Chapter XXVI

“So the rum’s not for you?” said Rathbone Lace.

“No.”

“Then let us row without it up to Oil Palm village.”

“I’m not going up the river.”

He stared, peeled the fruit beside him and ate it, then spoke. “Does that mean that my room is better than my company?”

“No. But I have settled it that as I am Captain, I will be Captain.”

“You mean captain like Holy Bartram? There are others you might copy. They live--he’s dead.”

“Yes.”

“Your ambition is to be called Saintly Scott?”

“Perhaps----”

He and I were at table on his veranda and it was dusk. He pushed back his native-wrought chair, I mine. A Negro woman with a large soft tread cleaned away food and dishes. Lace and I sat upon the steps where the night wind might find us. It was hot and there sounded a dull moaning and roaring from the bar.

“Daga----” he said, and stopped to light his pipe.

“I saw this place,” I said, “before I came to it. There was a wild night in Edinburgh and I was in danger. I stood against a wall, listening and looking into darkness. It opened before me, this African ocean and that castle, that beach, those palms. Had my ear been as keen as my eye, I would have heard those drums.”

They were beating below us, below Factor’s Hill, in Daga village. They had, likewise, a bonfire down there and some celebration. Beat, beat, beat, beat----

“I’ve heard tell of visions,” he said. “I don’t have them.”

“I can have them,” I answered, “but the trouble with me is action.”

“You are beautifully clear.--An uninformed man would say that your life was sufficiently active.”

“So he would--the uninformed.”

He laughed. “The same old David--plunging always from your stake and being brought up short! Now I--I am free!”

The bowl of his pipe glowed. “Daga suits me. I don’t even want to be Captain of the _Janet_. There’s danger there--and no danger here.”

“I suppose not. At times life seems to me a very big thing--but the next hour a most puny and wretched one!”

He made a smoke cloud. Below us the drums were beating and beating. “Then I say again, Let’s go in the old boat to-morrow up to Oil Palm village.”

“No.”

Something appeared on the step beside us--rum in a decanter with glasses. The African woman with no noise had put it there, then vanished. Lace poured himself out a dram. “None for you?”

“No.”

He drank--the odor of the thing that made you forget, that made you seem to yourself powerful and gigantic, was in the air--the drums were beating, beating.

“Man is a preying animal,” he said. “White, black, red or yellow, what does it matter? The successful is he who recognizes the fact and preys and joys in it.--You’ll be happier, Scott, when you bow to Nature!”

Through the dusk the sea still gleamed and the _Janet_ was riding there. Nearer at hand a last glow struck Daga castle and its barracoon that was filling for the _Janet_. The palms were drawn against a copper sky. “I do bow, Lace,” I said and got to my feet.

“Aren’t you going to sleep ashore?”

“No.”

“Bartram again!” he said. “When you fell heir to his ship did you _become_ him?”

In a certain sense it seemed to me that I had. Going out to the _Janet_, while the men rowed, hearing the waves upon the bar, marking the stars lighted above Africa, it was Bartram that I assumed. Assumed him in the sheer feeling older--first manhood all passed, maturity here and here for some time; assumed him in the watchful, plodding care for the ship and her great worth to me, her great and yet melancholy worth; assumed him in a concentration on getting the thing done in the best way possible; assumed him in his eye upon the stars. The _Janet_ encreased before me. I heard Olafson’s deep slow voice and a fiddle in the forecastle.

Within a week we began lading--Negroes from Dahomey, from the Camaroons, the Niger and the Zaire. At last all was done and we would depart in the night. The elder and the younger Lace and the captains of ships in harbor came aboard to drink farewell and good voyage. Again in the cabin I was Bartram.--Garth was here and he noticed it. “By God, you’ve but to let your beard grow, Scott, to be Bartram! And let me tell you, you might do worse. Damn me, he trod too soft with his niggers and his sailors, but he was a big man!”

They drank and talked and departed, and I was glad to see them go, and that, too, was Bartram. It was night. We made sail and slipped the land while our slaves were below in thick darkness. It never did to let them see at any close range the receding shores. But up through the gratings, as I walked the deck, came the familiar crying and the familiar odor from miserably crowded bodies in a tropic night. We sailed, and I looked out and upward at Bartram’s stars.

Olafson rested first mate, and a good one, almost as good as McNaughton. He and I had our own sympathy, the big Norseman, with some story, I knew, behind and around and before him. For second mate I had taken on a Scot, Alexander Nicol, who had been the same on the _John Land_, lost by fire. And for surgeon, in Colley’s place, there was Lisle from the same ship--a good man, but not Colley. Wheeler the boatswain, Michaelson, and the seamen who had outlived the plague remained, and Tom and Don who would stay with the _Janet_ till she sank. And in Kingston and in Bridgetown we gathered two-score and five seamen. As far as I could I picked them out; they were not a bad lot.

Now and again, for mysterious reasons, the Company operating there in England produced changes in routes and markets afar. For a long space of time a ship might be for the Islands, steady as a ferry between the Slave Coast and the British Indies. Then a notification, and for a string of voyages ports of North America. We had gone to Charlestown in South Carolina the voyage before the disastrous voyage. It was my port now. The Company agent there was one Trevannion.

Using Bartram’s cabin, taking his place at table, sailing his ship, more and more I felt Bartram and his stars. Yet was I also David Scott. And around David Scott and Bartram and all came at times like a flicker that strange sense of being another and a larger, a Some One that held and understood the others, but was not they.

This first voyage from Daga proved a straight, quiet, successful one. I delivered my cargo, smaller by a very little than when it was taken on. Trevannion I had met before. Charlestown harbor and waterside, Charlestown inns and their frequenters, some of the houses, the low, sandy, flowery country round about, the rice fields and the great pine timber became familiar. With a number of differences it yet reminded me of Virginia.

Beginning now to use the continent and not the islands, I reasoned one night, standing before the minute mirror in Bartram’s cabin, as to whether, after all these years, David Scott should strive to provide for himself a different physical aspect. As Garth had suggested, I might become bearded like Bartram. It was possible perhaps slightly to change my voice and manner of speaking.--As for my story, that had long been provided. Africa, Indies and the sea between, it was known and forgotten that I was some kin of Bartram, a Scot whose youth had been passed in France but who had joined the _Janet_ on some one of her returns to Bristol.

And long ago Bartram and I had discussed it, whether or no I should change my name. But in us both was something that clung to the given name--especially if it was good Scots--and that hated for their own sakes disguises.

It was not far from seven years since I had run away from Daniel Askew. Standing before the mirror, I put side by side my man then and my man now, noted the difference and thought that the Captain of the _Janet_ was safe enough, even though some fate should drive him into Chesapeake. And even if that were so, how unlikely any meeting with any who had known Daniel Askew’s or Amory Hall while he was there! On my forehead I carried a jagged line of white, scar of a wound received at Amory Hall in a wood we were felling. A great storm came up suddenly with wind that tore branches from the trees and sent them flying. Such a one was borne endwise against me like a spear and gave the hurt. But who would ever meet me who knew that? I dismissed all thought of it.

Trevannion was a different man from North and other agents that I knew. I could tell tales of him, and of Charlestown that was both fair and unfair, courteous and uncourteous, right and wrong like the rest of the world. But now I am back upon the _Janet_, and we go to Africa for more Negroes.

So, coming and going, with various fortunes, David Scott spent two years.