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Title: From the four winds
Author: John Galsworthy
Release date: March 6, 2025 [eBook #75539]
Language: English
Original publication: London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1897
Credits: Emmanuel Ackerman and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive)
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK FROM THE FOUR WINDS ***
FROM THE FOUR WINDS
[Illustration]
FROM THE FOUR
WINDS
BY
JOHN SINJOHN
LONDON: T. FISHER UNWIN
PATERNOSTER SQUARE, 1897
[All rights reserved.]
CONTENTS
Page
The Running Amok of Synge Sahib 2
Dick Denver’s Idea 26
Ashes 56
‘Tally-ho’--Budmash 72
The Doldrums 100
The Capitulation of Jean Jacques 124
The Spirit of the Karroo 152
A Prairie Oyster 176
According to his Lights 206
The Demi-Gods 228
THE RUNNING AMOK OF SYNGE SAHIB
A yellow stain is a yellow stain,
Though the heart is white and the brain is white;
And a lonely man is a lonely man,
That’s reason eno’ for me.
--Doggerel Meditations of John Hay.
‘You lucky beggars. Oh! You lucky beggars!’
The speaker rose, and stood stretching a languid length against the
railing of the verandah, his tall figure outlined in its white clothes
against the overhanging foliage.
‘Well, I don’t know,’ said Clemenson, ‘you fellows don’t seem to have
such a bad time out here; only wish I were going to stay, instead of
toddling back to the beautiful and salubrious climate of the British
Isles which you seem to covet so much; what d’you say, Taplin?’
He waved the end of his cigarette, glowing in the dark, towards another
recumbent figure.
‘Um--um,’ the second globe-trotter lay back, looking curiously at the
face of the man standing, and offered no further reply.
‘I can’t stay up to see you off,’ said the first speaker--‘I should
go cracked. “You can ’ear their paddles chunkin!”’--he broke into the
air of ‘Mandalay,’ and shook his hand with an almost menacing gesture
towards the lagoon.
‘Well! _Saiandra_, you fellows, you’ve cheered us up amazingly; don’t
forget to look in on me if you’re ever fools enough to come back to
this forsaken paradise. Send me that new magazine if you can get it
in Sydney, Clemenson. Good-night, Mrs Hay; I know you won’t think me
rude for making tracks. Look after them, Hay; see you up in court
to-morrow afternoon, I suppose? Got to go round the coolie quarters
in the morning. _Bon soir, la compagnie._’ He shook hands with the
globe-trotters, swung himself over the verandah rails, and walked
uncertainly down the narrow path that threaded the grove of shadowy
palms. For a minute nobody spoke; then Clemenson said with a sigh:
‘Poor old Synge, how down he is to-night. He _is_ a good chap. I
wish he’d stayed to see us off. I hate saying good-bye before it’s
necessary.’ He flicked off a mosquito, and bent down to adjust the
bath-towel wrapped round his feet and ankles.
‘Barring mosquitoes and flies, this is heaven, I believe,’ he went
on, lying back to look up at the sky gleaming with stars through the
fern-like tracery of the flamboyante trees.
‘Pardon me, under certain circumstances it’s hell,’ said a fourth voice.
‘Hay, you’re an unsentimental brute, you’ve no poetry in your carcase;
ask Taplin and Mrs Hay what they think. Wake up, Taplin, old chap;
hanged if you’re not sleeping away the last chance of heaven you’ll
ever get.’
‘Am I?’ grunted the latter. He was gazing intently from under the broad
brim of his hat at Mrs Hay. Sitting forward in her chair, her face ashy
white, she was looking with an intent, scared expression at her husband.
‘I must go, too, I’m afraid,’ she said, ‘the infant will want me;
little wretch, she always cries on hot nights if she’s left long.
Good-bye, Mr Clemenson; good-bye, Mr Taplin; _bon voyage_; come and see
me in England when I come home next year.’
Her manner was nervous and hurried, and her face, still turned towards
her husband, had not lost its scared expression.
‘You won’t be long, Jack, will you?’ With a wave of her hand she
disappeared into the house. The men had all risen, their bath-towel
armour, dislodged, lay in heaps on the verandah floor, and the
increasing ‘Ping! Ping!’ announced a winged attack along the line.
‘I say, this _is_ a sell. I thought you and Mrs Hay were coming out to
see us off; it was to have been an all-night sitting for the last, you
know, and now here you are one by one deserting, and leaving us to face
this abominable melancholy departure alone.’ Thus Clemenson, ruefully.
Taplin lit a cigarette.
‘What’s wrong, Hay?’ he said, and pointed with it down the path.
‘Oh! It’s all right. Nothing, nothing; my wife’s tired, and the
infant’s not well; that’s all.’
‘Nonsense, man, I saw Synge’s face, and I saw your wife’s, that’s
enough; I say again, what’s wrong?’
Hay leant silently against the rail, a cloud gathering upon his face.
‘Upon my honour I believe there’s nothing wrong,’ he said slowly, as
though weighing a thought within himself, ‘only my wife’s rather given
to nervous fits, you know.’ This apologetically.
‘Ummm.... Well, if you won’t tell us you won’t--beg your pardon for
asking; are we keeping you up?’
Again a silence, then Hay said to himself:
‘Oh! D----n it, it can’t be.’
He turned to the other two.
‘Look here, you fellows,’ he said, ‘you’re gentlemen, and you’re both
of you fond of old Synge; what I say to you now, whatever you may think
of it, goes no further?’
‘Certainly not,’ from Clemenson. Taplin shook his head; he was nothing
if not brief.
‘Well! It’s a longish yarn, and I think I’ll just go in and speak to my
wife before I begin.’
He turned and went into the house.
The two globe-trotters, left to themselves on the verandah, looked at
each other without a word. Through the darkness and stillness of the
tropical night the humming of mosquitoes was waning, and the silence
was only broken by an occasional cry, or the barking of a dog from the
coolie quarters. A table covered with drinks and packs of cards was
pushed aside, and the dying lamp cast a flickering glow on the two
recumbent figures. The fragrance of lime and pepper trees came floating
gently in on the warm night air. Clemenson sat flicking restlessly
and distractedly at the now sleepy mosquitoes with his handkerchief,
and Taplin, smoking quietly, looked down the path where Synge had
disappeared. Both were relieved when Hay reappeared from the house, and
sinking into a long chair, took up the word.
‘I’m going to tell you chaps one of the most extraordinary yarns
you’ll ever hear. I don’t attempt to explain it--I don’t know anything
about heredity--thank heaven _I’m_ not a doctor--but I’ve been in the
Strait Settlements, and I’ve seen things there that--Still I _don’t_
understand, and I don’t care to,--all I know is, the thing happened.’
He paused a minute to concoct himself a drink, and then went on:
‘You fellows have been here three weeks--jolly glad we’ve been to have
you--and you’ve seen a lot of Synge. I suppose you’ve both noticed that
somewhere or other about him there’s blood that isn’t white?’ Nods from
his listeners.
‘Yes; there’s not much of it, it hardly shows, but there’s no doubt
it’s there. What it is I’ve never asked him, of course. I believe he’s
very sensitive about it,--why, I don’t know, I’m sure--I only mention
this, you know, because it hits off my theory of the why of what I’m
going to tell you; besides,’ he muttered half to himself, ‘one mustn’t
talk to him about the Strait Settlements. Well,’ he lighted a cigar,
and pulled deeply at it for some minutes before going on, ‘when I first
came to the Fijis they sent me up as Commissioner to a small island
about a hundred miles north of this, called Luma. Why in heaven’s name
they wanted a Commissioner there, the Colonial Office only knows. I
went up with the wife and the infant, and for six months we were the
only white people on the island; then the measles came, and they sent
up a doctor--for his sins, poor old Synge. That place was a paradise
for beauty, but a regular hell for loneliness. We had Judy (whom you
know we brought over from Singapore with us), and another coolie, for
servants, and Synge abode in a large native hut about a quarter of a
mile away. Barring a ship’s calling, perhaps once in three months,
with mails, not a soul ever came near that blessed place; solitary
confinement was a joke to it.’
He paused, and drew a long whiff from his cigar; a breeze growing
amongst the palm leaves sighed thro’ the verandah and blew the smoke
into a wreath around his head. Clemenson shivered; the spirit of
desolation seemed to have got into the tone of Hay’s voice.
‘Those beastly measles! Synge worked like a horse; the unfortunate
devils of natives did their level best to die, and it was the work of
two average men and a boy to save the life of any one of them--stupid
beggars--but he pulled a lot of ’em through somehow. Then my infant got
’em, only a year old, and had a roughish time; there again Synge did
the trick, and then--hanged if, to put the finishing touch, he didn’t
go and get ’em himself--and badly too. Measles in a climate like this
aren’t any kind of a joke, and the poor old chap nearly turned up his
toes: but he came round at last--mainly thanks to Judy’s cooking. They
left him awfully weak and depressed; I used to go and sit with him a
lot, and he was fearfully down, always talking about the misery of
dying in a dog’s hole of a prison, as he called the place, and pining
for home. He had a fox-terrier called Wasp, that he was awfully fond
of, and when we weren’t with him he used to lie and talk to her by the
hour about his people at home and a certain girl, and Cambridge, and
the cursedness of things generally, and the poor little beggar would
sit up at the end of the bed, catching flies, and blink her eyes at
him, and let on to understand the whole caboodle. I often heard him
yarning away when I was coming in; you can hear anything in those
native houses. He had a sort of double one--one for a bedroom and one
for a sitting-room. Well, he got better by degrees, but the stronger
he got physically, the more gloomy and depressed he seemed to grow;
it was like having a funeral in your coat-tail pocket to be with him;
it didn’t cheer matters up for us, and to make things worse, the mail
missed--through a hurricane or some misbegotten reason--and we didn’t
see a ship, except at a distance, for nearly six months.’
Hay paused and shook himself, as if to free his mind from the
recollection. Clemenson muttered, ‘Lively!’ Taplin bit his forefinger
sympathetically.
‘Well,’ Hay went on rapidly, ‘one morning Synge came down to us at
breakfast, and said in his sarcastic way, “Something’s gone wrong with
the works of Providence; there’s actually a ship in.” So there was;
she brought the mails; Synge had some letters; and she went away
that afternoon. I remember Judy saying to me at tiffin, “Wasp hab had
five chickens, in honour ob de ship. Synge Sahib dip dem in de big
punch-bowl and call dem names--say he chrisey dem. Will de Sahib hab
gravy wid de blue man?” Judy’s information is always dished up with
some cookery--he meant blanc-mange--but good Lord! How infernally
long-winded I am! In the afternoon I went over to see Synge; he’d gone
asleep in his chair--it was beastly hot weather. His letters and papers
were all strewn about the place, and a big Malay kriss that he’d been
cutting papers with was lying beside him. Wasp, licking those five
blessed puppies, was sitting at his feet. He looked so tired that I
went away without waking him; perhaps if I had, things would have been
different.’
Hay paused again, and turned with a shiver to look over his shoulder
down the path, listening intently; the other two noticed for the first
time that the butt of a revolver was sticking out of his coat pocket.
‘Well, my boys, I expect I’ve bored you so far, but I shan’t with the
rest of my yarn.’ He turned to them again, speaking hurriedly and low.
‘That night I was sitting in the dining-room pretty late, writing up
my Commissioner’s log. The wife had gone to bed; it was a mighty hot
night, and the infant had been making herself felt. I was smoking, and
not over and above busy--the Luma Commissioner isn’t given that way.
There was a bright moon, and it was very still and peaceful, much the
same as this. It happened I was just thinking what rummy noises one
hears at night, when I heard quite the rummiest noise I’ve ever heard
or ever want to; it was the cry as of a creature that had lost its soul
and “couldn’t tell whe--ere to find it.” He broke into the old tune,
which came on the top of the intense solemnity of the last few words
with a weird effect that sent a shudder through his listeners.
‘By George! You fellows may just “lift up your hearts” that you’ve
never heard a sound like that; it sent the blue creeps through _me_--I
sat there wondering what the deuce it was, till, looking through the
window, I saw in a bright patch of moonlight in front of the house a
naked figure, dancing a kind of fantastic dance, and brandishing a
streak of silver above its head; then I heard that awful cry again,
and the figure darted forward and disappeared. I sat there rubbing my
eyes, and wishing for a drink, when the door opened with a crash, and
Judy almost fell into the room, his eyes starting out of his head with
fright, and his teeth chattering. “Sahib! quick! quick! Synge Sahib
kill Wasp, and kill de chickens; Synge Sahib run amok! Synge Sahib run
amok!” and the beggar fell on the floor, and grovelled underneath the
table. “What the devil!” I began--then suddenly came that cry again,
quite close this time. I dashed out of the room, and made down the
landing for my wife’s room. My God! What do you think I saw?’
In his intensity he leaned forward, staring straight at the opposite
wall, with his hand gripping the butt of the pistol, and in his eyes
they could almost read the words that followed.
‘Over the child’s cot stood that naked figure, with that devilish
streak in its hand. My wife, in her nightdress, stood shrieking and
clutching at the figure’s arm with both hands. I reeled back, then
I picked up the first thing that came handy, a knob of sorts, or a
boot-jack--I don’t know--and threw it with all my force. Praise the
Lord! I hit it; it turned, and by all the great and awful powers, it
was Synge--Synge transfigured--a Malay,--you chaps make no mistake--a
Malay, if ever there was one, in every line of his face and figure.
Barring a towel wound round him, he was stark naked, and his flesh
was yellow, not white; and whether my eyes went wrong or not I don’t
know, but his hair seemed to hang down his naked back, instead of being
cropped short, as it always is. His eyes were blazing and glaring with
a sort of green light like a wild cat’s. That devilish silver streak
was his Malay kriss, and he brandished it like one possessed. I’ve
seen Malays run amok twice--once in Bangkok, and once in Sumatra--and
if Synge wasn’t at that moment a Malay, and a Malay amok, I’m a German
Jew. He didn’t look mad, only mad murderous. But there wasn’t much time
for psychological speculation, I can tell you; I just had that one
look from him, and then he came for me. It flashed through me, there
was only one chance, and that was tracks away from the house. I took
that chance, and went through the window--which I concluded afterwards
must have been shut--and made those tracks. There was a straight path
from the house through the native village, leading out beyond on to
a long stretch of hard white sand. We went through the village--what
a funk the natives were in! They scattered on each side for us--the
cry had drawn them, as it had me. I remember thinking--just shows how
little the mind is in hand--how amusing it must have been for them to
see their revered Commissioner hunted by their respected doctor in a
state of nature, and wondering if they had humour enough to appreciate
the situation; we were the only white men in the island, you know. I
used to be a bit of a sprinter at school, and in the ordinary course
of things could give Synge about 30 yards in the 100, but that night
I could only just keep away, if it can be called keeping away from a
man whose breath you can feel on your neck, and whose hand you can see
coming over your shoulder. It wasn’t the sort of seclusion I could
have wished for. Twice he grabbed at me and missed, and then we got
on to the sand, and, for some reason or other, I drew away a yard or
two--perhaps my wind was better than his, though for that matter I
don’t believe he had a wind, or legs either, that night.’ Hay spoke in
a meditative voice that was half comic.
‘But altogether,’ he went on, ‘it was a rum business. Well, I knew that
what I had to do was to hold on ahead till we got to a creek about 100
yards wide that ran from the lagoon, inland. If I could get there first
I was safe; I was a good swimmer, and in those days old Synge couldn’t
swim more than a few strokes. Still, if murder-madness could make a man
run half as fast again, it could probably make him swim. However, it
was the only chance. That was a ghastly run, and a ghostly one, too.
The moon was full, and the sea gleamed in silver and black ridges, and
that blessed sand shone in the bright moonlight like burnished plate,
and we two white figures fled over it like disembodied spirits, with
the whole of Nature--sea, sky, and land--looking on and mocking at what
was meant to be as grim a tragedy as ever came about. And yet all the
time, you know, I couldn’t help seeing the comic side--the only two
white men on the island--sworn pals, you beggars! sworn pals--and the
one chasing the other for dear life, and no mortal reason--it appealed
to me very much, that is, as much as the discomfort of the blamed thing
would allow. All things come to an end, and so did that run. I must
have made record time, but it seemed like a couple of hours. I never
got more than about two yards away--it varied from that to about two
inches--and I can tell you I was all out at the end of that half mile,
when we came to the creek. There wasn’t time or space to dive, and I
went in plum bang--anyhow. I could see or feel the whirr of the kriss
in the air as he came after me. When I came up and struck out, he was
a yard or so behind, swimming desperately for me, with the kriss still
in his hand. “Good Lord!” I thought, “it’s all over now; the beggar
can swim, and I’m about done.” Quick as lightning I turned on my back
and kicked out with all my might, and, as luck would have it, I caught
him on the head with my foot, and down he went. I twisted round and
drew myself out on to the bank--phew! I _was_ done. In a minute or so
he came to the surface panting and gasping, and turned himself round
and round, looking for me, with that wolfish glare still in his eyes,
and the kriss still grasped firm. When he saw me, I sang out from
the bank, “Drop it, old man, the game’s up.” He gave that hideous cry
again, and tried to swim ashore, but in a stroke or two he threw up his
hands and went down. I lay still, trying to get my wind, and watching
for him to come up again. In a minute he did, almost black in the face,
but still with that murderous light in his eyes and the kriss in his
hand. I called out--“Synge, dear old chap, easy on, that’ll do,” but
just as I sang out he went down the third time, and this time he stayed
there.’
Hay stopped short with a shiver. The dawn was breaking in a long grey
streak over the distant reef, and with it came a wave of chill air. The
faces of all three men looked almost haggard in the growing light, and
Taplin said, ‘Go on, man,’ in a voice that sounded harsh and strange.
‘There was only one thing to be done,’ continued Hay, slowly, ‘and I
can tell you I didn’t care about doing it one little bit. Diving for
a madman with a kriss in his hand in twelve feet of water, even if he
_has_ gone down three times, is no sort of a pastime. Well, I found him
at the second go, quite motionless at the bottom, and pulled him up
ashore. He was unconscious all right, but I had the devil’s own trouble
to get that silver streak out of his paw. Then I sat on my haunches,
and rubbed him, and prayed the gods to send me help. Presently they
did, in the shape of my wife and Judy, on horseback, with brandy and
pistols. Judy wouldn’t come anywhere near, though he could see him
lying like a log; but my wife, who, like most women where there’s
illness, is an angel, helped me to get him on to a horse. Poor old
chap, he was mighty limp and light, and the madness had clean gone
out of him; his skin was white again, and his hair shorn--I suppose
I must have been a bit mixed there. We held him on, and got him back
somehow, and gave him brandy, and gradually he came back to life; but
he had brain fever and was delirious for days. Then I got to know
how fearfully the loneliness had weighed on him, and bitten into his
marrow. At last he came round, and got all right again by degrees. He’s
never had the faintest idea of what happened that night; the fever
seemed to have wiped it clean out of his memory, and of course we’ve
never told him. We got shifted here soon afterwards, and this place is
chalks better than Luma, if it isn’t exactly the vortex of society. The
saddest thing, as it turned out, over that business, was poor little
Wasp. After we got back with him I went over to his quarters to fetch
away his things, and there, lying on his bed, was that poor little
beggar and four of the pups dead as door-nails, with kriss stabs right
through them. The fifth pup was alive and whining piteously; we took
her home and dragged her up somehow, and here she is.’
Hay touched a sleepy fox-terrier with his foot.
‘We had to tell Synge a yarn about Wasp’s death. I’ve forgotten how
it went now, but I remember it was very artistic and untrue, and the
whitest sort of a lie. Well, I’m tired of yarning, and that’s the
whole show, and now perhaps you understand why my wife looked so queer
to-night, and why’--he broke off, and tapped the butt end of the
revolver. There was a long silence, which Clemenson broke with:
‘You don’t mean to say that you can go on living here with the
possibility of that happening again?’
‘Oh! This is different; Luma was specially designed by a beneficent
Providence for lone madness. Personally I don’t admit the
possibility--wouldn’t do, you know,’ he shuddered,--‘and forewarned is
forearmed; besides, these things are with the Fates, and if it _should_
come about, it’s better with _us_ than with people who don’t know and
wouldn’t understand, and--we’re fond of Synge.’
Clemenson lay back and whistled softly, and the three sat on in silence
and watched the grey turn to red, and the glow steal from over the
lagoon, flecking the green growing things with light, and chasing the
sentinel stars back into their boxes; and they listened to the murmurs
of the wakening island world, till the splash of oars in the narrow
winding river hard by warned the globe-trotters that the time for
departure was come.
