then it became a flaming, vitriolic voice that burned and bit, the words terrific and pregnant. Twice he lectured the gentry of die watch on radical lines. Shinski was a Red, an anarch. Too tender-hearted to kill a cockroach, Shinski believed in slaughtering the privileged classes, and had done his share of the slaughtering; it was muttered that he had been through the worst of the Russian shambles, a crimsoned figure. Glory-hole gossip made of him a Robespierre, and probably with truth. His presence here was wholly a mystery. He was no opium-victim; yet he had found the powder for Venable.
WHEN Venable went to work again, it was quite obvious that the drug was uplifting him, and about six bells he collapsed. He said nothing, and how the secret became known was untold; but something happened to Shinski. He was shifted to the other watch, so that Venable saw no more of him.
At the end of a week Venable was reacting very well. His brain was clearing out. Stormalong drove him mercilessly, yet not with the brutal fury applied to the other men, for Parson, as he was now known, gave himself to the work and did not slack. Finding that he was indeed at sea and bound for Asia, Venable accepted the situation and made the best of it. Patching together the shreds of his vague memories, he could connect Terence Garrity with his presence here in a very slight manner; besides, was not Garrity his friend? It was inexplicable. How he had come aboard the ship, he could not understand.
Meantime his body throve under punishment and hearty food. The gaunt frame hardened and became a powerful machine, with a vigor it had lacked for years past. Saved only by a narrow margin from mental collapse, Venable had no time for any thought or theorizing. He worked, ate, slept, in a monotonous sequence that filled all his day. His brain lay unused, fallow.
Of this, a fortnight in all. It was not much, as time goes, certainly not enough to pull Eric Venable out of all temptation and make of him a new man; but it was sufficient to clean and renew him in mind and body. And when the time was past, came—Garrity.
It was noon. Stormalong ordered Venable on deck, without explanation, shortly before watches changed. Out in the sunlight, awaiting him, Parson found the copper-thatched Garrity.
“It’s me,” Garrity grinned, hand outstretched. “Ye need not stare so! It’s me.”
“Why!” Venable took the proffered hand, whereat Garrity’s starry blue eyes lighted up. “They told me that you were back in—”
“I know all about it,” intervened the other bluntly. “Listen, now! ’Twas me had ye brought aboard, Parson—had ye shanghaied, no less, and it was for your own good. Ye’ll not love me for it, but that’s the truth: I could not bear to leave ye, goin’ the way you was back there! I know that ye do not want a boost up, but none the less I gave it. Now, if ye hate me for it, I can’t help it none.”
Venable said nothing; he could find no words. A furious, gusty anger leaped up within him as he comprehended. He stood impassive, towering over the engineer, staring down into those stark blue eyes that glimmered from the brick-red face with its broken nose.
Gradually there smote into his brain some realization of the simple, lucid honesty that lay in Garrity’s eyes. A week previously, he might have sprung upon the other in furiously insane passion; now he merely stood and realized the truth. Accustomed to weighing men and their motives, accustomed to viewing the spiritual side of things as the average man sees the practical, he comprehended the real affection for him that was in this man’s heart. And suddenly—just as ship’s bell was striking—his gaunt lined features broke into a smile.
“Eight bells!” he said. “Run along, Garrity—we’ll have a chat to-night, eh? Confound you, you rascal! I believe I’m glad you brought me along with you!”
GARRITY hastened below, overjoyed. For a space Venable stood at the rail, gazing with wide eyes at the blue sky and the blue-gray whorls of water; in that moment it seemed to him that after all, God lived—that in the far, clean depths of sky and sea were typified the vast omniscience of the Creator, governing all things! The brief moment swiftly passed. Venable turned away, his lips set in renewed lines of bitterness. He could see no light ahead, no future, nothing! This was the mental result of the drug, of course.
So vanished the second phase of his seafaring; and now began the third phase. It was one of introspection, of self-battles. The old craving was terrible in its power; he felt all helpless, hopeless, careless of what happened.
He saw much of Garrity now, and was strengthened by the doglike affection of this man who had plucked him from the gutter. He was shamed at thought of what his life in that interlude had been. The sun and the salt air, the hard work, began to tell. Old forgotten oaths came to his lips. He doffed the sanctified mantle that had held him apart from worldly things these many years, being now a new man in a new environment. He could not crowd out of his soul the fact that he had once been called to be a priest of God; but it lay far in the background, not molesting him overmuch.
One night there was pandemonium below—a fight, a wild riot. Venable was caught in it, and he found himself fighting as in the old north-woods days of his youth. Some one laid him out, finally, all but splitting his skull with a firebar; and it was good for him—it helped greatly. It went to make up the combination of little things that were needed. Garrity looked on from afar and said nothing, but his eyes were happy as he observed the change in his friend.
The truth about Venable was that he had both won and lost from that voyage to Tientsin. He won much of himself back again; a share of his dead youth was resurrected and returned to him. He lost much of his unworldly, theological attitude, and gained in practical ways. To illustrate: the night they entered the river and were dodging up toward the Tientsin wharf, Venable had an argument with a Greek stoker; the Greek drew a knife, worn in defiance of American shipping law, and Venable half killed him with three blows. You may draw a large inference from this happening.
So, then, they tied up at the Tientsin wharf. The work was finished. All hands were paid off, and separated presumably for ever. Venable and Terence Garrity walked ashore and to the fate destined them.
IT was late afternoon, and both men had money. Garrity caught a jinrikisha and directed their course to a decent place that he knew, in the French Settlement just across Bristow Road. On their way they passed through Victoria Road and the British Settlement; Venable was astonished at the beauty of the city, at its ultra civilization. Because he had come to China, he had expected pigtails and pagodas on every hand.
“Don’t ye believe it!” said Garrity sagely. “The world’s the world, Parson, and ye can’t get away from it nohow—except only at sea, and there’s more damned rules an’ conventions there than ashore. Ye can’t get away from the world, for a fact!”
Two hours later, having bathed and dined, they sat together in their room. Garrity broached what was uppermost in his mind—their immediate future.
“I’m urgin’ nothin’ on ye, Parson. Say what’s in your brain; that’s all; say what ye want to do, where ye want to go—up, down or roundabout—and I’m with ye while I’m wanted! You’re your own boss now, me lad. If ye want to go to hell again, we’ll go together!”
VENABLE laughed. He was amused by the situation and by the man Garrity. The steel in him was cropping out now.
“I’ve been a tremendous fool,” he said shortly.
“Ye have. And will ye now be a fool again?”
Venable shook his head, a curious steadiness in his deep-set eyes. “I think not.”
“Praise
