor, clean throughout,
charmingly innocent of the world, and a splendid seaman. To one of
fine sensibilities, there was something about the person of Captain
Carreras of softly glowing warmth, and rarely tender.
Bedient had been with him as cook for over a year, during which the
Truxton had swung down to Australia and New South Wales, and
called at half the Asiatic and insular ports from Vladivostok to Bombay.

Since he was a little chap (back of which were the New York memories,
vague, but strange and persistent), there had always been some ship for
Bedient, but the Truxton was by far the happiest.... It was from the
Truxton just a few months before that he had gone ashore day after day
for a fortnight at Adelaide; and a wee woman five years older, and a
cycle wiser, had invariably been waiting with new mysteries in her
house.... Moreover, on the Truxton, he had nothing to do with the
forecastle galley--there was a Chinese for that--and Captain Carreras,
fancying him from the beginning, had quartered him aft, where, except
on days like this, when Mother Earth's pneumatic cushion seemed limp
and flattened, there was a breeze to hammock in, and plenty of candles
for night reading.
Then the Captain had a box of books, the marvel of which cannot begin
to be described. Andrew's books were but five or six, chosen for great
quantity and small bulk; tightly and toughly bound little books of
which the Bible was first. This was his book of fairies, his Aesop; his
book of wanderings and story, of character and mystery; his revelations,
the source of his ideality, the great expander of limitations; his book of
love and adventure and war; the book unjudgable and the bed-rock of
all literary judgment. He knew the Bible as only one can who has
played with it as a child; as only one can who has found it alone
available, when an insatiable love of print has swept across the young
mind. Nothing could change him now; this was his book of Fate.
Except for those vision-times in the big city, Andrew could not
remember when he had not read the Bible, nor did he remember
learning to read. He seemed to have forgotten how to read before he
came to sea at seven, but when an old sailor pointed out on the stern of
the jolly-boat, the letters that formed the name of his first ship--it had
all come back to the child; and then he found his first Bible. Slowly
conceiving its immensity, its fullness _for him_--he was almost lifted
from his body with the upward winging of happiness. It was his first
great exaltation, and there was a sacredness about it which kept him
from telling anybody.... And now all the structures of the great
Scripture were tenoned in his brain; so that he knew the frame of every
part, but the inner meanings of more and more marvellous dimension

seemed inexhaustible. Always excepting the great Messianic
Figure--the white tower of his consciousness--he loved Saint Paul and
the Forerunner best among the men....
There was also a big book in the Captain's chest--_Life and Death on
the Ocean_--quarto-sized and printed in agate. It was filled with mutiny,
murder, storm, open-boat cannibalism and agonies of thirst, handspike
and cutlass inhumanities. No shark, pirate nor man-killing whale had
been missed; no ghastly wreck, derelict nor horrifying phantom of the
sea had escaped the nameless, furious compiler. For four days and
nights, Andrew glared consumingly into this terrible book, and when he
came to the writhing "Finis," involved in a sort of typhoon tailpiece--he
was whipped, and never could bring himself