The Savage Gentleman (8 page)

McCobb pulled out a chair.

"Sit, down, Stephen. You're overwrought. Jack--bring a drink of whisky."

Stone swallowed the spirits. He began to talk.

"I've read it all. It will be dry soon--and then the rest of you can have it. It taught me--something. It taught me a great deal. It taught me that my coming here--was criminal.

It was criminal to you and to Jack--but I had discounted that. It was criminal to my son--

but I had an alibi for that.

"It was criminal to myself." Henry gave back the words he had been told so often.

"Why--father--you know it was an accident. The ship was in bad shape and you needed water and you smashed up here--and why blame yourself?"

"It--"

Stone began and McCobb, terrified lest the boy who was so nearly a man be told the truth, held up his finger and spoke heartily.

"You couldn't help it. It's nothing."

Stone avoided the eyes of his son. They were very bright and speculative at that instant. He cleared his throat.

"But it's my fault. I took too great a risk. And I stranded all of us here."

"Fiddlesticks!" said McCobb.

"You are plumb out of your haid," Jack said.

"When they need me," Stone continued. "When they need me. They need me in America today. They'll need me more tomorrow, if I am any reader of signs. I had a dt.lty greater than any other and I ran away from it into this cloying wonderland. I'm a fool!"

"Stephen--"

"Father--"

"A fool, gentlemen."

Stone stalked from the room. No one followed him for several minutes and then Jack stepped from the shadows.

"I think I'll just run along behind to see that everything's all right."

McCobb nodded. "Go ahead, Jack. Thanks. And take this."

He held out a revolver.

Jack stuck the gun in his belt. It pulled his trousers tight enough to reveal in relief the blade and handle of a butcher knife secreted along his thigh.

Silence, descended in the house.

McCobb poured himself a drink from the whisky bottle.

Henry stared at his feet. His face was covered with a fine, golden down. His chin was like his father's. His hands were lean and powerful. He stroked the down.

"Of course," he said softly to McCobb, "I've always known it wasn't--an accident."

McCobb dropped his glass.

"Steady there, son," the Scot murmured.

"I don't mind--much."

McCobb began the speech to which Henry had been long accustomed:

"It was a bad night--"

Henry interrupted, in a low, forceful voice:

"I don't mind a great deal. At first--it was just a feeling. When I was little I experienced it. No one ever talked about how we got here. No one ever talked about why the voyage was made. That wasn't natural. So I just felt that our shipwreck was intentional.

"But gradually--" Henry's eyes expanded as he spoke--"I began to think. You taught me about engines and about engineering. I looked at the wreck down on the beach.

I dove around it. The propeller had snapped. That, of course, wouldn't happen under accidental conditions--would it?" The Scot drank again. This recital of the powerful blond youth who sat idly in the chair was more harrowing to him, in a way, than the afternoon's disaster. He said nothing. "I don't mind. I know father did it."

"Henry, my lad--"

"Don't worry. I'll never accuse him of it. He'll never guess that I know."

"Good man!"

"Or that I know why."

McCobb's scalp prickled.

"
Why?
he repeated stupidly.

"Why. It was--on account of a woman."

He did not raise his eyes to ask for confirmation.

Instead he rose and poured McCobb's third drink, which he took from limp hands, back into the bottle.

"Let us take a walk, too," he said, with a smile that was poignant and charming and that McCobb always accounted afterward as a sort of miracle.

It was the second time that day that Henry had saved McCobb from intolerable emotions.

They went out into the sunlight together.

Chapter Seven:
THE YEARNING

IT WAS 1917. The table in the "living-room" of the island house was exquisitely set A strange function was taking place.

Separated by spotless napery and beautiful silver, by white china and crystal glasses brimming with wine, were Stephen Stone and his son. Their ordinary habiliments of heavy cloth and soft-tanned rawhide were missing. Instead, they wore dinner clothes.

Dinner clothes of the late nineteenth century--Stephen's fitting perfectly, and Henry's somewhat too small for his frame--but dinner clothes with satin lapels, and boiled shirts.