‘Time’s up,’ said Hay, ‘there’s Missa Tanner and his boat,’ and he
pointed through the red clusters of the flamboyante trees to the tall
figure of a Fijian coming up the bank of the stream towards the house.
Taplin rose and stretched himself, then he walked over to Hay and shook
him hard by the hand.
‘You’re a good chap,’ he said, ‘a thundering good chap; and your
wife’s a brick--tell her so.’
‘Thanks,’ said Hay.
Half an hour later, the boat, held in the stream by the oars of
the convict crew, waited, while from the stern-sheets the two
globe-trotters said good-bye to their host.
‘Remember, you fellows, nobody’s ever heard a word of that yarn--you
won’t forget that?’
‘All right, old chap,’ said Clemenson; ‘but I say, just one thing: how
do you account for it? Wasn’t it temporary insanity, pure and simple?’
‘Certainly not; that I’ll take my solemn Dick--but I don’t account for
it, and I don’t try to; all I know is, as Judy says: “Synge Sahib run
amok.”’
* * * * *
The boat drifted away down the stream to join the steamer lying out
beyond the line of white reef. The globe-trotters lay back in the stern
silently, and from across the lagoon as they watched, the group of
houses grew smaller and smaller through the palm-groves, and the sugar
plantations, beginning to teem with working life and labour, faded
into a blurr.
Presently Clemenson, still looking backward, said, with a sigh, ‘By
gum!’
Taplin nodded.
DICK DENVER’S IDEA
‘A woman, a dog, and a walnut tree,
The more you beat ’em the better they be.’
This was always a good lie; there is such an amount of truth in it.
SCENE I
‘You are quite mistaken, I didn’t speak to him.’
‘That’s a lie! I saw you myself,--and I tell you, if you can’t behave
yourself better than to go talking to a blackguard adventurer like
that, you stay down here till this d----d voyage is over.’
The brutal voice, raised in anger, subsided into a sort of growl; the
first, a woman’s, was silent.
‘Why don’t you answer? Curse it, d’you think it’s your “duty,”’ with a
sneer, ‘to stand there like a mummy? By God, a mummy’s a fool to you!’
The man’s voice rose again in a harsh crescendo.
Dick Denver, leaning against the ship’s side, involuntarily took his
cigar from his lips, and ground his teeth.
‘I judge domestic felicity has its shady side,’ he muttered, with
a soul-satisfying drawl; ‘thank the Almighty for His infinite
mercies!’--presumably referring to his own unencumbered condition.
‘Poor little woman, she looked very sweet at dinner. Gosh! _I_ was the
blackguard adventurer!’ He laughed softly, and shrugged his shoulders.
‘What an everlasting brute the fellow is; that unfortunate woman must
have considerable of a bad time. Ah! Well,--no affair of yours, Dick,
my son.’
He turned, and from over the ship’s side watched the rings of smoke
curling away from his cigar. A rustle as of silken garments caught
his ear, and over his shoulder he saw a woman’s figure coming from
the hatchway. Standing back in shadow, he watched her move listlessly
towards a long deck chair, half-way between him and the hatch. He could
catch a long-drawn sigh, half a sob, and see the shiver of the slight
form as she sank into it. A whisper came floating along the deck to
where he stood. ‘God! How I hate him! How I hate him! How long? How
long?’
Dick Denver, vagabond, adventurer, gambler--what you will--was a man
with a soft heart, and a curious hardened inability to witness distress
without a desire to offer his help, which, owing to his manner of
life, was generally found to be worse than useless. Watching her as
she lay with profile half-turned from him, her chin resting dejectedly
in her hand, the fair hair clustering low on her white forehead, and a
pitiful droop in the corner of the little mouth,--he was conscious of
a desire, gradually concentrating in the toe of his boot, to kick the
originator of so much unhappiness. As he leant forward for a better
look, a puff of wind caught the brim of his large felt hat, and blew it
along the deck to the chair where she was sitting. Glad of the excuse,
he moved towards her. She turned her head, and a gleam from the moon,
half-hidden in the hurrying clouds, lit up a sweet pale face with deep
grey eyes. A word of apology, and he bent forward to pick up his hat,
catching a glimpse, as he did so, of a tear on her cheek. A great
compassion smote his vagabond heart. He straightened himself and said:
‘Aren’t you cold, sitting up here so late?’
A soft musical voice was one of Mr Denver’s chief accomplishments; it
was useful at poker, and was found attractive even by victims.
‘Oh! no, thank you; see, I have this shawl,’ pointing to a flimsy
concoction of silk and lace that hung over the arm of the chair
in a sufficiently useless way. Without a word he took it up, and
with the deftest fingers--was not Mr Denver a dealer of the first
water?--wrapped it round the shoulders and slender throat. A little
smile, half surprise, half thanks, was his reward.
‘The dew’s very heavy in these seas. Guess my cigar’ll bother you?’
‘Oh, no, not in the least, thank you. Don’t throw it away,’ as Dick
made a motion in that direction. Thankfully retaining it, he stretched
his length on the next chair, and emitted silent but contented puffs.
An attractive length, sinewy but slight; under the shady hat a drawn,
clean-cut, clean-shaven face, bronzed from original fairness to a deep
tan; lazily veiled grey eyes, rather deep-set, and a firm mouth--all
these things Dick turned to his companion, and spake in his most
musical and least nasal voice. She listened with pleasure, but with
an apparent and growing uneasiness, and with ear strained to catch
the least sound of an approach from the cabin; and, in spite of the
nonchalance of his voice and attitude, Mr Denver was no less on the
strain than she; ‘for,’ thought he, ‘the powers forbid that I cause her
to have more abuse from my friend below.’
The moon had burst through the clouds and was flooding the deck
with silver light, and Dick improved the shining hour. The ship was
bound for the West Indies; he discoursed of the islands and his
own experiences there, and she listened, with an evident interest
in spite of her fears. Never yet was woman (or man either, for the
matter of that) uninterested when Dick Denver talked, which he did but
seldom; his voice, as he might have phrased it himself, was ‘kind of
seductive.’ Presently, however, he rose, and hat in hand, said:
‘You’ll pardon me, but I guess you’d better go down; your shawl’s quite
wet.’
She rose with a little shiver, held out her hand without a word, and
turning, went down the hatchway with the same listless, dejected step
as before. Dick watched her go, pushed his hat high up on his head, and
whistled softly and expressively; then he stooped suddenly, raising
himself again with a handkerchief in his hand, the corners of which he
examined with unscrupulous care till he read a name. Holding it softly
in his hand, he pitched away the end of his cigar. Presently he began
whistling again. Nobody ever heard Mr Denver whistle, except in moments
of profound thought; evidently he was cogitating deeply. After a minute
or two he took a pack of cards out of his pocket, and caressing them
with his unoccupied hand, raised his head and voice, and spake to the
moon with a meditative drawl:
‘’Pears I can feel kind of a sorrow for the animal!’ He then put the
handkerchief in his breast-pocket and idled down the hatch. Dick
Denver was always solitary in his habits, and made a point of a
cabin to himself, otherwise his conduct that night with a small lace
pocket-handkerchief might have been considered somewhat out of keeping
with the character of a professional black sheep. It is impossible
to disguise the fact that Mr Denver, in spite of his notorious
insouciance, was an impressionable man.
SCENE II
The ship’s saloon, fitfully lighted by the swinging lamp with a
green shade, furnished a picturesque framing for the two figures it
contained. Mr Dick Denver, in loose garments of spotless white, sat
leaning carelessly back in one chair, with his legs resting on another;
a cigar in his mouth, his hands, with the cards in them, from habit
well held up, and the usual indifferent look upon his face. A great
contrast was the man sitting on the other side of the long, narrow
saloon table. Major Massinger, late of Her Majesty’s Service, a large,
bull-necked man with eyes like a cod fish, in a white mess jacket and
scarlet cummerbund, was sitting forward, burying a somewhat red face
in a beaker of brandy and soda. A box of cigars and picquet markers
testified to a long evening’s play, the last indeed of a series. To
those who knew him, the gallant Major’s boisterous joviality would have
betokened a winning night. His luck was ‘in,’ even to and beyond Dick’s
bottom dollar, but this beyondness, which might have been somewhat
disquieting to his opponent, was not to be gathered from Dick’s
impassive face.
‘Eleven o’clock--shall we conclude?’ said the latter.
‘Not a bit of it, unless you’re afraid of the luck?’
Dick answered by an amused look and a shrug of his shoulders, but he
said:
‘Won’t you disturb your wife if you stay here much longer?’
‘D----n my wife; you’ve evidently never been spliced, or you wouldn’t
be so beastly particular.’
Massinger turned as he said this to open another bottle of soda, and
missed the ugly look in Dick’s half-shut eyes.
‘All serene, then,’ said the latter--‘guess I owe you twelve hundred
and fifty dollars; well, now, I’ll play you double or quits, the best
of three games.’
‘What’s that in pounds? Two fifty, isn’t it? Very good! Go ahead, my
sportsman; double or quits, five hundred or nothing.’
Dick shuffled the cards and cut them; a breeze stole in at the open
skylight, and sighed fitfully through the saloon, and as it died away,
his sharp ears caught the ‘frou frou’ of a silk dress descending the
hatch.
‘One moment,’ he said--‘reckon I’ll just shut that door; there’s kind
of a hurricane playing around here;’ and, rising quickly, he moved to
the saloon door and stood there a moment, hat in hand, as a slender
white figure passed down the stairs. Her hand rested a moment in his as
she glided by, and Mr Denver shut the door and returned to his seat.
Massinger, manufacturing his fourth drink, saw nothing of this by-play,
and the game was resumed. But the tide had turned, and Massinger was
‘rubiconed’ twice running.
‘As you was before you was! Look here, Denver, can’t end up like this,
you know--it’s too infernal slow;’ his voice was getting thick and his
hand shook somewhat.
‘Mussh’t see the luck through, y’know, somehow’n other--no craning.’
Dick, a covert sneer on his face, was far too considerate to disappoint
him, and once again the cards were shuffled and dealt; the Major more
boisterous, Dick more impassive than ever. With the end of the partie
came the transference of £200 in notes from Massinger’s pocket-book
to Mr Denver’s. Undaunted, the Major slapped the latter on the back,
declaring him thickly to be a jolly good sportsman.
‘Have my revenge to-morrow night,--too tight now,’ said he.
‘Yes,’ assented Dick, cheerfully, ‘but I guess we get to St Martin
to-morrow, and I leave the ship.’
‘Oh, hang it! Never mind; I suppose we stay there a bit, eh?’
‘Two days,’ said Dick.
‘All right! I’ll play you on shore. Is there any solitary thing to see
in the d----d hole? My wife always wants to see everything, confound
her!’
Mr Denver apparently paid no heed to this remark; he was sitting tilted
back in his chair, his hat slouched over his brows, and only the
slight twitching of the hand holding the pocket-book, and a curious
smouldering fire in his half-closed eyes, showed that a struggle was
going on in his mind. Presently, with a sudden jerk, he returned to a
right-angled position, and stared straight at Massinger. The man looked
particularly like a cod-fish at that moment, and breathed heavily. Dick
shivered slightly and disgustedly. Through the open skylight above the
wind could be heard sighing in the sails, ‘God! How I hate him! How
long? How long?’ That was the refrain it took. A cold look of purpose
and resolution settled in Dick’s eyes--the crystallisation of a vague
idea.
‘Why, certainly no, not the smallest use! ’Pears to me as if there
might be a chance,’ he muttered unintelligibly to himself; and
fingering the pocket-book in his hand, he looked at the man opposite
with a calculating eye.
‘What’s the matter with you? You’re drunker than I am,’ said the
latter. ‘I ask you simply if there’s anything to see in the island,
and, begad, you’re jibbering like a boiled owl.’ He stooped unsteadily
to reach his glass under the table.
Mr Denver’s look was that of one who measures the distance for a spring.
‘Malūa! Malūa!’ (which is by interpretation ‘Go easy’). ‘I guess it can
be done,’ he drawled softly to himself. ‘Anything to see? No--o. Stop,
though,’--to the intelligent eye, as he drew himself together in his
chair, the spring was very near now--‘I guess I’m wrong all the time,
there _is_ something almighty curious to see, for those who have the
sand.’
‘What’s that?’
‘We--ell, it mightn’t interest _you_, but it’s a place they call “La
boîte du diable”--kind of a cavern in the side of a hill. Considerable
few people have been to see it, and none stayed very long. Reckon _you_
won’t care about it.’
An indescribable sneer was in Mr Denver’s voice, and the Major, though
far gone, was not _too_ far gone to seize upon it as an insult.
‘You mean, I wouldn’t dare,’ he said, huskily. ‘Confound you, sir,
d’you think I’ve not got as much pluck as you?’
‘Guess not,’ said Dick, drily.
‘D----n you, sir!’ said Massinger, furiously; ‘I’ll bet you that £200
I’ve just paid you, I go to that hole, whatever it is, and stay there
as long or longer than you do.’
For answer, Mr Denver rose slowly.
‘Put it in writing,’ he said, and, producing pen and paper out of
his pocket, he reached down the saloon ink-bottle, and pushed them
over to Massinger. The latter, quite sobered, stared a minute at his
nonchalant companion, then sat down, and without saying a word penned
the following lines in a shaky hand:
‘“I bet Mr Dick Denver the sum of £200 that I visit with him a
condemned hole called ‘La boîte du diable,’ and stay there as long or
longer than he does.”
‘Will that do?’
‘Play or pay,’ added Mr Denver, calmly.
‘“Play or pay.”
‘“Albert Massinger, October 9th, 188-”--he signed his name, and threw
it across to Dick, who signed his own, and pocketed the document.
‘Guess I’ll call for you after dinner at your hotel,’ he said; ‘might
be happier with pistols, it’s kind of a skeery place. Good-night,’ he
nodded, and without another word, lounged up on to the silent deck, the
suspicion of an unholy smile flickering on his impassive features.
SCENE III
The night was dark, and the two figures taking a winding way up the
narrow hillside path had much ado to keep from going astray. The
leader, ploughing along, head down, with eyes diligently on the move
to save his precious shins, was betrayed by a running accompaniment
of his favourite language. He was volubly cursing his folly in having
made ‘such a d----d silly bet,’ and Mr Denver for having inveigled
him into a fool’s errand. The latter, sauntering along a few steps
behind, apparently quite oblivious of his companion, was humming a
favourite little tune, and turning from time to time to look down on
the twinkling lights of the little town scattered here and there amid
the tall stems of the palms outlined against the further sky. The faint
murmur of the surf breaking on the reef seemed to chime in with his
mood better than the tune, for he stopped humming, and bent forward to
listen. Massinger had exhausted his vocabulary for the present, and was
silent also; only the fitful chirping of a cicala and the occasional
bark of a dog from below broke the stillness of the tropical night.
The moon was just rising over the sea, throwing a long silvery line
of light, which gradually spread, as if eager to embrace the land,
awaiting it in silent expectancy. The solemnity and stillness of the
scene, however, only served to increase the Major’s irritation.
‘Come on,’ he said, impatiently; ‘don’t stand moonstruck there; let’s
get this infernal foolishness over as soon as possible. How much
further have we got to go up this beastly path? If it’s far I’d sooner
pay £500 than go on.’
‘We’re almost there,’ said Dick, and passing his companion, he swung
along up the track. In about ten minutes he came to a halt, and said
in his soft drawling voice, ‘We turn down here, and in a minute or so
we’ll be right there. Then look to your shooting-iron, and harden your
heart, and in we go. Malūa, my son,’ he added to himself, ‘it’s no part
of the game to “show” a while yet--mustn’t skeer the gentleman;’ he
chuckled grimly and audibly.
‘What the devil’s wrong with the infernal place, and why do we want
pistols?’ said Massinger, testily; but even as he spoke he drew a
revolver from his side pocket. For all answer, Mr Denver led on down a
zig-zag path to the left, until brought up sharp by the face of a rocky
cliff, grown over with bushes and creepers. After standing there a
minute to see that his companion had followed him, he stooped suddenly,
raising with his hand a huge, hanging creeper, and dived as it were
into the face of the rock. Astonished at his sudden disappearance,
Massinger stood a minute before the rock irresolute, but a mocking
voice, with that peculiar high drawl, came from within.
‘Reckon you’re going back, Major; is that so?’
With a muttered oath, Massinger raised the creeper, and, imitating his
companion, crawled through a hidden opening in the rock, till he found
himself standing upright beside Dick in an open space. When his eyes
had become somewhat accustomed to the gloom, he saw that they were in
a natural vault or chamber, formed in the rock of the hillside, nearly
square, and about forty feet from side to side. In the centre was a
huge jagged hole of cavernous depth, and above it, a large cleft in the
rock ceiling of the vault, letting in a glimpse of the starry heavens.
The sides of the walls, of a reddish-grey stone, were damp and clammy,
and the air hot and steamy. In the far corner of the cavern, opposite
the entrance, was a natural stone seat. When by degrees and uncertain
glances he had taken in his surroundings, Massinger looked round for
his companion. Mr Denver was seated in a _degagé_ attitude on a stone,
with his back to the entrance, carefully selecting a weed from his
cigar-case. This he lighted, and got well under weigh, before he said,
with the drawl that had become hateful to the other:
‘Nice place, a’nt it, Major? Take a seat; there’s a tolerable spry pew
opposite.’
He waved with his cigar to the stone seat. Massinger, though secretly
far from comfortable, was not to be outdone in coolness by this Yankee
blackguard. Taking a cigarette, he lit it from the other’s cigar,
and strolled, with a fine assumption of indifference, to the seat
indicated. A long silence followed; the moon was gradually creeping up
in the sky, and long ghostly shadows were cast on the floor and walls
of the ‘Devil’s Box.’ Massinger’s feelings during this night had been
far from enviable; starting after a good dinner, he had looked upon the
affair as an amusing freak by which he would save himself the payment
of £200. The steep, difficult ascent had thoroughly disillusioned
him, and the eerie look of the cavern was fast completing his
discomfiture. He was conscious, too, of a vague feeling of distrust as
to his companion’s conduct. Why had he brought him to this unearthly
hole,--where apparently there was nothing to prevent their staying till
Doomsday to decide this fool of a bet. There was something sinister
about the entertainment.
As if reading the thoughts that were pressing on his companion’s brain,
Mr Denver broke the silence,--
‘Guess you’re feeling up a considerable high tree, Major; this is going
to be an interesting occasion for you.’ There was a look as of a cat
playing with a mouse about the speaker, and Massinger was not slow to
read a menace into the suave tones of the high-pitched voice.
‘What in God’s name is the meanin’ of this foolery?’ he broke out,
harshly; ‘why have you brought me here? There’s something behind all
this d----d skittlin’, and I’ll trouble you to tell me what it is.’ He
rose as he spoke, and took a step with clenched hands towards Dick. The
latter did not move.
‘I should mind that little orifice if I were you,’ he said, pointing
to the yawning chasm that separated them in the centre, and from the
murky depths of which ascended a faintly hissing, bubbling sound as of
boiling water. Massinger, who in his excitement had advanced almost to
its edge, started back again with an alacrity that showed the unstrung
state of his nerves. When he had again dropped into his seat, and was
playing nervously with the butt of the revolver in his coat pocket, Mr
Denver took up the word.
‘Major,’ he said, ‘I’m going to have some talk with you, and you’ll
pardon me if I deliver a little exordi_um_’--he pronounced it with an
ominous emphasis on the ‘um.’ ‘I reckon the moon won’t be full up for
another half hour, so we’ve considerable time.’
‘What’s the moon got to do with it, and what the devil is it you want?
Fire away and come to the point,’ said Massinger, twisting the ends of
his moustache, and endeavouring to conceal his now genuine alarm under
a boisterous bluffness. Mr Denver smiled a quaint little smile, as
though his spirits were rising.
‘Things will begin to move right along about the time the moon’s
overhead,’ he said, consulting his watch. ‘Now, see here, Major, I
don’t want to bore you, but I’ve got to say you’re kind of the worst
specimen of a man I’ve had the luck to meet’--a smothered curse from
Massinger. ‘Keep cool, Major; you’ll want all your language before
I’m through; guess I’ve brought you here,--at your own request, you
know,’--he smiled,--‘just to explain to you a little idea of mine,
which I reckon you’ll appreciate.’ Mr Denver’s resemblance to a cat at
this moment was not reassuring to the mouse. For a moment he paused,
changing his attitude, and leaning back against the wall with his
hands in his pockets and his legs crossed. Massinger had taken out his
revolver, and fingered it nervously.
‘Nice little iron,’ said Mr Denver, approvingly; ‘you’re a good shot,
too, Major, I know.’
