People finally don't have much affection for questions, especially one so leprous as the apparent lack of a fair system of rewards and punishments on earth. The question is not less gnawing and unpleasant for being so otiose, so naive. And we are not concerned with the grander issues: say the Nez Perce children receiving the hail of cavalry fire in their sleeping tents. Nothing is quite so grotesque as the meeting of a child and a bullet. And what distances in comprehension: the press at the time insisted we had won. We would like to think that the whole starry universe would curdle at such a monstrosity: the conjunctions of Orion twisted askew, the arms of the Southern Cross drooping. Of course not: immutable is immutable and everyone in his own private manner dashes his brains against the long-suffering question that is so luminously obvious. Even gods aren't exempt: note Jesus's howl of despair as he stepped rather tentatively into eternity. And we can't seem to go from large to small because everything is the same size. Everyone's skin is so particular and we are so largely unimaginable to one another.
Thus Tristan had not more than a shred of comprehension of the agony he caused Susannah. On the morning of his departure she took a long walk and became lost. One Stab found her at nightfall and after that Ludlow asked One Stab to keep an eye on her if she left the yard. Her walking continued for weeks and her father truncated his vacation out of disgust when she refused his plan to have the marriage annulled. But Susannah's character owed more to the early nineteenth than the early twentieth century and as an abandoned lover she was unwilling to commiserate with anyone; this resolve was impenetrable and she spent her time either walking with Samuel's botanical and zoological handbooks or sitting in her room reading Wordsworth, Keats and Shelley, favorites from the two years at Radcliffe before her marriage to Tristan. She enjoyed talking to her mother-in-law whose intelligence was as extraordinary as her own as long as the conversation didn't lead to Tristan. But most of all she enjoyed her long summer walks and such were her preoccupations that she never noticed One Stab following her. Sometimes she invited little Isabel along and she marveled at the child's quick wit and her knowledge of the natural world gathered from her mother and observation rather than from books. One especially hot afternoon while they were bathing in a pool formed by the spring near Samuel's grave Isabel noticed One Stab back in the forest and waved. Susannah cried out and covered herself then was embarrassed by the child's puzzlement. Then Isabel laughed and said she was going to marry One Stab when she grew up if he didn't get too old because Susannah had already married Tristan and there were no other choices on earth. Susannah slipped back to her neck in the water remembering how one day in this pool Tristan had imitated an otter chasing the fingerling trout and eating watercress. Isabel was saying that One Stab only followed to prevent her from getting lost or straying inadvertently between a sow grizzly and her cubs.
In Havana that morning Tristan took breakfast then walked the streets until noon came, the appointed time when his grandfather would make his daily visit to the shipping office. The meeting was casual at first but when they stepped away from the clerks out into the crude heat of the day his grandfather became grave and walked quickly tilted forward as a man in a rainstorm. The crew had been sent home and he had been ill with dysentery, the only complaint Tristan had ever heard from his mouth, but it was a veil over the inevitable: the schooner would be seized on its return to Falmouth for the war effort. To keep control of the ship they must cooperate. When they passed the guards at the British Consulate the old man paused and looked at Tristan with his cold blue eyes and told him not to say anything: the bargain had been struck. Then the old man pulled long from a flask of rum and offered it to Tristan saying that his senses had to be dulled a bit to bear these nitwits.
Later that afternoon they loaded supplies on the schooner with a new first mate, a Dane down from San Francisco named Asgaard, and three Cuban deckhands of evident experience. The captain of record was now Tristan and his grandfather was listed as a passenger bound for Falmouth. They slipped from their mooring after dark, raising an American flag before the mainsail and recording their heading in a brand new logbook. In a strong northeaster they rounded Cape Antonio the next morning and headed southwest down the Yucatan Channel toward Barranquilla to pick up a neutral cargo of mahogany and rosewood, and not incidentally, an important British subject. Then they headed east, passed south of the Caymans, up the Windward Channel and out the Caicos Passage turning north to catch the Gulf Stream whose current would aid them toward England.
In his cabin the old man barked an occasional order up to Asgaard and continued to school Tristan relentlessly. They took double watches keeping awake with Jamaican coffee. For a month all else was wiped from Tristan's mind except ingesting sixty years of his grandfather's experience: his sleep was troubled by imagined line squalls, frayed mooring lines, split masts, the strange giant waves found off Madagascar on occasion in the winter. They saw no sign of a German blockade as they neared the southern coast of England. They slipped into Falmouth at night where they were met by British intelligence. It was the old man's last arrival and he took permanently to bed that night aided by Tristan and his wife who had tallied his returns for over a half century. He was nearly merry when he took her hand and said that he was home for good.
Tristan was briefed the next day by an officer who had formerly been a factory manager in the Midlands. The officer was deferential and poured Tristan a drink as he nervously fingered a file. Then he asked if Tristan minded showing him how one went about scalping another human being; in his youth he had read a great deal of the literature of the American West but none of the authors had described the precise technique and he was curious. Tristan silently moved his hand in a slicing motion beneath his widow's peak and then made a swift ripping motion. It attracted his rarely used sense of humor and he said that one waited until the man was dead or nearly so depending on the degree of one's dislike and that you couldn't scalp a beheaded man because you needed an anchor to gain a good fulcrum. The Englishman nodded appreciatively and they went on about their business. The next morning the schooner was to be loaded with wooden cases marked tinned beef but which in fact held weaponry of a certain advanced nature. The cargo was bound for Malindi on the Kenyan coast to aid the British in their anticipated problems with the Germans at Fort Ikomo in Tanganyika. In this relatively early stage of the war they should have no trouble with the Germans in that they were flying an American flag but the situation could change momentarily and if Tristan were under fire he must scuttle the schooner. If the skirmish were of a minor nature as they neared Kenya a case of hunting rifles and shotguns consigned for Nairobi might be used in defense and that he should school his crew for that eventuality.
Tristan spent the afternoon sitting beside his grandfather's bed waiting for his midnight departure. While the old man slept he wrote Susannah and his father that he was on a mission for the government not realizing his letters would be censored and that he had been followed everywhere that day by an intelligence officer disguised as a Cornish fisherman. And writing the notes brought a strange sweep of sentiment over him as if for a moment his destiny was no longer so inalienably private and buried within himself. He imagined his father and Decker arguing about breeding lines and his mother in the parlor with the gramophone playing Cavalleria Rusticana. He saw Susannah sitting up in bed and stretching her arms in the first light, how her slight figure walked to the window to look at the weather surrounding the mountains and how she would come back to bed and look at him a long time without saying anything.