Read Ebook: The Wonderful Year by Locke William John

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Ebook has 222 lines and 13565 words, and 5 pages

"That ship," continued his father, "is sailing to Venezuela, where we have a concession from the government to build breakwaters and buoy the harbors and put up light-houses. We have been working there for two years and we've spent about two million dollars. And some day we hope to get our money. Sometimes," continued Mr. Forrester, "it is necessary to throw good money after bad. That is what we are doing in Venezuela."

"I don't understand," interrupted Roddy with polite interest.

"You are not expected to," said his father. "If you will kindly condescend to hold down the jobs I give you, you can safely leave the high finance of the company to your father."

"Quite so," said Roddy hastily. "Where shall we go to lunch?"

As though he had not heard him, Forrester, Senior, continued relentlessly: "To-morrow," he said, "you are sailing on that ship for Porto Cabello; we have just started a light-house at Porto Cabello, and are buoying the harbor. You are going for the F. C. C. You are an inspector."

Roddy groaned and sank into a chair.

"You sit in the sun," said Mr. Forrester, "with a pencil, and every time our men empty a bag of cement into the ocean you make a mark. At the same time, if you are not an utter idiot and completely blind, you can't help but see how a light-house is set up. The company is having trouble in Venezuela, trouble in collecting its money. You might as well know that, because everybody in Venezuela will tell you so. But that's all you need to know. The other men working for the company down there will think, because you are my son, that you know more about what I'm doing in Venezuela than they do. Now, understand, you don't know anything, and I want you to say so. I want you to stick to your own job, and not mix up in anything that doesn't concern you. There will be nothing to distract you. McKildrick writes me that in Porto Cabello there are no tea-houses, no roads for automobiles, and, except for the fire-flies, all the white lights go out at nine o'clock.

Like all the other great captains, Mr. Forrester succeeded through the work of his lieutenants. For him, in every part of the world, more especially in those parts of it in which the white man was but just feeling his way, they were at work.

In Siberia, in British East Africa, in Upper Burmah, engineers of the Forrester Construction Company had tamed, shackled and bridged great rivers. In the Soudan they had thrown up ramparts against the Nile. Along the coasts of South America they had cast the rays of the Forrester revolving light upon the face of the waters of both the South Atlantic and the Pacific.

They were of all ages, from the boys who had never before looked through a transit except across the college campus, to sun-tanned, fever-haunted veterans who, for many years, had fought Nature where she was most stubborn, petulant and cruel. They had seen a tidal-wave crumple up a breakwater which had cost them a half-year of labor, and slide it into the ocean. They had seen swollen rivers, drunk with the rains, trip bridges by the ankles and toss them on the banks, twisted and sprawling; they had seen a tropical hurricane overturn a half-finished light-house as gayly as a summer breeze upsets a rocking-chair; they had fought with wild beasts, they had fought with wild men, with Soudanese of the Desert, with Federated Sons of Labor, with Yaqui Indians, and they had seen cholera, sleeping-sickness and the white man's gin turn their compounds into pest-camps and crematories.

Of these things Mr. Forrester, in the twenty-seven-story Forrester sky-scraper, where gray-coated special policemen and elevator-starters touched their caps to him, had seen nothing. He regarded these misadventures by flood and field only as obstacles to his carrying out in the time stipulated a business contract. He accepted them patiently as he would a strike of the workmen on the apartment-house his firm was building on Fifty-ninth Street.

Sometimes McKenzie returned and, in evening dress, dined with him at his up-town club, or at a fashionable restaurant, where the senses of the engineer were stifled by the steam heat, the music and the scent of flowers; where, through a joyous mist of red candle-shades and golden champagne, he once more looked upon women of his own color. It was not under such conditions that Mr. Forrester could expect to know the real McKenzie. This was not the McKenzie who, two months before, was fighting death on a diet of fruit salts, and who, against the sun, wore a bath-towel down his spinal column. On such occasions Mr. Forrester wanted to know if, with native labor costing but a few yards of cotton and a bowl of rice, the new mechanical rivet-drivers were not an extravagance. How, he would ask, did salt water and a sweating temperature of one hundred and five degrees act upon the new anti-rust paint? That was what he wanted to know.

Once one of his young lieutenants, inspired by a marvellous dinner, called to him across the table: "You remember, sir, that light-house we put up in the Persian Gulf? The Consul at Aden told me, this last trip, that before that light was there the wrecks on the coast averaged fifteen a year and the deaths from drowning over a hundred. You will be glad to hear that since your light went up, three years ago, there have been only two wrecks and no deaths."