‘Pretty fair,’ said the latter, grimly.
‘So much the better. We--ell now, I’ve been thinking a good deal ’bout
you since I’ve had the honour of making your acquaintance, and--now
don’t be wild, Major--you really are--as you Britishers say--a great
cad.’
A furious oath and a sudden movement forward from Massinger was as
suddenly checked by the appearance of a little shining tube held
straight at his head, and the imperturbable drawl resumed,--
‘Guess I see you, and go one better; presently, my dear sir, you’ll
have _your_ chance, but just now I must beg you to sit still and hear
my little exordi_um_.’ A pause.
‘Four years ago you married the present Mrs Massinger.’
‘You blackguard, how dare you mention my wife’s name?’
For the first time Dick Denver’s face betrayed emotion; his mouth
twitched, and a sullen fire burned slowly up into his deep-set eyes,
but his voice was none the less impassive as he continued:
‘I guess I’ve as much show; I’m a good bit fitter to talk of your
wife than you are, you--you hound.’ The words in the slow drawl were
maddening, and this time it was Massinger’s revolver that was levelled,
but Mr Denver sat idly as ever, looking full at his companion, and
presently the latter dropped his arm.
‘Malūa, Major, Malūa! even _you_ won’t commit murder, you see.’--A
longer hiss from the inky depth in the centre, and a thin jet of water
spurted up a foot or two above the level of the ground. Mr Denver took
out his watch and looked at the opening above.
‘The show’s beginning,’ he said. Massinger was wiping some drops of
water off his trousers.
‘I say,’ he said excitedly, ‘that water was boilin’; will it come any
higher?’
‘Don’t alarm yourself, Major, the moon’ll be up before the next
demonstration.’
‘What in the fiend’s name has the moon got to do with it? If you think
I’m goin’ to stay here to be boiled for you or any other madman, I’m
not takin’ any, I can tell you.’
‘No? Well, I guess you’re _going_ to stay here some, while I finish
what I’ve got to say.--Four years ago you married the present Mrs
Massinger; and I guess you’ve led her the life of a dog.’
‘You’re a liar! a d----d liar! I’ve never ill-used her.’
‘You’ve never struck or kicked her, you mean, but by God, in every
other way you’ve been a brute to her, and I reckon you’ve spoilt her
life.’
He held the other with his look, and went on rapidly.
‘I know you, Major; you’re a mean, sullen, sordid cur, not fit to live
with any woman, much less with _her_. We--ell! so--o I guess I’ve fixed
up a little idea which I’m going to explain to you right along.’
Another low, soft hiss from the bottomless pit. The rays from the moon
were now striking almost vertically into the cavern, on Massinger
sitting motionless in an angry but half-cowed amazement, on Mr Denver
again consulting his watch. He returned it to his pocket and said:
‘In ten minutes from that first jet, there’ll be a geyser, and if
we’re here I calculate we’ll be boiled and carried down that hole,--I
know its little ways. There’s just upon six minutes left, but in three
the moon’ll be right above, and there’ll be considerable light in the
shooting gallery.’
Massinger opened his mouth, but Mr Denver went on sharply and
distinctly:
‘You see, Major, my idea’s just this, _one_ of us has got to stay right
here. Now its likely you’ll prefer being shot to being boiled; when I
say the words “one, two, _three_,” we shall both of us fire, and if you
pass out over my body you are to be congratul_at_ed. I shall shoot you
if I can, because’--he paused, then very slowly, ‘I guess Mrs Massinger
has no kind of use for you. It’s a fair and square business, Major,
and you bet’--he pointed with his pistol to the bubbling, hissing
chasm--‘the devil’ll take the hind-most.’
Dick Denver smiled grimly as he finished his exordium--his composure
was devilish; he rose, looked once up at the opening above, through
which the moon was now visible directly overhead, and then stood
immovable, watching his companion. The full horror of his position
had at last dawned on Massinger; he was on his feet now, leaning
irresolutely against the wall, with staring eyes fixed alternately upon
the awful chasm between them and his opponent’s set face.
‘My God!’ he said; ‘you must be mad,--for heaven’s sake, let’s end this
fooling.’ But his ashen face showed that he knew it was no fooling, but
a grim reality.
‘Time’s up. I shall say “one, two, _three_”; at three we fire.’
The words acted like a cold douche on Massinger; he shivered all over,
then braced himself against the rock and set his teeth.
‘D----n you,’ he muttered, ‘I’ll pass out over your body yet.’ Turning
to bay with a wolfish glare in his eyes, he lifted his pistol.
The angry water, greedy of its prey, was hissing louder and louder
between them.
‘One--two--_three_!--’ a double report and a hoarse, stifled cry. Mr
Denver staggered back, and his hat, pierced through and through, fell
from his head. Recovering himself, he threw one look over the pit to
where Massinger lay motionless on his face, shot through the heart; the
devil’s water creeping up and brimming over the edge, nearly touched
his rigid body.
‘Wonder if the cuss is dead? Can’t leave him to be boiled alive.’ Dick
sprang over the brimming, hissing gulf, and lifted the head.
‘As mutton,’ he said, dropping the lifeless mass. With a leap
backwards, he gained the entrance, and, passing through, dashed down
the hill. Once he paused, and looking back, saw a smoking jet shoot
high into the moonlit sky. Some drops of boiling spray fell with a hiss
on his face and hands,--Dick shivered and went on his way.
AN AFTERTHOUGHT
The first streaks of dawn were showing in the east. The long, low,
white-verandahed hotel surrounded by a group of palms that wavered
unsteadily in the half-light, like a group of ghostly sentinels, was
still undisturbed by the coming day. A man standing back in the shadow
muttered to himself, as, glancing over his shoulder, he caught the
first glow of light on the horizon. Advancing softly, with a spring,
he grasped the roof of the verandah, and swung himself up lightly and
noiselessly. Climbing the balcony rails, he looked for a moment along
the line of French windows opening outwards, then, creeping forward, he
passed through one of them into a small empty room, with a larger one
adjoining it. Pausing inside, he glanced through the open door into the
other room. The night had been stiflingly hot, the windows were open,
and from the bed standing in the far corner the mosquito-curtains were
thrown back. As his eyes fell upon the bed, Dick Denver shivered, and
stood thinking.
‘Better not’ he said to himself; ‘it’s kind of a skeery tale.’ He took
a piece of paper from his pocket. ‘No one saw us go up,’ he muttered,
and grimly, ‘I guess no one saw us come down.’ He ran his eye over the
paper.
‘“I bet Mr Dick Denver the sum of £200 that I visit with him a
condemned hole called ‘La boîte du diable,’ and stay there as long or
longer than he does.
‘“ Play or pay.
‘“Albert Massinger, October 9th, 188--.
Dick Denver.”’
So it ran. With a pencil he scribbled a line underneath:
‘Lost and paid. A. M. stays there for ever. Burn this.--D. D.’
He took out of his pocket a bundle of notes, then stole gently forward
and pinned them both to the pillow of the bed where a white figure lay
sleeping. Then he stood back and gazed with a wistful, yearning look in
his eyes. The white-robed figure moved restlessly in its sleep, and a
sigh that went straight to Dick’s heart came stealing across the room.
The window faced east, and the dawning light fell softly on the sweet
face resting on a bare white arm, and on the fair hair trailing across
the pillow. A tiny puff of sea-air floated in, and ruffled the lace
falling back from the delicate throat. A mad longing seized upon Dick;
he took two steps forward, then stopped irresolutely and staggered
back against the wall, as a far-off mountain cry of beast or bird
was wafted in at the window, sounding in his ears like that other cry
heard not long ago. It steadied him, and with a noiseless step he moved
swiftly to the bed, and stooping, pressed his lips lightly to one fair
tress that fell softly over neck and bosom; then he raised himself
as swiftly. Without another look he passed through the window, and
swinging himself over the rail, walked hurriedly through the morning
mist in the direction of the pier.
Two hours afterwards, Mr Dick Denver leant against the side of the
French packet ‘Belle Ile’ as she made steady way from the port of St
Martin. His eyes were fixed on a fast-vanishing white building.
‘I’m best with a new hand; there was nothing _to_ that racket. But it
just licks creation how I made tracks; it wasn’t in the programme,
anyway. Why did I? Dick, my son, why did you?... We--ell, ’pears to
me somehow I remembered a saying: “Ye cannot get figs from thistles”;
I guess that’s right so,--and,’ exceeding bitterly, ‘who am I that I
should lift my face to hers?’
ASHES
To the Inexorable, what need of incense-burning, when from the ashes
of human life is ever rising a measured stream of smoke?
I, Paul Marylski, outcast and rolling stone, am sitting in my old
arm-chair on this accursed English day of yours, the year of little
grace 189-. Forty years have I rolled, and have gathered no moss. Body
and soul am I like unto the battered old friend I sit in. In sooth, I
think as I crouch here over my fire, that I am but as the dead, man
without hope, without desire, without a future, without a present--can
he live? Yes; for he is sitting here to-night like an old dog, with
the same folds in the cheeks, and the same yearning in the eyes. A
thousand curses on the Congo and its deathly fever!--but for that
might I still be man with future before me, but who can stand against
this devil’s gnawing that never ceases?--not I, for one. I have some
friends, a sweet country family, such as you have in England; they
interest themselves in me, in _me_. I am grateful. The ‘mother’ tells
me--‘Cheer up; this life is but a stage; it will soon pass--then,
think of the future, the glorious after-life.’ She believes in this
firmly--why not? Temperament, dear lady, all temperament! I can no more
believe it than I can still this clawing at my vitals. Why do I live?
_Pardieu_, I know not, having had my day--and what a day! Do they not
say, ‘Every dog must have his day’? _Tiens_, this dog has had his, and
it is that, and that alone, which keeps him alive. Even now, as I sit
watching the dying embers, what pictures can I not see through the
smoke that wreathes from my cigarette.
Hark! What’s that? ‘Carmen!’ as I live, a battered hulk; ‘Carmen,’ and
on a barrel-organ! Ah, ha! Good, for your dingy London streets--they
help the picture for once.
* * * * *
I see a room, warm and light; the green blinds are drawn, the polished
floor reflects the softly-shaded lights; in the centre a table loaded
with things loved of the soul, and--is it the same thing, perhaps?--the
palate; empty bottles--ay, even an _empty_ bottle was lovely
then--betoken the end of a feast. Round the table, men, only men; but
look well--ay, and look again, ye callow youths, and livers of the
life of every day--not one but has his _future_ or his _past_--most
have both. Look at him well who rises, glass in hand, to address the
company. Did ye ever see such a born leader of men, a giant, slim and
tall, with eye that flashes, and drooping black moustache? He waves
his hand to the waiters to leave the room, and speaks:--‘_Messieurs_,’
he says--in French, for is he not Christophe de Barsac, first smuggler
in Marseille (or out of it, for that matter)?--‘_Messieurs, le jeu
est fait_,’ and he drains his glass to the dregs, everyone following
suit. ‘It now only remains, _Messieurs_, to reckon the cost,’ and he
sits down. A groan goes up from around the table. There rises a tall,
fat--ah! fat--man, with the invincible smile of a Russian of the
Russians. As such, I, the Pole, sitting opposite, hate him--but also,
you know, I love him as a brother.
‘_Monsieur le President_, and gentlemen,’ he goes on in English, which
his soul loves as only does the soul of the man who speaks it as
badly. ‘We ’ave ’ad ze good time, ze time of ze own devil, as says
our good friend Kerr--r;’ he rolls the r’s indefinitely, and indicates
with his cigar a lean, sunburnt man on his left. ‘I ver’ moch regret
’zat I ’ave no more money to ’ave anoyzer time of ze own devil, and
zat also you ’ave none to lend me, _mais, que voulez vous, vive Monte
Carlo_!’ and he, too, sits down, with a supremely fatalistic shrug of
those vast shoulders, and the still invincible smile. Only three men
out of those nine understand English, yet a murmur of applause shows
the appreciation felt for the speaker, and the sentiments conveyed in
that vast and comprehensive shrug. When the applause has subsided, his
neighbour, the sunburnt southerner and knight-errant, rises abruptly
and says:
‘That’s all very well, but I guess this dinner’s got to be toted up
and paid for. Le’ssee how this pans out,’ and he turns the contents of
his pockets on to the table,--one franc twenty-five centimes. He drops
them into a wine-glass, and passes it to his neighbour. Then follows a
scene curious--nine men of good presence in evening dress, turning out
the innermost recesses of their apparel into a wine-glass--and see,
the result is handed to the President, who counts it anxiously, after
adding his own mite of two sous--‘Six francs seventy-five centimes.’
At the least the dinner has cost fifteen louis. Another groan from the
table.
‘_Tenez_,’ says the President, ‘_J’ai une idée: le petit n’a jamais
joué; eh bien! Je donnerai les cinq francs au petit, et il jouera._’
Evidently _bonne idée_, for the room resounds as _le petit_ is
surrounded and forced forward with many an encouraging pat.
_Bon Dieu!_ That was I! That beardless youth with the bright eyes and
black hair, enjoying life as none but a Pole can enjoy, before his
country has laid her curse of melancholy upon him. Twenty years is
a good span of time, but it seems more than twenty hundred since De
Barsac pressed those five francs into my indifferent hand, and bade me
go forth and seek the price of that feast, eaten not wisely but too
well. Yet even now is Gortchakow’s pat heavy upon my back.
Ah, well, there he goes! passing dreamily out of the busy café, with
its garish lights and constant hum, into the ‘Place’--the immortal
‘Place.’ How well I remember it! Did not _her_ windows look on it?
Every feature, graven on my brain, rises now before me. The living
stream ever flowing from its four sides into those inexorable doors,
the sweet scents wafted from the gardens on the left, the fantastic
shadows of the palms, the strains of ‘Carmen’ from the band playing
in the verandah, the feverish throb of humanity under those quiet and
starry heavens. Who does not know the ‘Place’? and, once knowing, who
forgets?
There he goes, dreamily threading his solitary way across to the
rooms; yet are his thoughts not with those five poor francs; they are,
with his eyes, fixed on a certain window in the hotel opposite, and
wondering what is the earliest hour _she_ can be ‘_de retour_.’
But, heigh-ho! the portals are reached, and lo! one must think of that
dinner. What is one five-franc piece? Truly not much, yet something in
maiden hands. The rooms are full; it is the gambler’s noon. _Le petit_
finds himself wedged in between a swarthy Roumanian Jew, who is sowing
louis broadcast ‘_en plein_’ and ‘_à cheval_,’ and an English lady, of
undetermined age but determined spirit, who is shedding her weekly bill
in five-franc pieces. The Roumanian soweth, but he reapeth not, and he
rises with a scowl and a shrug, and _le petit_ slips into his seat.
He is _sitting_ down with one five-franc piece. _Mon petit!_ truly thou
art--what one calls--very green. Yet he has watched the game before,
this young bantling.
‘_Quatre premier_,’ he cries, and manfully throws down the fateful
piece. The little white ball is already spinning with its merry rattle
of life and death--it stops. ‘_Deux, noir, paire et manque._’ The
ever-busy rake pushes over to him two louis. And now
‘_Trente-quatre, trente-six, deux louis, sil vous plait._’
The obliging croupier places them--once again the merry rattle.
‘_Trente-six_,’ says the sing-song voice.
‘Bravo, _mon petit_, here is the price of the dinner with interest.’
Prudence personified, he places fifteen louis out of the twenty-four
in an inner pocket and prepares to do or die with the rest. Yes, yes,
how well I remember the tall Englishman behind saying to his friend,
‘Sportsman, that young beggar! I shall follow him.’
_Le petit’s_ English has been picked up on a Straits Settlements
trader, but the tall Englishman he understands and appreciates. He is
playing on _rouge_ now. A run of four; already by his side are piled
the louis mountains high.
‘_Messieurs, faites le jeu._’
‘_Cent louis, rouge._’
‘_Le jeu est fait--rouge_;’ again and again, and yet again comes red,
and each time _le petit_ wins.
Now he is staking the limit, and winning still, the multitude
wondering, with that rising murmur of praise and plaint that ever
attends a big winner’s fortunes. Suddenly he looks up. Standing
opposite to him is a tall woman with dark eyes, lovely to behold, and
she is watching him with a curious look, not of pity, not of contempt,
not of passion, yet with something of all three. He starts, half
rising, and makes a motion to leave the table.
‘_Messieurs, faites le jeu_,’--the murmur grows.
‘Follow the run up; play your luck out, sir,’ says the big Englishman.
_Le petit_ hurriedly counts out the limit and pushes it on to
_rouge_--the ball stops. ‘_Noir_,’ drawls the croupier, in a triumphant
sing-song; the run is broken, but _le petit_, sweeping the remains of
his winnings into his pocket, is no longer in his seat.
Between two goddesses can no man stand, not even the maiden wooer of
the great goddess Chance, when a greater than she has claimed him.
The woman with the dark eyes moved away, but _le petit_ is beside her.
‘’Léna, how long the day has been! But the night comes, ah, the night
comes--at twelve?’ She gives him one look from unfathomable eyes, that
provoke, yet answer, and passes on to a seat at the next table. _Le
petit_, with bowed head and unsteady step, but with a flame in his
eyes, passes out into the air to render an account of his stewardship.
* * * * *
Once more the softly-lighted room. The ghost of the feast has his
clutches now upon the band of revellers; yea, a gloom is upon them;
even wanes the smile of Gortchakow, prince of Russian philosophers.
‘_Enfin!_’ says the President, and at his voice all turn, to see _le
petit_ come in at a side door, and stand silent in the shadow. All
eyes are upon him--surely he looks depressed.
‘Zey ’ave plucked ’im, my children, zey ’ave plucked ’is one leetle
feazer,’ is Gortchakow’s sorrowful but smiling comment.
‘What luck, my son?’ says the President, gravely. For answer, _le
petit_ opens his coat, and before nine pairs of hungry eyes he pours
forth what seems a never-ending stream of gold and notes on to the
table. A howl of amaze and delight bursts forth, and _le petit_ is
enveloped in several pairs of arms, until he wriggles out, and dives
under the table, where he sits in comparative security, while the
President pays the bill, divides the spoil, and delivers a homily upon
‘_le chance_,’ rendered palatable by bumpers of champagne.
Great God! And is it only twenty years since I sat under that
table?--only twenty!!
* * * * *
Once more the ‘Place,’ but now the hum and throb has given place to the
passion-fraught stillness of the Southern night. Closed are the rooms
and the cafés; the last strains of the band have died away; the croak
of belated frogs, an occasional laugh, and the snatch of a song from
belated humans, are the only sounds that come to the ears of _le petit_
as he wends his cautious way to the longed-for meeting. A French window
opening on to a balcony, ten feet from the ground,--what is this to a
sailor, under cover of the night? Now he is up, and gazing with all his
eyes through the half-open window into a dimly-lighted room.
Sights fair and horrible, many, have I seen in my tempest-driven life,
ay, many, but never, by the gods, have I seen sight fairer, and yet
more horrible, than that which met _le petit’s_ fascinated gaze through
those half-drawn blinds.
The figure of the loved one is stretched on the couch, dreaming, with
look of expectation and delight in the half-closed eyes.
Dark with all the passions, scowling malignant, a face glares from a
shrouded corner of the room upon that white-robed form. Passionate
love, passionate hate, passionate jealousy--who shall say what is
in that face? Enough surely to bind _le petit_ with the spell of a
nameless terror.
The figure moves forward noiselessly out of the shadow. Ah! One knows
him now! This is he whom most she dreads; he who, not husband, nor
lover accepted, pursues her with vows, with threats, with all that
there is of jealous passion; to whom, despite of fear, repulsion,
dread, some mysterious tie binds her. _Le petit_ gazes--so he is there,
that ogre, ah! And certainly he knows, that monster, of the expected
visitor--he has read it in the passion of her eyes, upon her dumb but
parted lips.
It is destiny--so much the better; once for all we will end all this.
The figure creeps forward, with raised hand clenched.
_Le petit_ steps in from the balcony.
‘’Léna,’ he says, and with his finger points.
She rises at the sound of his voice, and turning sees; then with a
little cry of terror she comes to his arms for protection. That was
like her. Afterwards, when _le petit_ wanted those white arms that
hung around his neck--wanted them sorely in his sick estate, nigh unto
death,--did she bring them then? Bah! All women are alike! and yet not
all--not all.
Is that a devil that rages before one, foaming at the mouth?--Ah! no,
only Juan Costello, a very evil-looking person!
‘My compliments to you, Monsieur, but this lady and myself wish to talk
_affaires_; will Monsieur have the kindness to withdraw?’