Behind them, as they commenced to eat their green turtle soup, Jack stood at rigid attention and there was no sign of amusement on his face.

Stone touched his napkin to his lips and spoke to his son.

"They tell me, Mr. Stone, that Bryan's championship of bimetallism will sweep the country."

Henry lifted his eyebrows with elegant hauteur.

"I've read his speeches. A cheap and dangerous demagogue. Something about crucifixion on a cross of gold. Well--if gold is too heavy a burden for the people to carry about, they'll find that free silver will make their pockets light enough."

"William Jennings Bryan is a menace--" Stephen Stone began, after laughing politely at Henry's witticism. "A decided menace." He interrupted himself. "Henry--that's not the way to hold a wine-goblet. Like this."

Henry followed his father's instructions.

"Am I right, now?"

"That's better. Now. I'm the Ambassador from Spain. You have just criticized Spanish actions in Cuba and you are unfortunately seated beside me at a dinner given by Mrs. Astor. I am a little bit--perhaps, guardedly, a great deal--perturbed at this unhappy accident. I am thinking of something definitely unpleasant to say about your newspaper.

Proceed."

Henry flashed upon his father a winning and wholly artificial smile.

"My dear Mr. Ambassador-"

"My dear, Ambassador Chinito--"

"My dear Ambassador Chinito--this is luck. I've been wanting to meet and talk with you for months. The information we receive.at my office relative to Spanish policy is at best vague and uncertain, and this opportunity to discuss it with a' master of statecraft is handsome Providence indeed."

Stephen Stone smiled. "A little flowery. But good. Now. I am--oh--Jack--remove the soup. The serving plates. I am--"

The conversation continued endlessly. The meal lasted two hours.

It was a new function on Stone Island. A new course in Stephen Stone's instruction of his son. He had planned it long, long ago. He had brought the necessary adjuncts. He was training Henry for his social life, training him how to be a perfect guest, a polished conversationalist, and diplomatically quick-thinking--all in the manner and according to the best traditions of a period that was already twenty years old.

He taught him how to dress--although when he had ordered the clothes, in London, in 1897, he had not guessed his son would attain such stature. He taught him etiquette, and how to dine and what to order, and how to order from a waiter in Delmonico's and from a waiter in Jack's and what to do in London and Paris and Vienna and where to go.

He taught him how to behave in a men's club and in a bank and in the box of an opera.

He taught him all the important trifles and they lived through a thousand scenes and situations, for one night each week was designated to represent some sort of function.

Invitations were sent and Henry answered them. The table was set meticulously and Stephen Stone portrayed the various guests--sometimes playing three or four roles at once.

At the same time, he intensified his courses in politics and the newspaper business.

He made Henry write a complete edition of a newspaper for Stone Island every two weeks. He discussed with his son the politics of his day--for there was no other material open to their contemplation. He taught the mechanics of the business, the functions of the various departments, the financing and the methods of development.

He educated his son to be a public speaker, and with Jack and McCobb for his audience, Henry frequently stood on the front porch, vines, trees and gaudy birds behind him, the sea before, and waxed eloquent on the administration of a proper government, or the fallacies of the Populists, or the trend of policies in the State Department. Sometimes, for variety, he and his father had a debate. McCobb, who rarely joined in these intellectual and social pastimes, was instructed to act as chairman or referee in such cases.

Henry addressed an imaginary Senate Committee on the freedom of the press. He ranted endlessly about Bryan. He raked over the ancient scandals of the Tweed Ring.

He also talked with dowagers in imaginary carriages. Dowagers--and they were always stuffy and frigid--were the only women who invaded this educational polic, and their invasion was rare. He rode in street cars under his father's tutelage. He walked on Fifth Avenue on Easter Day. He listened to sermons and sang hymns--although Stone was himself an agnostic.

A great, vicarious world expanded before him, amplified by poor drawings in books and by his father's excellent descriptions. In that world one thing was paramount: Ideals.