Mr. Forrester nodded gravely.

"I remember," he said. "That was the time we made the mistake of sending cement through the Canal instead of around the Cape, and the tolls cost us five thousand dollars."

It was not that Mr. Forrester weighed the loss of the five thousand dollars against a credit of lives saved. It was rather that he was not in the life-saving business. Like all his brother captains, he was, in a magnificent way, mechanically charitable. For institutions that did make it a business to save life he wrote large checks. But he never mixed charity and business. In what he was doing in the world he either was unable to see, or was not interested in seeing, what was human, dramatic, picturesque. When he forced himself to rest from his labor, his relaxation was the reading of novels of romance, of adventure--novels that told of strange places and strange peoples. Between the after-dinner hour and bedtime, or while his yacht picked her way up the Sound, these tales filled him with surprise. Often he would exclaim admiringly: "I don't see how these fellows think up such things."

He did not know that, in his own business, there were melodramas, romances which made those of the fiction-writers ridiculous.

And so, when young Sam Caldwell, the third vice-president, told Mr. Forrester that if the company hoped to obtain the money it had sunk in Venezuela it must finance a revolution, Mr. Forrester, without question, consented to the expense, and put it down under "Political." Had Sam Caldwell shown him that what was needed was a construction-raft or a half-dozen giant steam-shovels, he would have furnished the money as readily and with as little curiosity.

Sam Caldwell, the third vice-president, was a very smart young man. Every one, even men much older than he, said as much, and no one was more sure of it than was Sam Caldwell himself. His vanity on that point was, indeed, his most prepossessing human quality.

He was very proud of his freedom from those weak scruples that prevented rival business men from underbidding the F. C. C. He congratulated himself on the fact that at thirty-four he was much more of a cynic than men of sixty. He held no illusions, and he rejoiced in a sense of superiority over those of his own class in college, who, in matters of business, were still hampered by old-time traditions.

If in any foreign country the work of the F. C. C. was halted by politicians, it was always Sam Caldwell who was sent across the sea to confer with them. He could quote you the market-price on a Russian grand-duke, or a Portuguese colonial governor, as accurately as he could that of a Tammany sachem. His was the non-publicity department. People who did not like him called him Mr. Forrester's jackal. When the lawyers of the company had studied how they could evade the law on corporations, and had shown how the officers of the F. C. C. could do a certain thing and still keep out of jail, Sam Caldwell was the man who did that thing.

He had been to Venezuela "to look over the ground," and he had reported that President Alvarez must go, and that some one who would be friendly to the F. C. C. must be put in his place. That was all Mr. Forrester knew, or cared to know. With the delay in Venezuela he was impatient. He wanted to close up that business and move his fleet of tenders, dredges and rafts to another coast. So, as was the official routine, he turned over the matter to Sam Caldwell, to settle it in Sam Caldwell's own way.

Every ten minutes El Se?or Roddy had made the same threat, and the workmen, once hopeful that he would carry it into effect, had grown despondent.

In the mind of Peter de Peyster there was no doubt that, unless something was done, and at once, the Order of the White Mice would cease to exist. The call of Gain, of Duty, of Pleasure had scattered the charter members to distant corners of the world. Their dues were unpaid, the pages of the Golden Book of Record were blank. Without the necessary quorum of two there could be no meetings, without meetings there could be no dinners, and, incidentally, over all the world people continued to die, and the White Mice were doing nothing to prevent it. Peter de Peyster, mindful of his oath, of his duty as the Most Secret Secretary and High Historian of the Order, shot arrows in the air in the form of irate postal-cards. He charged all White Mice to instantly report to the Historian the names of those persons whom, up to date, they had saved from death.

"Beg to report during gale off Finisterre, went to rescue of man overboard. Man overboard proved to be Reagan, gunner's mate, first class, holding long-distance championship for swimming and two medals for saving life. After I sank the third time, Reagan got me by the hair and towed me to the ship. Who gets the assist?"

From Raffles' Hotel, Singapore, the Orchid Hunter cabled:

"Have saved own valuable life by refusing any longer to drink Father's beer. Give everybody medal."

From Porto Cabello, Venezuela, Roddy wrote:

"I have saved lives of fifty Jamaica coolies daily by not carrying an axe. If you want to save my life from suicide, sunstroke and sleeping-sickness--which attacks me with special virulence immediately after lunch--come by next steamer."

A week later, Peter de Peyster took the Red D boat south, and after touching at Porto Rico and at the Island of Cura?ao, swept into Porto Cabello and into the arms of his friend.