Truly he is _canaille_, with his villainous tongue and his villainous
eyes--also he makes a great noise, until they come and take him away;
altogether it is a very stupid and common affair, pah!--Well, well, it
is a long time ago, and a little noise more or less doesn’t matter to
me now.
Also _le petit_ goes forth; and there is rage--a bitter, black rage--in
his heart.
How slowly wing the hours away till the morning light--those hours of
disappointment and burning hate. That dog! One will kill him with the
first light.--The little bay near Cabbé Roquebrune--that little bay
that recalls so greatly the far-away lagoons of the blessed South Seas.
Too good a resting-place for such a hound--far too good--yet it will
serve.
Up and down, up and down, never still through the long night hours,
head awhirl, eyes aflame. Bad training, my child, for the morning’s
meeting.
Who cares? It is fate--his death at my hands is written in those stars
that shine so steadily, so inexorably, above, in that dome of destiny.
Ah! There it is at last, that streak of light--omen of wrath and blood,
dull, and red, and angry streak. ‘_Tant mieux!_’ Certainly there will
be sport.
At last the little bay--and at the water’s edge the little tideless
waves are whispering joyfully, and they are as glad as _le petit_, for
this is a scene they love.
There he comes! he is glad, too--good--everything goes well.
‘You know these things, my friend; tell me where shall I hit him to
kill?’
‘I reckon you’re a kind of a spitfire. Take the cuss under the arm, as
he stands sideways, and keep your own elbow low.’
Ah! My friend, thou art an artist, and valued as such, but, when the
blood surges and sings in the head, words count for little.
So I can see his hated face glaring at me above his pistol, the flames
from our eyes are meeting. Ah, me! goodness and strength are gone out
of me with that glance--pity to spend so much good hatred on a cur like
that.
Yet ’tis not for long! and now ... ’tis all over, and they are carrying
_le petit_ back from the regretful waters. And some time--when was it?
who knows?--he drags himself to sea again, and the page is closed. And
what of the other, that hound? And of her? Again, who knows?--Ah, yes,
I have still the pain of that wound, but not greatly.
Well! well! a long time ago,--and it was but a page. Come, turn over.
Nay, not even the strength for that; thou hast had thy dose of life for
the day, and the barrel-organ is gone, and thou art tired, and the fire
is low, and the cigarette--pouf--it is but ashes.
‘TALLY HO’--BUDMASH
‘As the egg, so the chicken.’
--Free translation of a native proverb.
Two figures stood on the edge of the stream of traffic which flows
unceasingly along Piccadilly in the dusty forenoons of the season. They
stood with their eyes blinking watchfully in the sun that glared with
a friendly and altogether satisfying glare upon the stone pavement.
The one was the figure of a small boy; his legs were planted firmly
apart, and a wide-brimmed straw hat was set sturdily on the very back
of his head. A very small, very brown-faced boy was he, with round blue
eyes, and hair fair almost to whiteness; rising a stout five, and his
name--for the purposes of this chronicle--was ‘Tally Ho.’ The other was
the presentment of a silent and melancholy Hindu, with a black beard,
and turbaned head of a dusky mahogany; lean, and white-clothed, he
stood slightly behind, in an attitude of respectful protection.
They gazed curiously at the changing, throbbing flow of Western energy,
and ever and again the flow glanced over its shoulder in its ceaseless,
and apparently objectless, quest, to wonder in its turn at those two
strange figures from an unknown and far-off land, washed up high and
dry on the edge of the stream.
‘De big fire is velly hot,’--Tally Ho always called the sun the big
fire--‘as hot as Inja, doesn’t ’oo tink, Kotah Lal?’
‘If Tally Ho Sahib say, then so it is; yet it is in his servant’s mind
that in India there were even days when Tally Ho Sahib called that they
should put the big fire out, and greatly pull the punkah, and, as the
Sahib knows, there be no punkahs this side of the big water.’
‘My mislemembers,’ said Tally Ho. ‘What do ’ose memsahibs goin’ lound
on de wheels, dey’re velly ugly, dey makle my’s head ache--tell dem to
’top, Kotah Lal,’ and he indicated with a stumpy brown forefinger two
dashing young females on the inevitable bicycle.
‘They go thus because after them comes a big bad god, and so perchance
they will escape,’ said Kotah Lal, with a glimmer of a smile on his
impassive features.
‘For why are deir leggies one on each side?’ said the irrepressible
Tally Ho loudly, as another dame flew by; ‘it is not so in my country;
are de wheels alive, Kotah Lal?’
‘It may be so; thy servant is a stranger in this land, Sahib, where
all men seem possessed of devils, so fast they run to do naught all
the day long. But the Doctor Sahib on the big ship did tell me that in
this country there be a great and bad spirit called Indi-Gesti-Un, who
pursues men to their undoing, so that they run ever faster to escape.’
‘Where does he live, Kotah Lal?’ said Tally Ho, concernedly.
Kotah Lal placed his hand upon the regions of his middle, and smiled
mournfully. This seemed to supply Tally Ho with a fresh idea.
‘Kotah Lal,’ he said suddenly, thrusting his small brown fists deeply
into the pockets of his holland knickers, ‘what is dere for my’s
tiffin? Is dere cully and lice, allee samee as on de big ship?’
‘The Sahib commanded and the order has gone forth; without doubt there
be these things for the Sahib’s lunch.’
‘Velly dood, my tinks my’s empty.’ Tally Ho withdrew one hand from his
pocket, and passed it meditatively over his small stomach. ‘Which is de
way, Kotah Lal?’
‘It will be necessary to walk down the market of the dried grasses, and
through the square where are the four great lions that the Sahib looked
upon with favour yesterday, to where the trains run in the smokey black
hole under the ground. So said the Sahib in the blue clothes of whom I
asked anon.’
‘Turn on,’ said Tally Ho; ‘my’s _velly_ empty, my wiss Foo Ching was in
Ingeliland; he made exkullent dood chow-chow; my loves Foo Ching, Kotah
Lal.’
Foo Ching, the Chinese cook of the steamer which had two days before
achieved the honour of safely bearing from India, and landing one
‘Tally Ho,’ baptismally known as Geoffrey Standing Blount, was that
young man’s latest bosom friend, and at that time mainly responsible
for the eccentricities of his speech.
‘My wiss my was corpington (corpulent), like Foo Ching; Foo Ching was
velly nice and corpington, and my’s _velly_ empty.’
Tally Ho, who usually carried his head loftily, drooped it to
contemplate mournfully his small person, and in so doing butted it
into the stomach of an elderly commercial hurrying to his mid-day meal.
‘My begs ’oor pardon,’ said Tally Ho, pained but polite, raising his
hat and rubbing his snub nose. The commercial, with soul intent on the
undercut, paid no attention, but hurried on. ‘Oos a lude man,’ said
Tally Ho, indignantly; ‘a velly lude man.’ He stared reproachfully
after him up the street till the stream had swallowed him up.
In time, and by dint of much circuitous marching and counter-marching,
escaping with many a dodge and device the rumbling onslaught of
’busses, and the ‘scorching’ attack of bicycles, they reached the black
hole known to the Westerns as Charing Cross Station. The interview
between Kotah Lal and the ticket clerk ended satisfactorily in his
obtaining tickets for not more than two stations further than their
destination. Armed with these, the Hindu secured Tally Ho by the arm,
and descended gravely to the platform.
‘Dlefful ’tuffy,’ commented Tally Ho, with a sniff of disgust; ‘my
wantee tum scent on my’s hankeychoo.’
‘Let the Sahib abide but a moment in patience--here cometh the panting
one with the fiery eye.’
A train drew up, they got into an empty carriage, and, as Tally Ho
remarked, ‘de Injun blewed its nose,’ and ‘shaking its head,’ went on
its way towards the west. Now it is not to be peculiarly remembered
against Kotah Lal that upon this stifling afternoon he was inclined
to doze, bearing in mind that for two nights, being cumbered with the
duties of arrival, he had not slept,--moreover, the fact that within
two minutes of entering the train he fell into a deep and dreamless
slumber, he himself has since been heard to explain as a particular and
malicious visitation of the Evil One.
Before Westminster Bridge was reached Tally Ho had exhausted the
fascinations of the carriage, and was become unfeignedly bored.
‘My will wait till de tlain ’tops,’ he thought, ‘and ask Kotah Lal if
my may det down and ’peak to Blown.’
Brown, a particular friend of his, was an engine-driver on the little
one-horse line that ran past his home in the North-West Provinces. The
train pulled up with a jerk at the station, and Tally Ho turned to
proffer his request, but a gently ecstatic snore from the turbaned
head in the opposite corner warned him that his protector was far away
in the Land of Nod.
‘Poo’ah Kotah Lal,’ said Tally Ho compassionately, ‘he’s velly sleepy,
my will not wakle him up.’ This he said consideringly, having in his
small mind the semi-conviction that it might be better _not_ to ask for
his protector’s leave in this matter. ‘My tinks,’ pursued Tally Ho,
‘Blown will be wanting my.’
He moved towards the door, but at this moment the train resumed its
grimy way, and burrowed once more into the bowels of the city. Tally Ho
paused, his small fist on the handle.
‘My will wait,’ he said, ‘till de silly tlain ’tops again.’
He amused himself by turning and returning the handle, putting his
whole soul into the operation, and missing being projected into a murky
space by the dispensation of a merciful Providence, and the skin of his
tiny white teeth. The train emerged into the light, and pulled up again
in the open space just eastward of St James’s Park Station. Kotah Lal
snored peacefully.
‘My’s velly good not to wakle him,’ mused Tally Ho, as he slid out of
the carriage and bumped on his little seat to the ground. ‘My will
’peak clossly to Blown--dis is a baddy tlain.’
He frowned as he picked himself up, and, shaking himself, took his
grubby way almost under the train towards the engine. The engine-driver
was looking ahead and turning on steam as Tally Ho caught him in
profile.
‘_It’s not Blown_,’ he gasped, astonished, and the train moved on past
a gaping atom of humanity.
‘’Top, ’top, you baddy tlain, my says ’top!’ But the train stopped
not, and went on its way rejoicing into the cleaner parts of the city,
bearing with it an unconsciously slumbering Hindu.
Now the word ‘tears’ had not been in Tally Ho’s vocabulary this many a
day.
‘Baddy tlain,’ he said, ‘’t has runned away wid my’s Kotah Lal,’
forgetting, perchance, that it was Tally Ho that had first deserted the
train, and not the train Tally Ho. ‘My will catchee it!’
His small legs twinkled rapidly down the line of the train. But the
train had the start, and was flourishing out of St James’s Park
Station at the one end as Tally Ho trotted into it at the other. He
laboured up the steep incline on to the platform as the tail light was
swallowed up in the opposite blackness. Tally Ho stopped, at a loss
what to do.
‘Velly baddy tlain,’ he panted, ‘my--’ here a small mustard Dandie
Dinmont sniffed at his legs. ‘Oh! _what_ a nice doggie!’ said Tally
Ho, with characteristic irrelevance, and stooped to pat it. A whistle
sounded, the Dandie trotted away obediently, and Tally Ho trotted after
in hot pursuit. The platform was disgorging a stream of passengers,
and Tally Ho, his mind and eye fixed on the dog, passed the ticket
collector, unchecked, at the skirt of a stout middle-aged female.
‘Hi,’ said the collector, ‘hi, lydy,--ticket for the youngster, please.’
‘What youngster?’ said the indignant lady.
‘That there youngster of yourn, in the holland breeks.’
The owner thereof was now well up the staircase, and twinkling over the
bridge in pursuit of the Dandie.
‘You impident person!’ said the choleric dame, ‘holland breeks indeed!’
‘Now then, ma’am, don’t you give me none of your bluff--holland breeks
it is, and a smudgy seat at that,--py up please, if you y’nt got no
ticket.’
‘But I tell you I haven’t got any children; I’m a single woman; you
must be intoxicated, collector.’
‘Go it, breeks!’ came a voice from the half-amused and half-impatient
crowd.
‘That’ll do, ma’am, that’ll do,’ said the collector, majestically;
‘your name and address, if _you_ please.’
‘Certainly,’ bellowed the now infuriated female, ‘certainly. Maria
James, 4 Smith Square; and I’ll take good care you’re not a collector
of this company for long. Holland breeks indeed!’
‘You see,’ mused the collector to the crowd, as he took the remaining
tickets, ‘it tykes ’em this w’y sometimes--these ’ere _single_ femyles.’
Now in the meantime the ‘disturber of traffic,’ having said to
himself, ‘my wants to pat that doggie,’ had to his great disgust only
arrived at seeing the object of his desires lifted into a cab, and
whirled from before his eyes, at the gates of St James’s Park. This
was enough to damp the spirits of a hero. Tally Ho entered the park
with a momentarily dejected step, and wandered on to the bridge; but
there his dejection ceased, for below him, swimming in circles, in
semi-circles, in parabolas, in zig-zags, were ducks--ducks more sleek
and beautiful than any he had ever beheld, and fat--words could not
describe the nature of their fatness. Tally Ho sank on his knees, stuck
his head through the girders, and gazed. His affections particularly
rivetted themselves on two small bronze-green ducks taking first
lessons in diving from an attentive parent.
‘My wantles _dem_,’ said Tally Ho, joyfully and loudly, through
the girders, to the intense astonishment of a military-looking old
gentleman, from between whose legs the words arose.
‘Gawd bless me! What’s that?’
‘My wantles ’oo for each of my’s tlowser’s pottets,’ bellowed Tally Ho
across the water to the ducks.
‘Gawd bless me! It’s the ducks the boy wants,’ commented the ancient
warrior, stepping with much care clear of Tally Ho, and noting the
direction of his gestures. At this precise instant Tally Ho withdrew
his head from between the girders and scrambled on to his feet, and as
he did so his eye lighted on the stranger whose elderly but martial
form he had been doing his level best to upset.
‘Salaam, Genelal Sahib,’ he said, saluting affably and without
embarrassment, ‘my is Tally Ho--my wantles dose ducks.’
The General saluted in turn, screwed a gold-rimmed eyeglass carefully
into his eye, stroked his grizzled moustache, and gazed curiously at
his interlocutor.
‘Tan my have dose two nickle gleeny-blown ducks?’ said Tally Ho,
pointing into the water, and pulling abstractedly at the General’s grey
frock coat.
‘’Tenshun,’ said the latter, and Tally Ho dropped his hands
mechanically to his side, and drew himself up with his feet at a
correct 45 degrees. ‘Now, then, what d’ye want the ducks for, heh?’
The ‘heh’ was rather alarming, but Tally Ho passed it by unconcernedly.
‘Oos velly like my Daddy,’ he remarked with condescension; ‘but my
wantles dose ducks to takle home in my’s pottets,’ he continued,
reverting to business.
‘Bless the boy! But you can’t have those ducks; they belong to the
Queen!’
‘Dod bless her!’ said Tally Ho, raising his hat abstractedly, for
his attention had wandered to the stick with the skull handle in the
General’s hand. ‘Velly plitty ‘tick,’ he murmured to himself, ‘my will
walkle wid ’oo, if ’oos not tired,’ he added aloud considerately to the
stranger.
‘Gawd bless me!’ said the dumfoundered General. ‘He’d take command of a
division for two pins! Gentleman though--Indian--know the breed. Wonder
who he is--seems lost--never mind, take him along--pump him--no fool.
Come along Mr--Tally Ho, Sir; eyes front, quick march.’
Tally Ho made one manful endeavour to compass the General’s stride, and
then relapsed philosophically into a regular two for one. He had quite
forgotten the ducks, he wanted that stick so badly to carry over his
shoulder like a rifle. After completing the length of the bridge, side
by side with the General, and cogitating silently, Tally Ho saluted,
and said:
‘_Ettafakhan_ de Genelal Sahib finds de ’tick velly heavy.’
‘Gawd bless me! Persian! Very talented boy, great
diplomatist--_Ettafakhan_,’ he continued aloud to Tally Ho (the
which is the Persian for ‘peradventure’), and without another word
transferred the stick to his small and grubby fist. The latter, too
well bred to show the transports of joy swelling in his small bosom,
halted, salaamed profoundly, and after hugging the stick, which was
at least as tall as himself, heaved it over his shoulder, and marched
manfully on. The General was an old man; he stooped slightly and walked
slowly, and his eyes, that looked like those of an old dog, gazed
curiously ever and anon from under his shaggy eyebrows at the small
brown urchin tramping at his side. They reached the gates of the park
before he had in the least made up his mind what course to pursue with
this strange little mortal. As they were crossing the Mall towards St
James’s Palace, a new idea struck Tally Ho; he halted suddenly, stuck
the stick into the ground, and leaning on it, looked around him with a
self-satisfied air.
‘My’s losted,’ he announced.
The General, in rapt amazement at the calmness of this remark, halted
also, and a hansom, sweeping by, nearly ran over his toes, and knocked
off Tally Ho’s hat with the edge of its wheel.
‘Damned scoundrels!’ muttered the exasperated warrior below his breath,
‘plucky boy, though--near thing.... All right, heh?’--this to Tally Ho,
who was contemplating a large splash of mud on the crown of his hat.
‘My’s noo ’at!’ he said, ruefully.
‘Never mind your hat s’long’s _you’re_ all right, heh? That’s it! Come
along.’ A bright idea struck him. ‘Are you hungry? Course he is, all
boys hungry. Gawd bless me! what was I thinking of? Come and have some
tiffin at my club, Mr--Tally Ho, sir.’
‘Tank’oo, my will be _dee_lighted, my’s _velly_ empty,’ said Tally Ho,
frankly and cheerfully.
‘Course you are. Come along, sir, come along.’
As the oddly assorted couple took their way down Pall Mall, the
passers-by turned to stare. The sentries at Marlborough House
saluted--Tally Ho appropriated and returned the salutes with a
pre-occupied air--he was thinking now of the General’s white hat, and
of how he desired it greatly to keep his mongoose ‘Bengy’ in--he was
sure he had seen little windows in the top of it. ‘Perhaps the Genelal
Sahib will takle it off again, and sclatchle his head as Blown does
sometimes, den my will see,’ he reflected.
Now they had arrived at the corner of St James’s Square, and the
sweet-faced old sweeper at the crossing had made her double-barrelled
bob to the sunburnt, white-haired veteran and the sun-browned,
white-haired child. At the steps of a great service club the General
halted, and took off his hat to mop his brow, for the day was hot, and
his mind was perplexed.
‘Yes, sir,’ he said aloud to himself, ‘boy’s hungry--tiffin first, pump
afterwards. Gawd bless me! What’s that?’ For Tally Ho, swelling with
joy of verification, was threading his thumbs through the vent-holes of
the white hat, and saying to himself with subdued emphasis:
‘My will makle two mores, _eke oper eke_’ (one upon the top of the
other).
‘Devil you will!’ said the General, and feeling from the absorption of
his guest’s eye that no time was to be lost, he hastily replaced his
hat, and extended two fingers to assist Tally Ho up the steps.
‘No t’ank ’oo,’ said the latter; ‘my will runle up.’ He proceeded to
mount the stairs on all-fours, and sat on the top step at the feet
of the hall porter, awaiting the arrival of his distinguished but
disconcerted host.
‘Gawd bless me! regular young budmâsh (rogue)--fine fellow,
though--very fine fellow! Heh! Wilkins!’ he said, with a perplexed
twirl of his moustache, to the unmoved janitor.
‘New member, General, or friend of yours only, sir? What name shall I
enter, General?’
‘This gentleman will tiffin with me, Wilkins. Name, heh! what?--Quite
so. Mr--Tally Ho, sir,’ he said, turning to Tally Ho, who with his hat
off was examining the tape machine in the hall with an interested eye,
‘the servant wishes to know your name, so that he may put it in the
visitors’ book. What shall I tell him?’
‘Geoffley Standin’ Blount,’ returned Tally Ho. His knees were grubby,
his hat was torn, his seat was dusty, but he looked very much of a
gentleman.
‘Mr Geoffrey Standing Blount, Wilkins,’ said the General with dignity.
The smile flickering into Wilkins’ eye flickered out again, and he
turned to the visitors’ book. The General led the way to the lavatory
past a group of younger men in the hall, who greeted him with
respectful if amused recognition. Tally Ho, smiling affably, followed
him. Arrived at the lavatory, he looked with a pleased anticipation
at the row of basins, for though of tender years, soap and water were
after his heart. He was feeling hot and dusty, the taps ran so nicely,
and--that was all, alas!--impossible to reach those basins, those
nicely flowing taps--so he stood in the middle and waited while the
General washed, politely silent, but feeling his inches, or want of
inches, keenly. At last he said, ‘My’s nickle, but my’s growin’!’ An
apology for his host’s want of thought was in the last words.
