I, Jacob King, was born in New York City. I ran away to sea at the age of 14, and at 19 I was a ship’s officer.

    At 19 I was a man, not a young man but a grown man, and any one who has followed the sea will know what that means. The sea ripens a man early, ripens him and fixes his mind for good or for evil, according to his capacity to understand the life about him. Nowadays on shore I see young fellows of 19 that are not much better than children, except that they have stretched enough to wear long trousers. That is the life of the land, where such a thing as responsibility seems to be unknown until men have begun to decay. I was not that way; and if I had had a better mind I might have made a success of life. I think I would have been successful ashore, anyway, for I was quick and clever and never shirked work; but mostly I think so because I was hard and young and brazen. I knew how to fight and I knew how to[193] bluff. Ashore, it would have been enough to know how to bluff, I should not have had to fight. At sea a man cannot succeed, permanently, without actual worth and fighting and winning. On the land, so far as my observation goes, actual worth is by no means necessary to success. Any number of things may make a landsman successful; he may acquire money or fame and his success is measured by what of these things he has acquired; it is not measured by the stuff in him, as it is at sea, but by what he gets hold of; and if he cannot keep hold of it he becomes a failure again, though he is no worse a man than before. Landsmen do not value the man but what he has. By that measure I have become, I suppose, a pretty successful person ashore; I, who was a disgrace to salt water, can hold up my head here with some of the best of them. I am not famous, it is true, but I have a fortune of $200,000 more or less, a pretty considerable figure in these days.

    At 19 I was a ship’s officer and at 21 I was a first mate. It was then, on my first passage as chief officer, that the first of a series of events which I have to relate occurred. The ship on which I was then was the fast clipper China Castle, John Hawkins, master, and the passage was from Boston to Shanghai. Captain Hawkins was a young man in years, like myself—about 26, I think. He had sailed the China Castle between New York and San Francisco at the time of the California gold rush and was now taking her out on her first passage to the East. At last she was to be put into the tea trade, for which she had been built, but from which she had been taken from her very launching for the immensely profitable California route. Besides myself and Captain[194] Hawkins there was in the cabin Mrs. Hawkins, his young wife; she is the only other person aft who matters in my story. She had not been married to Captain Hawkins long, only a year or so, and this was her first passage with him and a sort of deferred honeymoon.

    Mrs. Hawkins was a beautiful woman, a young woman, of course. She was, I think, two or three years younger than her husband and about as much older than I. She was very pleasant, as agreeable as she was beautiful; and she did not stand on ceremony as a captain’s wife is likely to do. I suppose this was partly because it was her first voyage and it may have been partly because we were all about the same age; but it was mainly her own gracious nature. I, for my part, had not seen or met many women and I had never seen or met any woman like her. From a boy I had been to sea, and while I had been on ships where the captains had their wives along they had never been women of my own age. They had never been good-looking women, let alone being half so lovely as Keturah Hawkins, and I had never been aft as first officer and privileged to associate with them on terms of something resembling social equality. Of course, social equality is impossible on board a ship; but in so far as it could be brought about Mrs. Hawkins brought it about in the cabin of the China Castle. That and her beauty turned my head. She used to wear splendid jewels that her husband had got for her, though they were nothing to what he procured afterward, I judge, in the Orient. She had very fine blue eyes, a bright and flashing blue such as you see in midocean, particularly in the tropics in fine weather, the blue of deepest water. Her hair was a dark red, in great[195] coils as thick as the heaviest rope cable aboard the ship, and her skin was a white that did not seem to tan or lose its whiteness from wind or weather, though sometimes a faint freckle or two would appear upon it. Her grandniece, though but a young girl, is wonderfully like her in every appearance. The sight of this girl tears me to pieces. It brings it all back. It brings back the hour in which I went clean out of my senses, sitting there alone in the cabin with Keturah Hawkins. She did not scream or struggle, but in a moment she ran away and bolted herself in her room. Of course when the Captain came down from the poop deck, where his regular pacing had been audible over our heads all this time, she told him.

    I don’t know why he didn’t shoot me dead; well, yes, I think I do. I think his wife interceded for me and I think he believed the proper punishment could only be something everlastingly shameful and as painful as possible. He had me triced up by the thumbs and flogged in the sight of the crew. I was flogged till I lost consciousness. It was two days before I could stand a watch. My only idea then was to kill him. I told him so, which was an unnecessary thing to do. He took precautions, however, such as seeing that I had no weapons, and never giving me an opportunity to attack him. Mrs. Hawkins kept to her room; I had my work to do, and that went on as though nothing had happened. No private affair, no matter how serious, relaxes the discipline of the sea. When I told Captain Hawkins that I would kill him some day he only looked at me and said: “You’re a good ship’s officer but you’re a disgrace to salt water. If you want to kill a man, the first man for you to kill is Jacob King.”

    [196]I thought he meant suicide—“go drown yourself” as the contemptuous phrase of the fo’c’s’le puts it. It was years before I saw what he meant by that “If you want to kill a man, the first man for you to kill is Jacob King.” I know now just what he was driving at. I have killed Jacob King. I have killed my man. I won’t need to kill another.

    But that has come a long time after. A long time. Too long, maybe.