Much time had passed since the two friends had been able to insult each other face to face.

"Do you mean you think I can't plant deep-sea buoys?" demanded Roddy.

"You can't plant potatoes!" said Peter. "If you had to set up lamp-posts, with the street names on them, along Broadway, you would put the ones marked Union Square in Columbus Circle."

"I want you to know," shouted Roddy, "that my buoys are the talk of this port. These people are just crazy about my buoys--especially the red buoys. If you didn't come to Venezuela to see my buoys, why did you come? I will plant a buoy for you to-morrow!" challenged Roddy. "I will show you!"

Peter had been a week in Porto Cabello, and, in keeping Roddy at work, had immensely enjoyed himself. Each morning, in the company's gasoline launch, the two friends went put-put-putting outside the harbor, where Roddy made soundings for his buoys, and Peter lolled in the stern and fished. His special pleasure was in trying to haul man-eating sharks into the launch at the moment Roddy was leaning over the gunwale, taking a sounding.

One evening at sunset, on their return trip, as they were under the shadow of the fortress, the engine of the launch broke down. While the black man from Trinidad was diagnosing the trouble, Peter was endeavoring to interest Roddy in the quaint little Dutch Island of Cura?ao that lay one hundred miles to the east of them. He chose to talk of Cura?ao because the ship that carried him from the States had touched there, while the ship that brought Roddy south had not. This fact irritated Roddy, so Peter naturally selected the moment when the launch had broken down and Roddy was both hungry and peevish to talk of Cura?ao.

"Think of your never having seen Cura?ao!" he sighed. "Some day you certainly must visit it. With a sea as flat as this is to-night you could make the run in the launch in twelve hours. It is a place you should see."

"I'll bet," challenged Peter, "you don't know about the mother and the two daughters who were exiled from Venezuela and live in Cura?ao, and who look over here every night at sunset?"

Roddy pointed at the flat, yellow fortress that rose above them. Behind the tiny promontory on which the fortress crouched was the town, separated from it by a stretch of water so narrow that a golf-player, using the quay of the custom-house for a tee, could have driven a ball against the prison wall.

Daily, from the town, Peter had looked across the narrow harbor toward the level stretch of limestone rock that led to the prison gates, and had seen the petty criminals, in chains, splash through the pools left by the falling tide, had watched each pick up a cask of fresh water, and, guarded by the barefooted, red-capped soldiers, drag his chains back to the prison. Now, only the boat's-length from them, he saw the sheer face of the fortress, where it slipped to depths unknown into the sea. It impressed him most unpleasantly. It had the look less of a fortress than of a neglected tomb. Its front was broken by wind and waves, its surface, blotched and mildewed, white with crusted salt, hideous with an eruption of dead barnacles. As each wave lifted and retreated, leaving the porous wall dripping like a sponge, it disturbed countless crabs, rock scorpions and creeping, leech-like things that ran blindly into the holes in the limestone; and, at the water-line, the sea-weed, licking hungrily at the wall, rose and fell, the great arms twisting and coiling like the tentacles of many devilfish.

Distaste at what he saw, or the fever that at sunset drives wise Venezuelans behind closed shutters, caused Peter to shiver slightly.

For some moments, with grave faces and in silence, the two young men sat motionless, the mind of each trying to conceive what life must be behind those rusted bars and moss-grown walls.

Peter de Peyster exclaimed profanely. "Are there no men in this country?" he growled. "Why don't his friends get him out?"

"The night his wife was ordered out of the country she was allowed to say good-by to him in the fortress, and there she arranged that every night at sunset she and her daughters would look toward Port Cabello, and he would look toward Cura?ao. The women bought a villa on the cliff, to the left of the harbor of Willemstad as you enter, and the people, the Dutch and the Spaniards and negroes, all know the story, and when they see the three women on the cliff at sunset it is like the Angelus ringing, and, they say, the people pray that the women may see him again."

For a long time Peter de Peyster sat scowling at the prison, and Roddy did not speak, for it is not possible to room with another man through two years of college life and not know something of his moods.

Then Peter leaned toward Roddy and stared into his face. His voice carried the suggestion of a challenge.

"I hear something!" he whispered.

Whether his friend spoke in metaphor or stated a fact, Roddy could not determine. He looked at him questioningly, and raised his head to listen. Save for the whisper of the waves against the base of the fortress, there was no sound.

"What?" asked Roddy.

"I hear the call of the White Mice," said Peter de Peyster.

There was a long silence. Then Roddy laughed softly, his eyes half closed; the muscles around the lower jaw drew tight.

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