‘Gawd bless me--boy’s too small--can’t reach--never thought of
that--dear, dear!’ He tugged at his moustache in great concern.
‘Hi! you boot-boy,’ he shouted, ‘bring a chair, two chairs, help
the gentleman up, hi! you fool, hold the slack of the gentleman’s
trousers, can’t you, while he washes;’ for Tally Ho in a transport of
joy was taking a header into the basin. The remainder of his toilet
was carefully attended to by the boot-boy, under the General’s anxious
supervision.
When it was completed, and Tally Ho was once more presentable, they
ascended to the dining-room--Tally Ho for once on his two feet, and
conducting himself with a vast propriety. It was a little after the
ordinary luncheon hour when the General finally anchored his guest,
contrary to all laws and precedents, in the club dining-room. An old
crony of his was finishing his lunch in one of the windows; next to him
the General, greatly in want of support, took his stand, and having
caused his guest to be lifted into his seat, abstractedly handed him
a menu card. Tally Ho perused it gravely after the manner of a man
accustomed to these things, and handing it to the waiter, remarked:
‘My will have cully and lice,’--he paused, debating gravely, ‘and
plummers,’ he added, with a note of triumph in his voice.
The General twirled his moustache.
‘Curry and rice for this gentleman, plums afterwards--fried sole for
me. Boy of decision,’ he continued, approvingly to himself. ‘Knows his
own mind.’ He looked at the card. ‘Gawd bless me! not on the menu,
either of them--’course, can’t read--how should he?--never mind, finer
fellow than I thought--man of resource.’ He turned to the crony. ‘How
do, ’Morant?’ he said--‘married man, just the man I want--stand by to
support me, heh?’ He nodded imperceptibly in the direction of Tally Ho.
‘Certainly, my dear fellow,’ said the intelligent crony, ‘make me
known.’
‘Colonel Morant--Mr Geoffrey Standing Blount.’
Tally Ho, whose round blue eyes were fixed immovably on the face of
the waiter, greatly to the discomfiture of that youthful but solemn
personage, turned and twinkled friendlily at his new acquaintance, but
his mind was too agitated by the question then troubling it for more
than a passing attention to other matters.
‘For why isn’t he black?’ he said in a loudly audible but awestricken
whisper to the General, pointing with his chin at the unfortunate. ‘My
foughted all club waiters was black.’
‘This is England, sir, not India; here they’re red, you know,’ said
the General, blandly, with a chuckle. ‘It’s like lobsters, red in hot
water; ain’t it, Morant?’
His eyes followed the vanishing form of the young waiter flying to hide
the blushes spreading over his disconcerted countenance.
‘Oh!’ said Tally Ho, polite but unconvinced.
‘The point,’ said the General, after a pause, turning to his supporter.
‘The point is this--given small boy--gentleman--lost--name Geoffrey
Standing Blount--new to England.’
‘Dat’s my,’ said Tally Ho to himself softly in parenthesis.
‘Guest of mine,’ continued the General, ‘don’t want to pump him--point
is, how to find his belongings, heh?’ He wound up abruptly.
‘Where was he met with?’ said the crony. He was head of a county
constabulary, and great on detective detail. ‘The time and place?’
Mechanically he took out a pocket-book.
‘Ducks--St James’s Park--one thirty.’
Tally Ho stared from one to the other; were they talking of him? He
inclined to think so.
‘My’s losted,’ he said to the crony; ‘my’s Daddy’s Number One
mud-and-water soldier in de Deyra Dhun.’
At this precise moment his curry arrived, and no further information
did he volunteer, for, as he had remarked, he was ‘velly empty.’
‘I have it,’ said the crony, ‘waiter! fetch me an Army List. Number
One mud-and-water soldier is pigeon-English for commanding engineer.
Here you are,’ he continued, triumphantly, ‘R.E. Majors, Blount, F.
Standing. India.’
‘India,’ said the General, ‘hum. Large place--and this is England.’
‘His bankers,’ said the crony, ‘probably Cox’s; waiter, fetch me a
commissionaire, we’ll send him round and find out.’
‘Bravo,’ said the General, ‘invaluable fellow, brilliant idea--that’s
it, young man,’ he turned approvingly to Tally Ho, ‘wire in.’
‘Exkullent dood chow-chow, nearly as dood as Foo Ching’s,’ responded
Tally Ho. He was again oblivious of the fact that he was in process
of being found, and was devoting himself in the intervals of luncheon
to smiling sweetly at the waiter, whose feelings he was innocently
conscious had been in some sort wounded. ‘Are ’oo feelin’ all light
again?’ he said sympathetically, ‘’oo ’tant help not bein’ black, tan
’oo?’
The waiter cast one beseeching look around him, and fled precipitately,
leaving a trail of blushes behind.
‘Poor mans,’ said Tally Ho, ‘perwaps de big fire has strokled him; he
_is_ velly led, isn’t he, Genelal Sahib?’
‘All right, my boy, all right,’ said the General, choking. He turned to
the crony, who was smiling gravely. ‘Wonderful boy,’ he said, _sotto
voce_, ‘make fine soldier--splendid touch--considers feelings of his
men.’
‘Rather a curious way of doing so,’ said the crony, glancing with a
twinkle in his eye at the door through which the waiter had disappeared.
‘All same--good intention,’ said the General.
But Tally Ho had entirely forgotten waiter, lunch, and hosts, in the
contemplation of a new problem connected with the giant fireplace,
which was crammed with plants.
‘It’s all tommy lot,’ he said abruptly to himself, climbing down from
his chair and walking straight up to the fireplace. ‘Kotah Lal said
dere was allerways fires in Ingeliland, but dere isn’t, and dere never
wasn’t, ’cos dese would be burntled.’
‘Gawd bless me!’ said the General, ‘wonderful!--splendid soldier he’ll
make--good reasonin’ power--fine forcible vocabulary.’
‘I should apply for a commission for him to-morrow if I were you,’
said the crony, drily.
‘So I will,’ said the General, ‘hum--well--not quite yet--but keep my
eye on him.’
Tally Ho came back to the table, and stood waiting at attention. The
two men rose.
‘Has ’oo finished?’ said Tally Ho, ’tum along, my wantles my’s cigar.’
‘It seems that your protégé has his vices as well,’ said the crony,
as they went downstairs. In the hall the commissionaire handed him
an address. He looked at it triumphantly. ‘Major Blount’s London
reference,’ he said.
‘Capital,’ said the General, ‘I’ll send round at once--sure to know all
about him there.’
He did so, then ordered coffee and cigars, and settled himself and his
guest in armchairs. Tally Ho’s feet, when he sat back, just reached the
edge of the chair.
‘My’s daddy,’ he said, ‘dives my one puffle of his cigars--Kotah Lal,
my’s _sais_, ’mokes, but my doesn’t takle puffles from a _sais_,’ he
added, proudly.
The General twinkled all over his war-worn face, took his cigar from
his mouth and handed it to Tally Ho. The latter grasped it gingerly
between his small brown finger and thumb, and applied it to his mouth,
which it completely filled. Holding it firmly, and sitting well back,
with his chair tilted up, he took one long diligent draw, then with
his cheeks puffed out he gave it solemnly back to the General. Slowly
and rapturously he let the smoke escape, and watched it curl up to
the ceiling in little puffs and rings. When it was all expended, he
snuggled his small fair head back amongst the cushions.
‘It allerways makles my sleepy,’ he said apologetically, and his head
was nodding already. ‘Dood night, ‘tank de Number One up aloft Sahib
for my’s goody day--but my wantled dose gleeny-blown ducks baddy.’ Here
he heaved a serene little sigh, and snuggled still further into the
recesses of the chair. ‘My’s lost-ed,’ he murmured contentedly, as his
chin fell on to his chest, and he slept. A sunbeam flitted in through
the blinds on to his dusty flaxen pate. The General leant forward.
‘All serene, my young friend,’ he said softly, ‘before you wake again
we’ll have that careless beggar of a _sais_ of yours by the heels, and
you’ll be “losted” no more. And mark my words, Morant,’ he went on,
flicking the ash off his cigar, ‘when we’re done for, and stacked
with the majority, that tow-headed young budmâsh’ll be as great, ay,
a greater soldier than either of us; we shan’t know it--stacked,
heh?--but the country will. One of us goes, but there’s always another
fellow ready to take his place, thank the Lord.’
‘_Eke oper eke_,’ muttered Tally Ho in his dreams.
THE DOLDRUMS
‘The breeze would have savéd him, you know,’ said the mate.
Out of a cloudless sky,
Into a sapphire sea,
To the tune of a windless sigh,
That is drawn in the tops’les three,
The sun sinks fast thro’ a burning haze
To the heart of the sapphire sea.
Over the shadowed deep,
Topped with an oily swell,
To the hours of the night asleep
In the chime of her muffled bell
The spent ship prays--and her spirit fails,
On the heave of the sullen swell.
* * * * *
Fanning the crimson flare
Lit by the coming dawn,
Thro’ the hush in the breathless air
Of the night that is past and gone,
The wind speeds swift to the weary sails,
In a song of the coming morn.
But away from the stifled ship,
Fleeter than any wind,
With a kiss on the twisted lip
Of the face that she leaves behind,
A breath steals forth--and the wind but plays
On a mask that is left behind.
Six bells clanged the dawning of the last hour in the midnight watch. I
dropped my cards, for it was the peculiar custom to stop whist just as
the bell sounded.
‘Time up!’ said the Captain regretfully, mopping his brow, ‘How do we
stand, Jenny?’
His wife’s voice--‘Eight and three eleven, and four’--rose in a
vinegary triumph of addition from across the saloon table, to culminate
in an emphatic ‘Fifteen points.’
‘Good! I rather think that’s the best night yet, sir.--Bed, Jenny.
Good-night, gentlemen. A hot night, an’t it?’
‘Good-night, Captain! Good-night, Mrs Cape! Coming on deck, Jaques?’
‘No!’ said my partner, ‘bed for this child, g’night;’ and murmuring a
disgusted ‘Fifteen points--and the vinegar--and the heat--phew!’ he
shut his cabin door with a jerk.
I climbed the stern hatchway, and joined the three men lounging against
the skylight on the poop. The moon hung hazily between the softly
flapping sails of the idling ship. Out of the deadly calm waters a
little purposeless heave rocked her ever and anon to this side and
that, and the old shellback at the useless wheel whistled softly to
himself, as he looked vainly for the ship’s wake in the oily tropical
ocean.
The Southern Cross dipped afar on the port quarter, and innumerable
stars spangled the stilly depths of the dark heavens. The curiously
dissonant miaul of the focs’le cat hit the ear, through the sultry
stifling air, with a sense of the relieved ridiculous.
‘Dosé fallows you know’ (he pronounced it ‘gnau’), said the mate in his
slightly nasal, foreign accent, evidently resuming, ‘it’s very curious
you know, dey rrãally haven’t anny feelings.’
‘Do you mean, they feel no emotions, as we understand the word?’
said young Raymond impatiently, his intolerance of human beings so
constituted ringing in the high-pitched tones of his clear voice.
‘Not a blessed one!’ said a third voice from the ship’s side, shrill
and worn, ‘Yellow devils! Yellow devils! they’ve only one virtue.’
‘And that, Doctor?’
‘Opium, sirree. They’re tolerable, when they’re opium drunk.’
The mate looked up sharply, and with his brown, almond-shaped Slav
eyes scrutinized keenly the dim figure of the speaker, and his mouth,
between the close-trimmed pointed beard and drooping moustaches, took a
more than usually cynical and mournful curve.
‘You are severe, Doctor,’ he said; but the other, without answering,
turned away, and leaned over the bulwark wearily.
‘Ah! that is bad, you know,’ I heard the mate say to himself under his
breath.
‘Yes,’ said the shrill voice presently from the darkness, ‘you may have
seen ’em and you may talk about ’em, but you don’t _know_ them. You’ve
not worked in China Town amongst John Chinaman, as I’ve worked. I guess
you’ve not seen ’em born, and die, and marry, as I’ve seen them. Ugh!
devils--devils--hog-skinned, slit-eyed devils!’
‘It is all tempérrament, you know,’ said the mate, ‘dosé fallows, you
know, they are different all through, it is not a question of degree.
A white man will never understand how their minds wōrrk. Will you have
a cigarette, Doctor?’ He watched the thin face and trembling hand
closely, and shook his head, as the Doctor turned back with his lighted
cigarette to the ship’s side.
‘It is bad, you know,’ he muttered again to himself. Young Raymond
had strolled to the wheel, and was standing talking cheerily to the
helmsman; the heat seemed to have no effect on his buoyant spirits. I,
stretched on a locker, fanned myself lazily with the mate’s cap, and
the mate himself sat in his favourite attitude with his hands clasping
his knees, his chin sunk on his chest.
Presently the Doctor began to talk again, more to himself than to us.
‘What a night!’ he said. ‘What a ghastly, hellish, stifling night! Look
at that oily pond, can’t you feel the heat lifting out of it into your
face. I used to think nothing could lick the Queensland bush, but,
Great Lordy! this is worse, many points worse; there was always a kind
of a breeze there and some stir of life, but this flat, oily waste--Oh!
for a breath of air. I can’t breathe; I tell you, Armand, I can’t
breathe.’ He turned round to the mate fiercely, and threw out his thin
hands, as if to thrust from him some suffocating weight. ‘What’s the
good of you sea-men,’ he laughed a feeble hoarse laugh, ‘if you can’t
fetch some sort of air up out of your hell-doomed oceans?’
‘No fear, Doctor, we’ll get you some before long annyway, three days
flat cãlm is a big spell even for the Doldrums. How’s her head, my
son?’ he called to the grey-bearded helmsman.
‘Nor-nor West, zurr.’
‘Is she doing anny?’
‘Noa, zurr, but zims theer’s a but of a swell tu th’ Sou East, mebbe
we’ll ’ave wind ’fore the marnin’.’ The Shellback spat on his hand and
held it out, then shook his head doubtfully.
‘The dawn will bring it,’ said the mate, ‘you will see.’
‘Not to me,’ said the Doctor to himself, ‘I’m through.’
Young Raymond turned at the sound of the dreary despairing voice.
‘What’s that?’ he said, ‘Through! we’re _all_ through, we’re all
kippered to the nines; don’t be so beastly egotistical, Doctor, you’ve
got no blooming monopoly.’ The sunny ring of his voice through the
jaded night was as refreshing as a breeze, but the Doctor only said
moodily:
‘Yes, my friend, but I guess you weren’t fried to start with, there
was still some English juice in you; _you_ haven’t been spread-eagled
on a gridiron for seven years till everything’s been sucked out of
you,--even sleep.’
‘Thank the Lord,’ said young Raymond in fervent tones, as he threw his
head back, and snuffed at an imaginary breeze, ‘I can always sleep.’
‘Sleep!’ echoed the Doctor shrilly, and his thin scarecrow of a figure
writhed against the railing of the bulwark, ‘I havn’t slept for
_weeks_,--I’m going home, _home_, I tell you, after seven God-forsaken
years, but I’d give it all, and chuck in the rest of my life, for
twenty-four hours of natural sleep.’
At the word ‘natural’ the mate shifted uneasily in his seat, and his
foot beat a tatoo incessantly on the deck.
‘There will be trouble,’ he said softly, ‘big trouble, unless we get
the wind, you know. Come, my dear fallow,’ he went on to the Doctor,
‘what is the matter with you to-night, you were not even amuséd with
the Wray baby--oh!’ he laughed with a sudden unrestrained merriment
curious to listen to in that sultry, joyless air, ‘that is an
interésting little ãnimal. Did you see Cotter fill it with plum-duff
at dinner, and Mrs Wray opposite laughing all the time, you know, and
little Wray looking ’orrifiéd,--ah-ha! and the little ãnimal likéd
it, you know,’ his laughter died out as suddenly, and he gazed at the
Doctor with his mournful eyes,--the eyes of a man who has been to the
edge of the world many times, and looking over--come back again.
‘You are hipped to-night, you are quite dull you know. Tell us a yarn
of John Chinaman; he has a most curious individuãlity, annyway.’
There was silence a moment, then the spanker boom creaked slightly from
pure inaction, as floors creak in houses at the dead of night, and a
spark from the mate’s cigarette floated straight upwards in the dead
air; then came a weird, droning sing-song whisper from the bulwarks.
‘Once upon a time,’ it said, ‘there was a poor devil of a doctor,
whose lot it became after many wanderings to minister for his living,
in an oven, to the extremities of John Chinaman, whereby he learnt
many things,--for instance, that it was good to eat puppy-dog and go
unshaven, that there was no such thing as right or wrong, beauty or
ugliness, cleanliness or dirt, heaven or hell,--that there was no end
to the miseries of the white man, and neither end nor beginning to
the miseries of the yellow man. But also,’--the whisper almost died
away, ‘he learnt one supreme good, ‘το καλὸν,’ that without which
man withers--life has no taste, no colour, no scent,--the great, the
glorious--My God! O my God!!’ The voice from the faintest whisper rose
suddenly to a scream. With a spring young Raymond’s lithe white-clothed
figure was by the Doctor’s side, his arm round his neck.
‘Steady, dear old boy!’ he said.
The meaning of those muttered sayings had suddenly been rendered plain,
and the mate stood leaning forward with his long arms half stretched
towards the Doctor. The melancholy fatalism of his face, that outcome
of his Slav blood, was veiled by a look of sorrowful concern.
‘Ohé!’ he said, ‘Ohé! tck tck----’
As for me, I moved swiftly to the wheel, and stood between the group
of men and the helmsman, speaking to him at random, in the instinctive
dread of what was coming next on the shrill tones that lifted
themselves behind me.
‘Yes!’ said the worn voice, ‘look at me!--look at me!--what
am I? What have I sunk to? I, who was even as you,--public
school--’Varsity--Bart’s--What’s the use of it all? Look at us, I say,
look’--he clutched with one hand the arm thrown about him; and as if
answering the hysterical cry, the moonlight streamed from behind the
main tops’le, with a cruel suddenness, full on to the two men. It lit
up the bright, fresh face and yellow hair of the one,--tall and lithe
and radiantly white--and threw into a ghastly relief the other,--long,
shrunken and shambling, with his twisted yellow face and sunken hunted
eyes, with the little brown streak at the corner of the thin distorted
mouth, the lank discoloured hair, the writhing, skeleton hands. He
cowered as the light fell upon him, and buried his head like a child on
young Raymond’s shoulder.
When I turned again, old Carey, the Shellback, was looking steadily at
the deck, and, contrary to all orders, spitting vigourously upon it.
‘Fact is we’m tu fur tu the East; yu zee, zurr, these y’er ca’ms is all
along o’ that.’
What answer I made to the soft West-country drawl I know not, because
it is bewildering to hear a man’s sobs drawn under hard pressure
against a linen coat. Then the mate was speaking.
‘Come down to your bunk, my dear fallow, it will be ãll right, you
know; I will give you some things to make you sleep.’
‘Sleep!’ came out of the sobs, as a voice might come out of a grave,
on to which the earth was being shovelled. ‘My God!--if I could sleep
_without_.... Armand, for pity’s sake make me sleep--’
‘There! there!’ young Raymond spoke as to a child.
As swiftly as it had streamed forth, the moonlight hid itself behind
a kindly sail, and the three soft footsteps, moving along the deck,
slowly died away out of my hearing.
‘Might yu ’appen to ’ave zum baccy, zurr, the mate’s gone down, yu zee,
an’ it du be rale ’ot tu-night, that’s zartain.’
I gave the understanding Carey out of my pouch, and we smoked in a
sympathetic silence.
* * * * *
I woke with a start; a faint light was showing through the open port
hole, and the half-drawn curtain of the bunk wavered unsteadily.
‘She’s moving,’ I thought, feeling with a vast sense of relief the
fluttering pulse beginning to beat at last in the wind-logged ship.
‘Yes, there’s a breeze from the South-East; get up!’ Young Raymond was
standing by the side of the bunk, his white clothes unchanged, but with
a face unknown to me, so grave, drawn, and sunless was it.
‘What’s wrong?’
‘The Doctor!’ he said, ‘Come!’
We crossed the dark saloon, unswept and ungarnished, just as it had
been left the evening before. Raymond silently drew aside the green
baize curtain of a cabin on the starboard side. Within it stood the
mate, stooping over a figure stretched limply on the lower bunk; he
looked up as we came in, and withdrew his hand, with something in it,
from under the pillow.
‘Look!’ he said, holding up a little inlaid box. ‘I was afrayd of it;
I lookéd for it last night, you know,’--there was a curious note of
appeal in his voice,--‘but dosé fallows are so cunning, you know.’