    When we reached Shanghai I got my discharge, of course, and a good discharge it was, for I had done my work well and Captain Hawkins, as fine a seaman as ever lived, was strictly just. I stayed ashore awhile and lived an evil life, drinking and smoking opium and consorting with thieves and ticket-of-leave men and all the riffraff of an Eastern seaport. All the while I was haunted by the remembrance of Keturah Hawkins. Drunk or sober, sane or in opium dreams, I saw her—saw her great cables of dark red hair, her white skin, her dazzling blue eyes, her delightful smile that she had smiled expressly for the benefit of the young and capable first mate of her husband’s fine ship. If I had been able to do it I would have possessed myself of her even then. I would have killed her husband, I would have killed every one aboard the China Castle, to have her. In opium dreams I did kill them all; I slew all Shanghai and burned the city and launched as many ships to pursue her as were launched to bring back Helen from ancient Troy. All dreams, all mad delusions! I was a fevered, burning, babbling, stupefied wretch of a sailor with no money in my pockets and nothing to fall back upon but a splendid ruggedness of body and a good discharge as first mate.

    [197]The good discharge was sufficient to get me a berth on a ship sailing for San Francisco. Once at sea again I was all right except in my mind. That had been all twisted and distorted by the punishment inflicted upon me by Captain Hawkins. I couldn’t get over the disgrace of it; which was deserved, of course, though I didn’t think so. I kept thinking of myself as a man who had been shamed beyond all deserving. I was convinced that I had merely been too rashly assuming, and that if I had gone about it differently or had taken more time, had not acted so impulsively—— All this was self-deception, of course, and it degraded Keturah Hawkins, in my thoughts, at least. Perhaps I thought that if I could not lift myself up to her I could pull her down to my level. What I didn’t see was that a good woman—or a good man either, likely—cannot be lowered by whatever baseness any one may choose to think or say. The only person that is lowered is the thinker or the sayer. You’ll find this and a whole lot more coiled away in that poem of Emerson’s about Brahma: “I am the thinker and the thought,” or something like that, it runs. I don’t know whether a man makes the thought that passes through his mind, but I do know that the thought makes the man. At least, it made me. I was still Jacob King, but I wasn’t the same Jacob King. Something in me had been poisoned. The slow poisoning of——? The swiftest poison is not the most sure.

    I was very bad, I mean mentally, when I got to San Francisco, and the life I led there did not mend me. Gradually as I kept seeing the image of Keturah Hawkins in all states of sleep and waking, at all hours and under the influence of all sorts of drugs and in the midst of all kinds of surroundings[198] the image itself faded; or changed and coarsened. I did not notice that the dazzling blue, as of sunshine trying vainly to shaft through unfathomable depths, had disappeared from her eyes, but soon I could no longer see those heavy cables of dark red hair, made up of so many twisted strands, nor the wonderful milky whiteness of the skin. The features became indistinct, and soon I saw clearly nothing but the magnificent jewels she had worn—the ropes of pearls that took lustre from her skin; the emeralds that shone in green drops in the rich, dark, smouldering red of her hair; the sapphires that seemed to condense and make permanent the more brilliant blue of her eyes. About these gems that she had worn there was the glitter, the undying glitter of hard stones. All that was lovely, all that was spiritual, all that was human in the vision of her perished; and still the splendour of those jewels remained. I used to see her as an imperceptible outline—no face, no rounded arm, no wealth of hair, just an imagined outline with here and there certain gorgeous jewels in an ornamental and decorative arrangement—fastened on the air. At such times I went clean crazy, but I could do nothing. I was getting too besotted to straighten up for any length of time. And there wasn’t any cure. How could there be? I couldn’t cure myself. I was being poisoned by the irremediable past. How abolish the past? It’s all very well to talk about living a thing down, but the only thing that can be lived down is the thing that wasn’t entirely so. My past was.

    It was in San Francisco that I got acquainted with a man named Hosea Hand and came into a strange relationship with his brother, one Richard Hand. Hosea Hand was a[199] sailor, one of the crew of the ship on which I had come from Shanghai. He was younger than I, and after we got to San Francisco and the ship’s discipline relaxed I saw a good deal of him, first and last. One day in a lonely mood he told me his story. His brother had cheated him out of an inheritance, or so he figured, and he had run away to sea, like myself, as a boy. Two things about the story struck me: his brother, if what he said was true, might pay money to have him stay away from home—not that Hosea Hand had any thought of returning home but I could represent him as being bent on doing so, and myself as able to keep him away, for a price; the other thing—and this impressed and excited me much the more strongly—was that the Hand farm was on Long Island not far from the little town of Blue Port where Keturah Hawkins had her home. I turned the whole thing over in my mind during the sodden days and nights of a week. I do not believe that in the condition I was in all that time I was capable of reaching a bold decision—not even boldly evil. At last I wrote to Richard Hand. I told him that I, a stranger to him, not only knew his brother’s whereabouts but knew his story; and I had found Hosea Hand resolved to return home and settle accounts. I could keep the boy away, but must have something for doing it. It would be a sensible thing for him to do business with me. I wanted money, and I wanted information. His reply and its enclosure would be evidence of good faith.

    He replied; and it was plain that he was frightened. Hosea Hand was no longer in San Francisco, having shipped on a vessel for New York. Richard Hand did not send much mo............