Stephen Stone made them the foundation of all else:

Never lie.

Never cheat.

Be honest.

Be forthright
(but tactful).

Stick to your party but hold your country above it.

Be a gentleman
(a thousand times that!)

Be a good sport.

Be tolerant
(except of certain evils).

Be moderate.
Drink moderately. Smoke moderately.

Keep informed.

Sleep eight hours a day and work twelve.

Never, never, never, never believe a woman.

Women are ruin. Love is a myth. Marry when you are over forty-five and marry someone you do not love.

Love is ruin.

Be, above all, fearless.

The precepts were banged out on the table with a fist. They were infiltrated through all their discussions. Henry was shown up flagrantly for the slightest lapse from them.

This was Stephen Stone's reaction to the numb days that had followed the sinking of the ship off the, headlands. He had stayed away from the house all night--with Jack in the bush nearby--and he had come back changed. The gaiety which had grown in him vanished. He applied all his energy now to the training of his son.

And Henry slowly lost human contact with his father. He obeyed. He even respected. He worked like a slave. But a rift grew between them. McCobb thought that it was an unconscious breach caused by Henry's unspoken resentment of the fact that his father had stranded him--probably for life--on the island.

It was not.

It grew because the two men were fundamentally different. There was something fanatical, puritanic, masochistic and sadistic in Stephen Stone. Henry was broad-minded by nature, and generous.

If Henry had been the man whose wife had run away--he might have forgiven her.

If Stephen Stone had been the individual whose father deliberately stranded him on an island, he would have eaten out his heart with secret malice and thwarted ambition.

The strength of the two men lay in different sinews of the soul.

It was May and 1921.

Stone sat bitterly in the house. Henry had been gone for three days in the sailboat.

Stone was bitter because he himself had planned that his-son should be independent and go where he pleased when he pleased--and because he found that such journeys occasioned him only worry and lonliness.

He stamped ion the floor with a cane which hung on the arm of a chair. Jack looked from the kitchen.

"Yes, boss?"

"Bring me a glass of that port,"

"Yest boss."

When. Jack came with the glass on the tray, Stone said: "How much have we left?"

"Of this port?"

"Of this port."

"About a barrel."

"Well--next time I ask for port, bring me some of that stuff we made ourselves.

It's not bad."

"No, boss."

"And you get back to your cooking."

McCobb entered from the compound, He was carrying a brace of ducks.

"Nice ones, eh ?" He held them up.

Stone did not look at the ducks. He banged irritably on the floor.

"It’s as quiet around her as the inside of a tomb.”

McCobb nodded, "You'd get over that gout quicker, I think, if you were careful with the wine."

"Hell!" Stone seldom used even that initial word of profanity. "Wine! Who wouldn't drink wine? Why the devil doesn't that young whipper-snapper come back here?"

"He'll be in soon," McCobb said.

He did not mention his own worries--worries he always felt when Henry traveled alone. He passed behind Stone's back and looked at him almost pityingly. Stone was growing old--and he did not know it. Some day--the mirror would tell him irrefutably.

McCobb was growing old, too. He was years older than Stone, but life had not told so heavily upon him. He had an oaken constitution and a valiant heart. He was ready for the years.

A shrill whistle floated up from the bay. Stone jumped onto his feet and scarcely noticed his gout. He hobbled to the door.

"There he is, damn it!"

McCobb was at his side. They waited impatiently while Henry made fast his boat and came up the road.

He swung along with a prodigious stride. He was a full six feet two inches, now.

He weighed a hundred and ninety pounds. His hair was bronze, his eyes turquoise, his skin mahogany. He was a magnificent man. When he laughed his voice poured from deep and resonant lungs.

As he strode through the gate they saw that he had a sack on his shoulders and there was motion inside the sack. He took the front steps at a jump.

"Hello, father. How's the foot?"

"Better, son. Better."

"McCobb! Glad to see you."

He dropped the bag, which squirmed. He took the hands, of the two men.