I looked at the face lying upturned to the growing light. It was no
longer twisted; the eyes stared quietly at the roof of the bunk, the
hands were crossed peacefully on the sunken chest. In that face, which
had writhed the night before in hunted agony, there remained only the
little brown stain at the corner of the mouth to mark it as the same.
‘Dead?’
‘Quite.’ The mate knelt, and reverently drew the lids over the quiet
eyes.
Young Raymond was leaning silently apart against the side of the cabin,
his head framed in the open port-hole, and his face was ever grey and
drawn. I turned from him to the mate.
‘How?’
He answered the double question of my glances hurriedly.
‘No,--it was an accident, see--’ he unscrewed the lid of the
little box, and counted the tiny black-brown pills in it.
‘Six--seven--ãyt--there are manny happy hours, you see; while desé
were here, he would not have done it, you know. No, it was an
accident,--perrhaps he took one too manny,--but it was the heat, you
know, and that’--he laid his hand gently over the dead man’s heart.
‘Poor fallow! I likéd him greatly.’
There was a long silence in the little cabin; the faint ‘lip-lip’ of
the rising waves against the ship’s side seemed very far away somehow,
and the measured tramp of the second mate on the poop above sounded in
muffled harmony to our thoughts--then six bells rang out clear and full.
‘It is Cotter’s watch still,’ said the mate, ‘I am free for an hour
yet. We must talk, you know.’
He moved over and shut the door, then seated himself on the side of
the dead man’s bunk with a reverent callousness, born of an intimate
familiarity with many kinds of death.
The ends of the Doctor’s dusky crimson sash hanging over the upper
bunk quivered slightly, with the faint rolling of the ship, against
the mate’s smoothly dark head, as he crouched forward with his back
hunched, and his bearded chin thrust out. His hands were clasped
round one knee, the thin leg below them working incessantly with a
quick, nervous movement. All the time he was speaking, he looked
straight at young Raymond with his mournful eyes, and the latter, who
had never moved from his leaning attitude against the cabin side,
gazed abstractedly in front of him from out of a growing halo of
flame-coloured light. The ship’s cat purring softly was rubbing itself
slowly against the white trousered leg.
‘Dis thing had to hãppen, you know,’ said the mate at last. ‘It was
written, you see, there’--he raised a hand and pointed to the still
face. ‘_I_ knew it a long time. I think I knew it when he first came
on board at Adelayde; he walkéd down the quay, you know, with that
fatiguéd walk he had, poor fallow, and it was written in his eyes--they
were quite hunted, you know. _I’ve_ rrãally been the doctor on the old
galley this journey, you know, _he_ wasn’t fit for it. Hãng it all, I
have been doseing the shellbacks, you know, poor devils--ah--ha!’ he
laughed that sudden spontaneous laugh that must have come from his lips
even in death, if an idea had commended itself to his sardonic humour.
‘The skipper should never have taken him on board, you know; but the
old fallow was in a hole, he had to get off, and he had to have a
doctor. The old galley is an invalid ship, you know, and so she has
to have a doctor and a cow,--that blessed cow hasn’t given anny milk,
still she hãs four legs, you know--and _I_ am the doctor.’ He gnawed
at his moustache and muttered some words under his breath.
Then young Raymond spoke for the first time.
‘Did you know that?’ he said, pointing with a shrinking gesture to the
opium box in the mate’s hand.
‘After Cape Town, I knew it. Guessed it when he came on board, you
know, and shut himself into his cabin for two days. I got in once,
and then I saw what the trouble was, you know. I lookéd for that’--he
held up the box--‘but dosé fallows are so cunning. _He_ knew it too,
he knew he was going to hand in his checks, you know. He uséd to talk
to me, and he often said, “_If_ I get home.”’ The mate paused. ‘Well!
that is ãll over, it had to hãppen, you know.’ His voice and face and
the resigned dejection of his whole figure embodied the word ‘Kismet’;
the threads of the situation, for the moment, had slipped through his
fingers. He sat quite quiet, staring mournfully in front of him, but
the leg beneath his clasped hands never ceased a second in its nervous
movement.
The tramp above, and the ‘lip-lip’ of the little green waves against
the ship’s side, were still the only sounds that broke in on the early
silence.
‘For the sake of his people,’ said young Raymond suddenly, taking the
little box from the mate’s hand.
‘Yes, he had an ayged father, you know, a parson in Yorkshire, he was
going home to him--after seven years--that is harrd, you know,’ the
mate said dreamily.
‘Well?’ said Raymond impatiently, and he put the hand that held the box
through the open port-hole.
‘No--no--look here,’ said the mate, holding out his hand for the box,
‘I must tell the skipper, you know,’ and he put the box away in his
pocket. ‘But you will see, it will be ãll right, he will leave the
whole rãcket in my hands; he hates a fuss, you know, that old fallow.
Besides, it wasn’t rrãally the opium at the end, you know, it was
the heat--his hãart was so weakenéd, you see.’ He got up and looked
earnestly, with narrowed eyes, at the dead man’s wasted figure.
‘Yes,’ he said at last, ‘it was a little joke, the breeze would have
savéd him, you know, ... but it will be ãll right,--failure of the
hãart from the heat ... and then we shall put him over the side;
anyway there will be no post-mortem. Nobody will come in here, you see,
except the skipper, and the box will be in my pocket,--the wind will
take away the smell in time.’ There was a faint, sweet, sickly smell as
of drugs in the close air of the confined space.
‘So be it!’ said young Raymond, moving from his station against the
cabin wall.
‘Let us put him to rest, though; his face haunts me, even when I don’t
look at it,’ and he shuddered; ‘the light is too cruel.’ Keeping his
head averted, he took a handkerchief from a drawer, and covered the
dead man’s face. The flaming East was sending a shaft of orange light
through the open port-hole full upon it, and the effect was not pretty.
‘When did he go?’ I said, breaking the silence that followed.
‘I don’t know,’ said the mate, ‘but it could not have been long before
the breeze came, anyway--he was hardly cold, you know.’
Young Raymond faced round to the light with strained eyes.
‘_I_ know,’ he said suddenly, ‘_I_ know, I saw him go, I saw it all. I
shall never get it out of my head--never! never!’
The mate looked at him half cynically, half concernedly.
‘Hãng it all, my dear fallow,’ he said, ‘death is not an aymiable
joker, when you are not uséd to him, you know; but you musn’t let him
play with your narves.’
‘Nerves!’ said young Raymond hoarsely, ‘you shall tell me if it _is_
nerves, Armand, for, by George! I should like to know.’
‘Well?’ said the mate; he had seated himself again in his favourite
attitude.
The world seemed suddenly enclosed within the walls of this wooden
crib, time was annihilated, everything stood still, there was no longer
anything outside--just the cabin--we three--and the dead man. I felt
giddy and stifled, but the moment young Raymond began to speak, all
that feeling merged in wonder at the intense earnestness in his face
and the tones of his voice.
‘After we left _him_, last night,’ he said, ‘I slung my hammock on the
main deck, starboard side, just where the gymnastic bars are rigged by
the main mast; it seemed cooler there than on the poop. Cotter came out
on watch just after I turned in, so it was about midnight, I suppose. I
couldn’t get the idea of _him_ out of my head;’ he avoided looking at
the dead man always, and stared straight in front of him.
‘I could see him tossing and twisting in that bunk, and I couldn’t get
to sleep for ages; I suppose I must have dropped off at last, though,
because I didn’t hear two bells go. I woke suddenly out of an awfully
jolly dream about home and my people. The moon was down, but it wasn’t
very dark; there was just that light that comes before the dawn, you
know. Oh! yes, I could see all right; I could see pretty clearly right
to the starboard hatchway leading up to the poop--that was just facing
me as my hammock was slung. It was frightfully hot, suffocating--there
wasn’t a breath of air, not a breath. I lay awake a few minutes, and
then I suppose I dozed off again; but though my eyes were shut, I
seemed to have the feeling that something was coming towards me. It
grew upon me, so that I must have half raised myself in my hammock,
because when I woke again I was sitting up. There _was_ something--a
figure; it came from under the starboard hatch out of the saloon. I
could hardly see it in that horrible, misty, unreal light, but it
came slowly along the deck close to the bulwark without making any
noise. I don’t know why I was in a ghastly funk, but it seemed somehow
uncanny--I wasn’t properly awake, you see. I waited for it--it seemed
hours coming. When it was almost within touch, I saw what--it was--it
was--_him_. His head was bent back and his hands thrown up; he was like
a shot bird that’s towering for air, you know, but there was no sound,
no choke or gasp--I listened for it, but there was none, not even a
sigh’--he paused. ‘There ought, there must have been a gasp, if it
_was_ he,’ he muttered to himself; ‘he couldn’t have stood like that
without a sound. Oh! Armand, the face!’
He spoke in short broken sentences, and his hands twisted here and
there in the full agony of recollection.
‘The eyes were staring open, as they were before you--and nothing
moved in it--it was a _dead_ face ... and then it went away again, you
know,--I don’t know _how_ it went. I shall never get that look out of
my head--never!’ He drew his hands across his eyes.
‘It was far worse than _that_ dead face,’ he said solemnly, pointing to
the bunk; ‘it was the dead face of a _living_ man.’
‘Then?’ said the mate.
‘Then I lay back in my hammock, not more than a minute, I think,--and
then I got out and came here, and as I crossed the deck the first of
the breeze crossed it too--too late!--he died for want of air, I _know_
he did--just too late, you see.’
‘Too late!’ echoed the mate softly, nodding his head. ‘_That_ is the
joke.’
‘He was lying here as you found him. I didn’t touch him before I came
and told you. And, look here! Armand, what have I seen? It scared me.’
An infinite and sombre gentleness was in the look the mate bent to meet
the trouble in the young face turned to him, but he only said, ‘That
is most interésting. You are not to be pitied, you know, you are to be
envied; a man does not often see these things, you know.’
‘But _what_ did I see? _What?_ I tell you it scared me.’
‘I _think_,’ said the mate slowly--‘I don’t know, of course,--but I
think you have seen what very few people have seen. I think there is
a time, you know, which comes between life and death. It is perhaps
the twilight of the body you know, and the dawning of the soul,--it
is that breathless space which these old crãfts of our bodies have to
go through, you know, where there is no life, and not yet death,--the
Doldrums of our individuãlities hanging in the wind.’ There was a long
silence.
‘Thanks,’ said young Raymond at last, and the old sunny look seemed to
creep back into his face through the haunting shadow of fear cast there
by the thing he had seen.
‘Thanks, old fellow! The dawning of the soul! I like that.’
He had caught, like a child, at the one idea in the mate’s words which
appealed to his narrow, sanguine optimism; and only _I_ saw the look
of wearily gentle cynicism in the mate’s face, and heard his words as
he turned away out of the cabin, ‘Yes? if there _is_ such a thing, you
know.’
So I turned away too from the ‘valley of the shadow,’ but young Raymond
knelt softly by the bunk and drew the handkerchief from the dead man’s
face. He could bear to look on him now. The breeze stole in and stirred
the hair on the two heads close together.
The words came to me at the door.
‘You’re all right now, old fellow, aren’t you? You’ve gone home.’ Then
through a choke in the voice, ‘but, oh! my God! your luck was hard.’
THE CAPITULATION OF JEAN JACQUES
S.S. Wapiti.
_May 16th, 188 ._
... To-day, fine again, gorgeous, but mighty hot. Left Suva at
daybreak. Very one-horse place, with a lovely harbour. We got a lot of
bananas and pines from a Fijian’s canoe as we went out--they ought to
last till we get to Sydney....
A rum thing happened about five o’clock; some 150 miles sou’-west of
Suva we sighted a small cutter with two men in her. They were making
signals with a pair of breeches. The Captain stopped for them, and
lowered a boat to see what was up. I got leave to go. The poor beggars
were burnt up--I never saw men so completely frizzled; Frenchmen--one
a very big man, one a very little--awfully plucky little chap, said
he was ‘all ar-right,’ only wanted water, and was trying to make Suva
from Tahiti! ’m! _In a ten-ton cutter!_ Double ’mm!!
He asked his course,--we gave it him, and a cask of water. I was the
last to go over the side of the cutter, and he said to me: ‘Monsieur,
you gentlemens, is it not?’ ‘Hope so,’ said I. ‘Going to Noumea, is it
not?’ ‘Yes,’ said I. ‘Will it ’ave ze _extrêmement_ kindness to inform
_ce cher Gouverneur_ zat “Jean Jacques” made to ’im ze compliments?’
With that he put his finger to his lips, and smiled sweetly upon me.
I don’t think any nigger could have given him points for brownness,
but I liked the looks of him hugely.
As we were pulling back, the second officer said to me:
‘Scaped convicts, you bet, poor devils--no business of mine.’
I thought of that smile and forbore to wink....
(Extract from the Diary of a Passenger.)
‘_Sacré!_ these walls are high! lift me, Pierre.’
A very small lean man raised himself with the agility of a cat from
his perch in the uplifted grasp of the giant below, and was through a
window twelve feet from the ground, and crouching in the shadow of the
white curtains without a sound stirring the silence of the night air.
Jean Jacques, Frenchman, man of genius, man of diminutive stature, man
of sun-baked countenance, political convict, crouched in the shadow
of the curtains and reflected. His reflections were the résumé of a
carefully matured plan,--in fine, his reflections were these:
‘I, Jean Jacques, am at large; I have not been at large for some
time; certainly, then, I wish to remain at large; I wish also my
friend Pierre below to remain at large. _Que faire?_’ The reasoning
unconsciously took the form of Ollendorf.
‘I am in the room of the four-year-old daughter of the Governor. How
do I know this? Because I can see her little socks hanging over the
end of the bed. Is not the four-year-old daughter of the Governor the
apple of the Governor’s eye? Certainly, she is the apple of the eye of
the Governor. Given, then, Jean Jacques, the apple of the eye of the
Governor, and the desire to remain at large, what happens? P--s--s--t,
it is apparent, any child can see what _must_ happen!’
Jean Jacques rose to the height of his five feet two, his lean, dark
face glowing, and his crisp black hair curling with the greatness of
his ideas, and advancing, drew aside the curtains of the little bed.
A small figure in a wisp of a nightgown stretched her limbs thereon in
childish abandon, and turned her elf’s face up to her nocturnal visitor
in the unconscious serenity of sleep. That Jean Jacques was a humane
man was evidenced by the thoughtful way in which he bestowed dress,
socks, slippers, dolls, and sun-bonnet within the capacious folds of
his convict’s blouse; that he was a man of energy and action, by the
manner in which he enveloped the child’s head in a soft shawl, and her
little body in a discarded blanket, and, before she had time or breath
to wake and scream, passed himself and her into the upstretched arms of
Pierre, and regained the ground.
Then two dim figures, with a hostage to liberty, flitted through the
deserted streets, and the night swallowed them up.
* * * * *
Noumea was looking its best; what that means one must have been
there to know. Not yet astir with the day, the town and harbour were
pretending an innocence of the twin spirits of despair and misery
throbbing and raging within their boundaries. Out of the blue Pacific,
also pretending a non-existent innocence, the sun was rising, and
causing the ruddy copper tints of the island rocks to shine with a
morning glory, the foam of the reefs to sparkle, and the green and red
of leaf and flower to glint and glow with a tender and dewy freshness.
The native market was already beginning to stir with the busy sellers
of most conceivable, and some inconceivable, fruits and vegetables.
Soon, above the everyday droning hum of the vending of merchandise,
rose and swelled an ever-increasing buzz, like the tuning of an
orchestra, in dozens of discordant quirks and twitters, till, hushing
every sound, as does the uplifting of the conductor’s baton, there
boomed forth once and twice over the stillness of the harbour the deep
angry tone of the convict escape-gun. Then the buzz broke out again,
but this time with the unanimity of knowledge and conviction. Not that
a convict’s escape was any rare occurrence in a community boasting the
possession of some nine thousand such, in a greater or less degree of
captivity; the buzz had a deeper and a wider meaning; there were nine
thousand convicts; there was but one Governor, and to that Governor
was but one daughter. The ‘buzz,’ with an intelligence which did it
credit, connected the two disappearances, it was even whispered--that
is to say, it was bewailed and lamented at the top of the shrill native
voice--that there was a third disappearance, of knives and ropes,
and good food-stuff, to wit; this formed a tail to the comet in the
opinion of the buzz. The buzz was immensely tickled and interested,
it was even compelled to open its mouth--which was bad for it--when
from the barracks issued patrols armed to the teeth, and from the quay
departed snowily-breeched officials to the various ships lying at
anchor. Grievously agape was the mouth of the buzz when from Government
House marched the Governor, grey-headed and of soldierly bearing. The
Governor was a widowed man, and had but one child; it amused the buzz
and affected it to tears to see what he had suffered. In spite of his
soldier’s pride, suffering had lined his face during the last hour,
and the furrows deepened as he marched on with head up into the middle
of the Place, and spoke to the buzz with wingéd words, that hushed it
completely, distending its mouth and stimulating its stomach by the
liberality of the promised reward.
There was a scattering and a hurrying, such as the official methodism
of the town had not known since the French and English blue-jacket
fight--a tussle of unquenchable memory and much friendly shedding of
gore.
The hours rolled on, the sun blazed, the world forgot its siesta, while
the shadow on the Governor’s face deepened with the waning of the day.
He sat in the Place and waited--round him a staff of messengers coming
and going, as fresh thoughts and possibilities thronged his anxious
mind. Presently, as hope faded and grew wan, he said--
‘I can bear it no more here, I will go up and wait in the
Cathedral--perchance God will send me inspiration,’ and he took his way
thither....
Now, if one desires to see the most perfect picture in the world,
one may look upon it--if one goes in the evening to the Cathedral
at Noumea, and, standing at the eastern end, looks down the aisle
to the west. There, framed in the grey walls, hangs a picture as of
heaven--not, indeed, of canvas and paint, but of the sea and the air
and the earth, as a man sees them when the glow of a setting sun is
flooding and filling all with an unearthly glory of light. So the
Governor, even in his great grief, saw the vision of heaven, and bowing
his head upon his hands, sat gazing thereon--silent and alone. As the
sun dipped he fell, worn out, into a sort of trance, rousing himself
with a start as the rim of the fiery globe rested lightly on the
horizon, seeming to poise itself before sinking to rest, while the
grey shadows of the twilight crept out, as if eager before their time
to whelm the last hopes of the day in a filmy maze. Out of the West,
before the eyes of the Governor--far away in a reverie of pain--floated
a white cloud, and dimly his mind became conscious of it. ‘Very odd
cloud,’ he thought abstractedly, ‘that comes so suddenly and close;’
then he sprang up as though he had been shot. ‘Was it a cloud? No,
assuredly it was not.’ It floated, it quivered, it waggled with the
breeze, it was--bathos--it was a nightgown.
Suspended between sky and earth in the middle of that picture of
heaven, fading already with the growing darkness, waved a child’s
nightgown. Instinctively the answer to the whole problem of the day’s
disappearance flashed before the Governor’s mind, and what he saw
when he had hurried through the door under the folds of that flag of
truce came as no surprise. He stood and gazed upwards. Down below in
the streets of the town, in all the country round, the buzz was still
actively engaged in pursuing the promised satisfaction of its stomach.
Now this was what the Governor saw on the roof of the Cathedral,
thirty feet above him. Over the stone parapet a lean, dark face
surmounting a bare brown arm and hand, from which hung the rope of the
flag of truce; behind, what seemed to him a vast blue statue, astride
the neck of which sat a little figure in a cotton blouse, dangling two
bare legs, and patting the statue’s head with one hand, while with the
other it blew kisses to the amazed and horrified Governor. His hand
caught the butt of his revolver. Escaped convicts were wild beasts--and
his child sat on the shoulders of one and played with what was left
of its hair! The Governor’s aristocratic and sporting instincts were
aroused.
Jean Jacques, leaning over the parapet, smiled genially, and his other
hand, in which glistened the long blade of a knife, rested for a moment
on the parapet. Only for a second, but the Governor let fall the
pistol, and covered his face in his hands with a shrinking gesture of
physical pain and fear.
‘_Bien! Monsieur_,’--Jean Jacques took the word in courteous tones,
and with a caressing upward wave of the hand that no longer held the
knife to the little white atom on his comrade’s shoulders. ‘_Bien!_
decidedly Monsieur and I shall understand one another. I have the
honour of addressing Monsieur le Gouverneur? Good.’ Jean Jacques made a
polite bow with what could be seen of him in response to the Governor’s
sign of assent.
‘Monsieur, I will be brief. I am Jean Jacques. My friend Monsieur
Pierre Legros--Monsieur le Gouverneur!’
He indicated the silent Pierre with a backward and airy wave.
‘My friend and I were bored--it was not your fault, Monsieur, do not
be distressed--we were in want of distraction, we were also in want of
being free--ah! Free----’
Jean Jacques looked up with a sigh that spoke volumes even to the
Governor, pre-occupied as he was with dread anxiety.
‘_Nous voila!_ distracted and free--do you think we will again return
to the other state?’ An accent of menace crept into his voice, but
passed as quickly as it came.
‘No, we shall remain free; it rests with Monsieur to decide how and on
what terms. Providence has kindly sent Monsieur to us alone; my friend
and I do not wish that anyone should see Monsieur talking with us--it
might compromise him as affairs will turn out. Therefore, if Monsieur
will give to us his ears, my friend and I will briefly explain to him
how things stand, and what we have the honour to desire at the hands of
Monsieur.’
He paused for a moment, and turned to Pierre, standing in the shadow
behind him; the latter made a sign of acquiescence, and Jacques went on:
‘Mademoiselle Cecile is very happy with us; it is a new game we are
playing,’--he turned again and smiled at the child, who waved her hand
and laughed back at him,--‘and we are very fond of Mademoiselle. But
we have thought it may be best for everyone that we should continue to
be free in another land--across the seas. Monsieur le Gouverneur will
therefore cause to be prepared for us, in the little bay of Pontet
to the east, a good seaworthy cutter of not less than ten tons, with
provisions and water for twenty days; also he will in his kindness see
that the road is clear for us to embark at midnight to-morrow, and he
will give us--will he not?--his word of honour that he will not cause
us to be pursued. Monsieur’s word of honour is his bond. If Monsieur
will come to the little bay of Pontet at twelve on that night he will
find Mademoiselle in the little cave close by the bay. Should Monsieur
not see his way to accept these terms, he will do as he pleases, always
remembering that Mademoiselle is with us, and that what happens to Jean
Jacques or his friend Pierre, happens, unfortunately, to Mademoiselle
also.’
So ending, Jean Jacques bared his teeth again in a genial smile.
The Governor groaned--his situation dawned slowly on him in the fulness
of its horror--he clenched his teeth and groaned. His duty drew him
one way, his feelings (and he was conscious then how overpoweringly)
dragged him the other. He bowed his head, and pondered painfully. Jean
Jacques waited some time in silent politeness, then he said:
‘Monsieur will understand that to my friend and myself our liberty is
as dear as to Monsieur is Monsieur’s daughter: also Monsieur shall, if
he pleases, have the night and the day in which to reflect and prepare;
and in order that there may be no mistake as to the preparations, it
will be best if Monsieur will return himself and give us his answer at
two hours before midnight to-morrow.’
The Governor was conscious, with a feeling of rage and shame, that the
convict knew only too surely that the game was in his hands; he raised
his head with a jerk, and said, sharply and sternly:
‘It shall be so--at ten to-morrow night you shall have my answer.’
Then with one look at his little daughter calling merrily, and blowing
kisses to him, and a muttered ‘Good-night, my darling, be a good brave
child,’ he stepped firmly away, turning for a moment to say fiercely,
‘Be careful of her, men; if but one hair of her head be harmed, woe
betide you.’ Then he marched heroically down the hill, and hastened to
his home to hide his deadly agony of doubt and fear.
* * * * *
The buzz was hushed--hushed until the day should come again to lend
it zeal and courage. It was one thing to hunt for escaped convicts,
in packs, under the smiling sun, it was another to seek desperate men
in the blue-black of the Southern night. The buzz was of opinion that
its stomach might wait a little. Inland among the hills tired parties
of soldiery still pursued their weary search, but to no purpose. That
buttress on the Cathedral was a full fifteen feet from the ground--its
combination with a giant, a man of genius, and a rope had occurred to
no one’s mind; furthermore, the side of the Cathedral roof overlooked
by the coastguard station was protected by a parapet, and this fact had
also been unobserved.
Underneath the parapet the child lay tossing between her two captors.
Even in her restlessness she seemed to have complete faith in them; one
hand lay in Pierre’s monstrous paw, with the other she kept throwing
off the clothing that Jean Jacques carefully replaced. Neither man
slept; they watched their little prisoner anxiously, and every now and
then Jacques spoke a word or two of soothing to the restless little
mortal. In the middle watches of the night, Cecile waked suddenly from
her dreams, and sat up, shaking her dark straight locks back from her
hot little head, and looking wildly about her. Then she screamed, a
child’s scream of terror, and the look of fright that the two men
had been waiting for so painfully and anxiously shone in her black
eyes. That, which only Jacques’ wonderful, almost mesmeric, power with
children and the giant Pierre’s gentleness had restrained so far, was
come at last.
‘_Bon Dieu_, but this is terrible,’ said Jacques; ‘gently, _ma chérie_,
it is all play; see, here are thy two good friends, here is thy horse,
the big Pierre who gave thee that good ride on his shoulders; gently,
_ma chérie_, gently.’
He stroked the soft head, and with the tenderness of a mother kissed
the hot little cheek. Pierre turned his head away, with the dumb and
blind confidence in his comrade in all moments of danger and difficulty
that possessed his faithful soul. But scream after scream broke from
the child; it was not all play, she was in the dark, where was her
little bed and her nurse? and she wanted her daddy. Jean Jacques was
the father of children, a man of genius, and kindly, but he was unequal
to this situation, perhaps from that very kindliness which forbade him
to use the shawl to smother the child’s cries.
Now the Cathedral was high above the town, and the buzz in the nearest
houses was tired, and only turned in its heavy sleep to say, ‘Listen
to the wild cats in the mountains--to-morrow we will go and hunt them
and the other wild beasts with dogs.’ So the paroxysm passed, and the
child lay still again in Pierre’s arms, but with a dull fever burning
in her cheeks and eyes. The night grew old, and the chill air smote the
exhausted babe in spite of all the men’s care, and morning brought the
raging fever that, if it be not stayed, means death to the white child.
The men looked at each other with dismay in faces haggard with the
strain of sleepless nights and dread anxiety.
‘Must we then fail after all?’ said Jacques, more to himself than to
his comrade. He turned his eyes, gloomy with a bitter resentment at the
rising sun.
‘Twenty hours--only twenty hours--and three lives hanging in the
balance. I _will_ not fail; the child _shall_ live, and so shall we.’
‘Water,’ said Pierre, and without another word took off his hat and
fitted the rope through the brim to make a bucket.
‘Yes, water before the people are stirring,’ said Jacques.
By the aid of the rope he descended with his extemporised bucket and
stole down the hill under shelter of a wall to the nearest cottage--a
laundry, as luck would have it--then, filling his bucket, he got back
without being seen. Cecile was delirious, and as she raved and tossed,
the tears stole down the cheeks of the big convict, and gently he
stroked back the dark hair and carefully arranged the blanket so that
no ray of the fast rising sun should fall on her. Jacques tore the flag
of truce into shreds meet for bandages, and they bound them wet round
the fevered head and laid the little frame in Pierre’s arms. They had
no food left now except a few bananas, which they kept for the child.
The fever seemed to abate somewhat, and presently she slept.
The two men sat hour after hour gazing at each other, and at the sun
creeping up in the heavens. Now and then Jacques looked away at the sea
gleaming brilliant and free, with a yearning look in his eyes that told
more than a thousand words, and from it he looked back again at the
flushed cheek of the babe in his comrade’s arms, weighing and weighing
all that the sea meant to him against the pangs of that helpless
innocent. Pierre sat immovable; cramp had possession of his limbs, but
he sat still for his life; if the child slept through the heat of
the day they were saved--what was dearer than life was theirs--if she
waked, he dared not think.
Noon came and passed, and the two men sat on--sat on with the same
yearning look in their eyes, and the same speechless constraint, and
the child still slept. A change seemed to be stealing over the heated
face. Jacques watched it anxiously.
‘The fever is leaving her,’ he said; ‘what will come after?’
Hope and despair alternated in his face.
Two o’clock, three o’clock, four o’clock, they counted the chimes with
desperate eagerness--never were hours more leaden-footed--and still the
child slept. A wan white look had come into her face, and she looked
very ethereal and transparent.
‘_Bon dieu!_’ thought Jacques, in agony, ‘will she fade away before our
very eyes?’
Involuntarily Pierre stirred; a spasm of cramp had shaken him to the
soul, and Cecile awoke. Contrition and consternation stilled the cramp
in Pierre’s vast frame, and he rocked her gently to and fro.
‘Give her to me, my friend,’ said Jean Jacques, quietly, but the look
he bent on the child and the tone of his voice showed that despair had
entered into him.
Truly it was pitiful--the babe was strengthless and voiceless, she
only made a little imploring gesture, and looked with eyes big and
dark-shadowed in helpless appeal. The two men gazed at each other in
silent accord, then Jacques said:
‘She will die, if she meets again the chill night air--it is all over,
my friend; with the first shadows we must take her back.’
He gave one burning look at the sea that mocked him in long blue
ripples of laughter, then turned to the babe in his arms with a smile
in his eyes and soothing words.
Pierre groaned, and turning over lay on his face motionless. Jacques’
watch had begun. How terrible those next three hours were--waiting
for the pitiless sun to go down and the ending, ah!--such an ending
of the Day of Hope. If they took her back at sunset, the child would
live--yes, he knew that, he was sure of it--but at what a cost! Freedom
to him was the all of life, the air he breathed; in the cause of
freedom, or what he deemed such, had he not already endured two years
of torment--must he go back to heaven knew how many more? Stay, could
he not harden his heart? After all, who knows, the child might live
anyway; it was only to keep her another four hours. A silent and bitter
rage filled his heart, his own brilliant idea had cut from them their
last chance; so near to freedom and yet how far; not even a run for
their money, as the English say. Then his glance fell again on those
appealing eyes that seemed to ask so much and yet so little--only to be
taken back to her own little bed. A terrible dread and horror welled
up in the convict’s heart, and quenched the flames of rage; the shame
of his deed was casting its shadow before, and with anxious, desperate
eyes, he watched the sun’s departure from the heavens with an agonising
hope that the remorse of the murderer of an innocent might be spared
him.
Slowly, slowly, the sun went down. With the lengthening of the shadows
Jacques made his preparations for the return. He formed a cradle of
the blanket by passing a piece of the rope through the four corners,
and then made the end of the rope fast to the roof. When the lights
began to twinkle from the town through the fast gathering dusk, and the
strains of the convict band playing in the Place came to their ears,
they journeyed--and it was time indeed.
Pierre went first down the rope, then Jacques lowered the child in her
blanket cradle into his arms and followed, flinging the rope back again
on to the roof, that no sign of their hiding should be left for the
buzz to make mock of. They took a narrow upper path that led above the
town to the back of the Governor’s house.
A sneering fate kept that procession as secret as the former one--not
a creature came nigh them. The buzz was recruiting its disappointed
energies with gossip to the strains of Faust. Jean Jacques, a former
distinguished member of that orchestra, even now, as he walked in
Pierre’s wake, jaded with hunger and fatigue, and racked with the pangs
of despair, cursed his successor under his breath for a wrong note in
the solo of the Devil’s serenade, the strains of which were wafted to
him on an unfriendly breeze.
‘Hurry, Pierre,’ he said between his teeth.
Rapidly and noiselessly they skirted the outer wall, passed through a
wicket gate, and crossed the garden to the long white house. It seemed
deserted, save for a light streaming into the outside darkness from
a window on the ground floor. Creeping quietly forward, Jacques saw
through the open casement the figure of the Governor seated at a table
in a long low room that did duty as a library. His head was bowed upon
his two outstretched arms, a hat, cloak, and pistol were laid on the
table in front of him.
So the preparations had been made!...
Jean Jacques withdrew, and making a sign to Pierre they moved back
along the verandah until once again they were below the window of
their little prisoner’s room. Noiselessly as she had been taken from
it Cecile was restored to the little bed that lay ready for her. With
a deep sigh she turned her eyes gratefully on Jacques as he placed her
softly amongst the pillows, and then closed them in an exhaustion,
deep as the grave. After listening a moment to make certain from her
breathing that all was well, he drew the clothes gently over her,
closed the mosquito-curtains, and slid to the ground.
‘_Allons!_’ said he to Pierre, and linked his arm in his comrade’s.
So they passed through the open window and stood before the Governor.
He raised his grey head slowly from his arms, and sat staring in amaze
at the two figures in front of him.
‘Monsieur le Gouverneur,’ said Jean Jacques, simply, ‘we are here, my
friend and I, to render ourselves; you may do to us what you please--we
have failed.’
He raised his head, and confronted the Governor, with calm and haggard
face. The latter sprang to his feet with the cry:
‘My child! My child! Cowards, miscreants, what have you done to my
child?’
‘Pardon, Monsieur, we are not cowards--we should not be here else. Go
and look for your child in her own bed; we wait for your return.’
The Governor, without a word, turned and fled out of the room and up
the stairs.
The two stood immovable and waited; Pierre indeed made a gesture
towards the pistol, but Jacques, into whose eyes had crept a look
almost of hope, shook his head, and the giant, faithful in his
confidence to the last, left it untouched. The Governor returned, grave
and stern, but his eye was bright and he walked with a firm step.
‘My child is ill,’ he said.
‘Monsieur,’ said Jacques, with dignity, ‘we were afraid for her, so we
brought her home; had we kept her till midnight she would have died;
but have no fear--I know the fever; she will be well again in a short
time.’
The Governor shivered--the shock and strain of the last two days had
unnerved him. He sat down again, and leant back, thinking. A flame shot
into his eyes.
‘And you would have killed my child!’ he said, with a menacing gesture
at the two figures in front of him.
‘No, Monsieur, we would not, and the proof is in that we have brought
her back rather than that she should be harmed.’ Jacques looked
fearlessly back into the searching and resentful eyes. The Governor
fell back in his chair, and it seemed to them an eternity before he
spoke again. When he did it was slowly and measuredly, and his words
were those of a judge:
‘Men, I, the Governor of this great island, and a French gentleman,
had sacrificed my duty and my honour to my love. What you required has
been done--the boat is provisioned and ready, the way will be clear
from eleven o’clock till twelve. At your bidding, _yours_, had I done
this; _you_ had put me to this shame, but Fate has delivered you into
my hands, and saved me what, as God be my witness, was necessity. Why
should I spare you? Yet,’ he paused, and the sombre calm of Jacques’
face was pierced again for an instant by that gleam of hope, ‘you have
made a sacrifice. I know that to such as you, liberty is sweeter than
life,--I cannot doubt the sacrifice,--and I will grant you one chance.
If that chance favour you, you will find in that chest what I have
prepared for you--disguises and some papers, signed by me, assuring you
a passport; hide in this room till eleven o’clock, then go, and may
fortune speed you--the boat is at the little bay; but if the chance
favour you not--look for no mercy from me, for by heaven, you shall
have none. Wait for me here.’
Again he left the room and ascended the stairs.
‘Go, go!’ said Pierre, ‘there is still time.’
‘No,’ said Jacques, and they waited--for nearly an hour they waited,
so worn that they no longer felt the strain,--there is a limit to
suffering, bodily and mental, beyond which feeling is not.
The Governor returned; his eyes softened somewhat when he saw them, and
he took the pistol in his hand.
‘Mademoiselle is awake; _this_ is your chance. Follow me upstairs and
into her room. If, when her eyes fall upon you, there pass but a shadow
over her beloved face, there is no mercy for you.’
So saying, he went out. Jean Jacques turned to Pierre and gripped his
hand.
‘_Courage_,’ he said, ‘_jouons bon jeu_,’ and the indomitable spirit
shone out of his black eyes into his comrade’s.
The Governor mounted the stairs. Jean Jacques whistled under his
breath, Pierre wiped the cold sweat from his brow, and they followed.
The Governor passed into the room through the open door; as they paused
for one second, they could see Cecile’s eyes turned lovingly on him and
her hands stretched out; her old nurse was sitting at the head of the
bed on one side, and a doctor was on the other. A lamp, turned low,
gave a fitful light; the Governor reached forward and turned it up.
‘_Dieu merci, nous avons de la chance_,’ thought Jacques, ‘at all
events she will not take us for ghosts or bogies;’ then, with head up,
and a smile on his lips and in his eyes, he marched boldly into the
room, Pierre following like a dog.
The Governor, standing back in the shadow, his head bowed, stood
watching his little daughter with eyes that burned like coals of fire
in the hollows of his wasted cheeks.
No one spoke.
As Jacques moved forward, the child turned her eyes from her father
towards him; when they lighted upon him, a look of curiosity, but not
of fear, dwelt in them for a moment, then a smile dimpled up in the
brave little face, her hand moved, and her lips parted as if to blow a
kiss to her guests.
Jacques advanced to the bed and stroked the little head--Pierre stood
at the foot and grinned with sympathy.
‘It is enough,’ said the Governor, ‘you are _men_; go, and God save
you.’
THE SPIRIT OF THE KARROO.
‘Oh! the trail is hot, and the heart is black,
Sleuth, and stealth, and a hard-gripped blade!
Over the shimmering sage-green brush,
Under the lea of the kopje’s rise,
Winding the skein of the narrow track,
Sleuth, and stealth, till the debt is paid!’
Greed, Hate, Jealousy, these three, and the greatest of these is
Jealousy.
Now this is true according to Euclid, who says that the greater
contains the less: it is also true that in 1891--was it? Pietris
Vanhiever--
* * * * *
‘My--ahh--my a--a a,’ yawned a--large gaunt silver-backed jackal out of
the long grass by the side of a little stone _kopje_. Anon he raised
his head and licked his gums in a slow and appreciative manner, as if
a pleasant thought had occurred to him. The night was drawing in over
the sandy plain, Namaqua partridges were flitting to the half-dried
waterhole, the spring-bok were drawing together, and forming serried
squadrons against the possible attack of such as Silverback of the
stealthy foot and hungry fang; and from the Englishman’s camp hard
by came the smothered grunt and squeal of the mules beginning with
rapture their evening feed out of the leather trough slung to the
waggon pole.
The stones of the _kopje_ moved, and an aged one-eyed hyæna slunk
out into the grey-green growth that surrounded his home. He sidled
deprecatingly till within speaking distance of the jackal, and said in
a whisper, the huskiness of which was born of much midnight prowling
and many an unholy meal:
‘Is there meat in the wind, friend, that thou lickest so thy good red
gums and white teeth? If perchance it be so, I pray thee remember thy
old comrade, the widower and one-eyed.’
‘Meat,’ snarled the jackal, ‘ay, ay, but meat is for those who can
see;’ and casting a sneering glance at the bleared face of his visitor,
he resumed his careful watch on the camp.
‘Peradventure it is mule, O crafty one?’ said the old reprobate,
leering covetously towards the newly-lighted fire that threw the
encampment into sharp relief against the fast gathering darkness.
‘Bah!’ said Silverback, ‘mule! mule is good enough for prowling
one-eyed vagabonds, but not for me. I would sooner chase a young buck
through the long night than eat a plaguey salt beast like mule.’
‘Ow--ah,’ sighed the hyæna, ‘your Swiftness may indeed speak so, having
legs of steel and jaws like cast-iron traps; but to one who has fasted
these many days, being old and forsaken, mule and meer-cat ’tis all the
same, it goes into the stomach--what more can I expect, who am old, and
nigh to my end?’ and he rolled his eye imploringly at Silverback.
‘Well, well,’ said the latter somewhat mollified, ‘I say nothing; for
two nights have I watched and hunted, and what I have seen, I have
seen.’ With this enigmatical remark he sat up, and regarded his aged
companion with a critical glance. ‘Truly he _is_ old,’ he said to
himself; ‘he cannot count greatly on a division, and having a certain
experience of graves, perchance he may be of service, the hoary old
sinner. Watch with me if you will,’ he snarled aloud.
So bidden, the one-eye joined the two eyes, and with them glared on
steadily and patiently through the dark at the white man’s camp.
* * * * *
‘When you’ve finished supper, Dan, saddle me Hopper’s horse; I’m
going to have a try in the dark at that last lot of buck we saw this
afternoon.’
The speaker, a long, careless-looking Englishman, with blue eyes and
a fair beard, sat kicking his legs over the side of the waggon and
smoking a short pipe with much contentment after his supper.
Dan Vanhiever, a swarthy half-caste, part Kaffir, part Boer, with a
slight limp, rose at once from his recumbent posture with his feet to
the fire, and assisted by a Hottentot boy, with many a hoarse ‘_Yuip,
Schelm!_’ detached and saddled the much-resenting grey, who, with his
companion Waltong, was taking alternate bites at the fodder and the
mules from either side of the leather trough.
‘Good-night, boys! keep the fire going, so that I can find my way back;
so long!’ The Englishman swung himself into the saddle, and taking his
rifle, rode away on the back track of the waggon.
Early to sleep is the rule on the _veldt_, and two of the three
followers left in the camp turned their toes to the fire and slumbered
noisily.
The third, Pietris Vanhiever, sat forward, his hands on his knees, his
swarthy, black-browed face flushed and scowling, a smouldering light in
his eyes;--or was it only the reflection from the blazing fire, on to
which he heaped plentifully the gathered brushwood?
Presently he stood up, glancing stealthily at his companions, his hand
on a long knife in his belt,--a picturesque figure, in red shirt, blue
jean trousers, widening and opening in the seam towards the foot, and
sewn with hair, and the wide-brimmed felt hat of South Africa.
‘Ah, Boss! two nights have I watched, and two days have I fasted, and
now I will make an end,’ he muttered in Dutch between his teeth, and
bent down to see if both men were asleep. Then he crept noiselessly out
of the camp circle, and stooping almost double, ran swiftly as a man
runs who knows the end and purpose of his going.
* * * * *
Silverback turned his sardonic mug towards his ghoul-like neighbour,
and with a twirl of his brush, as much as to say, ‘I told you so,’
stole out of the shadow of the little _kopje_ and followed silently on
the trail. With every hair on his bristly back standing up in unholy
eagerness, with his one eye and his few remaining teeth staring with
greed, the ancient reprobate grunted the magic word ‘Man,’ and hobbled
cautiously after the jackal....
* * * * *
The long Englishman, glancing from side to side, rode carelessly and
slowly along the track left by the broad wheels of the waggon. Once he
unslung the Winchester he carried on his right arm, and fired two or
three shots, but seemingly at random. The track took a sudden turn to
the left, round a slight rise in the ground; once past this he urged
the grey into a canter, turning round in his saddle to see that he was
not followed.
‘Can’t be seen from the waggon here,’ he said to himself; ‘not that
it matters much, though--their manners are disgusting, and assuredly
morals they have none. Covering my trail is much the same as going to
church in the old country for the benefit of the servants,’ he added
with a laugh.
The light from the risen moon was fairly strong, and the track, luckily
free from meer-cat holes, lay straight over the _veldt_ towards a
large broken group of sandy red rocks of curious formation. Their
irregular outlines took weird and mysterious shapes in the half light,
and their happening in the vast flat desolation of the _Karroo_ gave
them the appearance of being the creation of some saturninely fantastic
spirit. The track ran so narrowly between two of the biggest rocks that
a driver could touch them on either side of him with his whip. Out of
the red soil of the rock on the one side grew a giant Cokerbôm tree,
old as the world itself, projected in a stiff uncompromising rigidity
over the track. The Englishman, riding rapidly beneath, reached up and
plucked a spiky, inhospitable leaf.
‘Tough old beggar!’ he soliloquised, sucking his finger, ‘you’ll be
growing here when _I’m_ dead and gone, and all’s blue; in a couple of
thousand years you _may_ be a foot or so taller if you have luck; rum
things, trees--wonder if they have souls?’
He emerged into the open _veldt_ again, and another half hour’s canter
brought him within sight of an isolated piece of civilisation; the
lengthy, low, white buildings of an outlying Boer ostrich-farm, in a
square enclosure, dotted with carefully fostered and unwilling plane
and eucalyptus trees.
‘Steady!’ he muttered, ‘she said last night she’d be at this end--yes,
and that’s the tree. He reined in his horse. ‘There she is, by heaven!
What a blessing to find a woman punctual; but then she isn’t a woman,
only a girl--poor child!’
With a half sigh he swung himself from the saddle, and, leading his
horse, stepped forward to where, shrinking in the shadow of a couple of
trees just on the outside of the enclosure, stood a slip of a girl in a
white dress with a dark cloak thrown over it. Her grey eyes lost their
look of fright, and devoured him, as he fastened his horse to a branch;
with a low cry, almost a moan, of delight, she straightened herself and
sprang into his arms.
‘How long have you been here, _Liebchen mein?_’ He spoke in Africander,
with an occasional German word.
‘O my King, I came as soon as the house was quiet and I could steal
out. I came like a mouse, with my heart in my mouth, and two hours I
have waited and suffered, but now--now--O my Lord and King, I live,
and the darkness is overpast--see, I have brought all that I have, as
thou badest me.’ She lifted a slight bundle wrapped in a light rug,
and placed her other hand timidly, with oh! so light a touch, upon his
beard. ‘Is my Lord’ (she used a word that in Africander means also
husband) ‘pleased with his servant?’
Her face flushed painfully and anxiously. Truth to tell, he did not
look over-pleased--he stood looking pitifully first at the bundle,
then at the slight figure that leaned so lovingly, and yet so timidly,
against him, and the shadow of an almost seriousness came over the
careless blue eyes. He put his hand on the long fair hair, and said
gently:
‘All that my pretty does is good, and shall she not be rewarded?’ He
raised her chin, and kissed her eyes and lips. ‘Yet I am sorry too, for
I have been thinking, and it cannot be to-night--I can’t take you away
to-night, child.’
Her head drooped and she shivered. ‘Not to-night--not to-night? But my
Lord _promised_ me.’
‘Yes, child, I know, but there are many things I didn’t think of that I
_must_ do before we go away. I must go back to Cape Town and put things
straight. Cheer up, sweetheart, ’tis only for a fortnight, or three
weeks at most, and then I will come and take you away for good and all.’
‘I’m afraid--so afraid. If my Lord leaves me, he may forget, he will
see other women, and I am so poor and little--let me come now, my King,
only to be near thee--I won’t ask more, just to be near thee--_let_ me
come.’
‘Dear child, be reasonable--think a minute, think of the waggon. I
can’t leave that, and we should be followed and overtaken at once, and
there’d be the devil to pay. Then think of my men--I don’t want my
little flower amongst rough swine like the Vanhievers.’
‘Vanhiever!’ The girl shrank out of his arms, and stood staring wildly
at him. ‘What Vanhiever? not Pietris--not Pietris?’
‘Ay, Pietris and Dan--what ails you, child?’
‘My God! O my God!’ She sprang back to him, and threw her arms round
his neck, and drew his head down to hers with a gesture of protection.
‘He doesn’t know, does he? Tell me, he doesn’t know?’
‘What _is_ the matter, you funny child? You’re shaking all over! _Who_
doesn’t know, _what_?’
‘He, Pietris. Don’t you know? Didn’t you hear? He was my lover. I was
betrothed to him,--_him_ that I hated, and he swore to kill any one
that came between. Did not my Lord know?’
Her voice fell again, and she spoke in a terrified whisper.
He flung his head back. ‘Not I,’ he said, with a laugh.
‘The hog, to raise his eyes to you! Well, dear, it’s all right, he
knows nothing;’--then, as a thought struck him, he went on with a sort
of relief, ‘but don’t you see, that settles it, it can’t be while he’s
with me--won’t do at all.’
‘No, no, and O, my Love, be careful--don’t come here again. You don’t
know him; he is a devil, and the child of devils.’
She clung to him despairingly.
‘All right, my darling, trust me. I’ll make tracks for Cape Town
to-morrow, and you must promise me to be a good child and keep a brave
heart, and then--think, only two weeks--three at the longest--there,
there.’
She lay resting in his arms, her face buried against his shoulder,
stifling the sobs that _would_ come; then, raising her head, she said
quickly and passionately:
‘Go, my Lord, go, and quickly; thou may’st be missed, and remember,
he is a devil--yes, a _devil_. In three weeks thou wilt return.’ She
looked full in his face. ‘Go, and by this--and this--do not forget thy
servant.’
She put her lips to his and kissed him passionately twice.
‘No, my darling, no.’ There was a husk in his throat, and the careless
gaiety of his voice was shaken. He mounted and rode away, looking back
at the slight figure leaning against the tree, with hands clasped to
her breast in a dumb agony.
After he lost sight of her, he rode for some time silently, his head
drooping; then, as a man will who has been much on the _veldt_, he
began talking to himself disjointedly:
‘Poor little thing!--I don’t know--I don’t know--am I a most awful
brute, or what am I? What am I going to do? Devil only knows--this
is a mess, my boy, whichever way you look at it. She’s a sweet
child, but--my God, for always, and then--my people--and then--the
world--and then--her people, umm--Boers, bah! Brutes! Too many “and
then’s”--Strikes me I’ve been a fool--a dashed fool. Well, can’t be
helped; what’s to be done now, that’s the point?’
The grey tossed up his head and neighed--they were fast nearing the
rocky island in the desert of sand and scrub.
‘What’s to be done? cut and run? My Gad, it’s blackguardly, but _que
voulez vous_? it’s wise.--Go back to her? Poor little thing! I’d like
to, fast enough, I’m fond enough of her now, _but_--always a d----d
“but,” and this time a devil of a d----d “but.”’ The grey stumbled, and
his thoughts were jerked into another train. ‘That swine Pietris! The
impudence of the brute! Leave her--that means--to him--By gum! I can’t
stand that--it’s not on the cards at all--to him, the blackguard! By
George, no! I shall _have_ to go back to her, oh! decidedly I shall
have to go back, and the sooner the better, and, d----n it, I’m glad of
it.’
He urged the tired horse forward with voice and heel, and entered the
narrow passage between the giant rocks.
* * * * *
There was silence where the venerable Cokerbôm tree, from under its
grim red-grey protectors through unnumbered centuries, laid a gnarled
and fantastic shadow across the moonlit track. That little world of
rocks and sand, of scanty brush and tree, held its breath. In the
death-like stillness the spirit of the Pass seemed to be straining to
catch an approaching sound.
A long, deep-drawn, hissing breath, and again that brooding silence,
while the moonlight played for an instant on the silver tongue waiting
in the mesmerised space for its brief repast. Along a knotted, spikey
branch Pietris Vanhiever crouched, grasping in his hand a naked,
long-bladed knife; his sinewy arm, on which the dark swollen veins
stood out like cords, was stretched so as to give full play to a swift
and sudden blow. His teeth bared in hungry expectation, every nerve
strained in eager listening, he waited for the fulfilment of his vow,
and the satisfaction of that passion of jealousy, which, after his two
days of absolute bodily starvation, dominated his half-caste being to
the extinction of every other feeling.
Presently there came within the ken of his hungry spirit a muffled
regular sound drawing rapidly nearer--without doubt the footfall of a
horse on the soft sand. His black eyes gleamed under their heavy brows
with a sombre fire, and gripping the branch more closely, he swung his
arm once, twice, backwards and downwards, then drew it close to the
branch again and waited.
‘Loppety, loppety, loppety’ came the swing of that peculiar
three-legged canter that was steadily and virtuously making for the
Englishman the first stage of that route that should put his little
girl--his own property--for ever out of the reach of such swine as
Pietris Vanhiever.
‘That _he_, forsooth--_he_--good Lord! it’s almost comic--certainly
quite impossible!--Yes, this big _Kopje’s_ the first landmark--shall
see the camp fire from the other side--unless the lazy hogs have let it
out--hallo’....
The silent scream of the thirsty knife backwards and downwards, the
hollow groan, the soft thump of the body on the sand, the frightened
snort and sudden wheeling of the riderless horse, the hiss and dart of
the destroyer on his prey--these things are written in the dumb records
of the giant and changeless tree.
The sound of the grey’s hoofs fleeing back in the direction from whence
he had come had faded away before Pietris raised himself from the body
of his enemy.
Dead, oh! undoubtedly dead; the good knife had gone home just below
the left shoulder--no need of a second blow--a famous place, that. Yet
he was sorry too--it would have been good to have struck again, and
yet again, and--ah! that hated face! should he crush it shapeless with
his heel, staring up at him careless and proud even in death? Should
he? Should he? The Kaffir blood in him surged in waves to his heart,
the desire to mutilate and mangle his enemy smote him sore. Not with
his boot, though--no--no--leave signs--besides, too soft; only _Veldt
schoens_; no--the knife again, blade or handle--all the same. He leant
over and strained at the handle; as he strove to draw it from the
wound, the eyes of the dead man seemed to roll and fix themselves on
his. With a cry of superstitious terror he recoiled, and to his vision,
maddened by passion, weakened by physical exhaustion and starvation,
the blanched lips of the corpse moved in the old smile of cynical
mockery.
A nameless dread seized upon him--the white man in him, that had given
the nerve and passionate resolution for the steadfast fulfilment of his
vow, gave place in a moment to the unreasoning, superstitious savage.
The man’s body was dead--he knew that assuredly--but his spirit was
alive and _there_--that proud and sneering spirit that he could not
slay. He shrank back and crouched in a huddled heap against the rock,
watching with fascinated gaze the movements of his enemy.
Now, to a diseased and distorted vision moonlight plays queer tricks
with things. The tortures of the damned came upon Pietris Vanhiever,
and, greatest torture of all, he was deprived of the power of flight.
It seemed to his terror-ridden brain that the spirit through those eyes
was drawing him slowly--slowly--to the body of his victim, there to
hold him to eternity. Then a fresh horror came upon him, and the devil
of superstition turned his thoughts to the tales crooned to him by his
Kaffir mother, in the half light of the evenings, at the door of the
native hut. The tales of the spirit of the Karroo, the Great Spirit,
that comes to the souls of men whose lives and blood are spent upon
the Karroo’s breast, and gathers them to itself; the legends of the
woe and ruth that befall the living man who looks upon the gathering
of that harvest; and he shook with the cold fear that seized upon, and
paralysed, his limbs and knees. So minutes and hours went by, and the
moon dropped low behind the great rocks, and a black darkness came over
the pass of death, and ever the white upturned face held him through
the blackness in a stupor of terror, hearing nothing, seeing nothing,
save only, in those staring, shining eyes, the spirit of his enemy.
Ah--h--h, what was _that_?--at the end of the Pass, what was
that?--white, silent through the darkness--what was it? _Lieber Gott_,
what was it? Coming, white and terrible, yes, coming to the harvest.
‘_Ah!_’--and screaming aloud in superstitious horror, ‘The spirit of
the Karroo! the spirit of the Karroo!’ he fell back heavily in a dead
swoon....
Hopper’s horse, stumbling in the blackness against something soft lying
athwart the narrow track, bent down his head and sniffed, then with a
snort of terror and disgust wheeled round and vanished for the second
time riderless into the night.
* * * * *
The breath that stirs over the Karroo before the first streak of dawn,
straying into the heart of the great _Kopje_, stirred the soft down on
the tips of Silverback’s ears, and played faintly with the beard on the
dead man’s face.
‘The dawn is at hand, O Lord of the far-smelling nostrils and
steel-like jaws, would it not be well to bite and sup, if but just a
little, for surely this be dead also, he has not moved these two hours.’
‘Try and see,’ snarled the jackal.
The hyæna drew back his grizzled snout with a grunt of disgust and
alarm.
‘The Mother of all hyænas forbid! _I_ touch a whole man, _fresh_,
that also might yet be living! Nay, nay, but do thou, who knowest not
fear, make trial and see if he be really good corpse, and no longer
two-legged demon, and I will withdraw a while and keep good watch at
the hinder end.’
‘Coward!’ grumbled the jackal, watching him shrink to the outside of
the _Kopje_. ‘But as for me,’ he grunted to himself, ‘the day is at
hand, and my stomach calls loudly.’
Licking his long red gums, he stole forward from his lurking place
in the crumbled sand, and set his white fangs in the fleshy part
of Pietris’ leg, not omitting to beat a rapid retreat, in case of
unexpected developments.
The murderer’s death-like swoon was not proof against the meeting of
those steel-like jaws. He groaned uneasily, and rolling round, raised
himself stiffly and slowly to a sitting posture.
‘A thousand devils!’ he muttered, rubbing his leg, from which the blood
flowed freely, ‘what fool’s game is this?’
Then his bewildered eyes in the fitful grey glimmer, that before the
coming of the dawn forced itself into the recesses of the _Kopje_, fell
on the upturned face of the Englishman. With a start Pietris sprang to
his feet, recollection of the events and the horror of the night coming
with a rush to his awakening mind. He staggered, then shrinkingly crept
forward, and, bending over the body of his victim, looked long and
fearfully into the glazed eyes.
‘It is gone!’ he muttered, ‘gone, gathered--and I--woe is me!--ruin
and death--I have seen the harvest;--well, there is no more fear in
that trash,’--he spurned the prostrate body,--‘except for this’--and
stooping, with a great effort he wrenched the knife from the wound. He
plunged it into the ground, and, wiping it carefully, replaced it in
his belt. His eye in stooping caught the fresh spoor of Silverback and
his companion.
‘_Gott sei dank!_’ he muttered, ‘there needs no burial here,’ and his
eye followed the spoor into a cave at the rock base. Once again he
looked at the helpless corpse, and a thought came into his mind. He
rolled from the side of the rocks a large stone, rubbed on it some of
the blood still dripping from his own leg, and placed it close to the
head of the dead man--then: ‘It will be thought he fell, and struck his
head, for soon there will be but bones,’ he said with a grin; then with
a muttered oath, and a hurried look around and back, half of fear and
half of hate, he fled painfully and wearily, but with noiseless steps,
towards where in the far distance the embers of the camp fire still
cast a red glow, and whence an occasional grunt from a half-slumbering
mule was borne towards him on the breath of the dawn. Rapidly and
wearily he fled, in the misty half light, and behind him in the
darkness rose and fell the unearthly yowl--the jackal’s grace before
meat.
‘The feast begins,’ he muttered, and as answering cries came from the
scrub to the right and left of him, ‘Good eating, all of you!--this was
he born for.’
* * * * *
‘Not guilty’ was the verdict; ‘guilty, but not enough evidence,’ the
comment of the Court, for Hopper’s horse, a gaunt silverbacked jackal,
and a Cokerbôm tree were not asked to give testimony.
To this day, if you should chance to take Pietris Vanhiever with you
on a shooting trip, do not over your camp fire discourse on native
superstitions pertaining to the _Karroo_--it is calculated to upset an
otherwise good hunter.
A PRAIRIE OYSTER
‘I drink my love at the fall of night,
As the glow dies out of the Western sky;
I drink to the whirr of the widgeon’s flight,
And the coyote’s yowl, as we drundle by.
‘I drink my love in the prairie morn,
With a “Hey! farewell!” to the falling moon,
To the stars a-point at the flush of dawn,
And the waking cry of the watchful loon.
‘I drink my love in the heat and glare,
With the sun a-flame on the silent lake;
I drink to the hum of the quivering air,
To the beat and throb of the world awake.
‘Here’s a toast to them all! And it’s sung refrain
Is the clink and jar of a westward train.’
We droned along in one of those fits of despondency peculiar to trains
that have an immensity of flat ground in which to pick up their lost
time.
The night was a lovely one, hot, with a bright moon silvering the
prairie, and trying vainly to throw shadows in a shadowless space. In
a meditative mood, I lounged on the platform against the open door of
the smoking car, and it seemed to me that I was taking a lesson in the
comprehension of infinity. A rolling plain as far as the eye could
reach--not a tree--not a house--as limitless and as empty as the sky
itself.
A peculiar feeling of rest and freedom at first possessed me; I was, or
thought I was, beginning to understand many things hitherto unrevealed,
to have a sympathy with Simon Stylites, and an appreciation of
Mahatmaism; but soon a wild desire to project myself indefinitely into
space seized upon me. The moonlight and the vastness were getting into
my brain--a little more, and I might have leapt from the train, and run
until nature or prairie dog holes should assert their influence upon
me;--and then with a saving grace, a couple of coyotes appeared from
behind a hillock, and played with their tails in the moonlight--and the
spell was broken.
I became conscious that my cigar was out, that the mosquitoes were
annoyingly attentive. Better to be a limited being in a smoking car
and not itch, than to be an unlimited being outside it and itch most
‘demnibly.’ I went back into the smoking-room.
Empty, thank heaven--no professionals from the Golden City to talk faro
and rowdyism; no commercials to bombard one with down Eastern brag, the
decline of Winnipeg, or the future of Vancouver and the C. P. R.; no
globe-trotting sportsman to bewail his luck in the Rockies, or abuse
the British Columbian for a liar.
‘Empty, thank God.’
‘Take a light, sir?’ said a soft, rather high pitched, drawling voice
under my left elbow. I jumped, and, to disguise it, smote my cheek,
where a mosquito might have been, but was not.
A man of about forty, a long figure in a sleeping suit, with a lean,
brown, clean-shaven face, courteously bending forward, held towards me
the lighted end of a cigar.
‘Thanks very much, sir; delighted to find I’m not alone.’
‘_Not_ empty, thank God;’ said Mr Dick Denver, in an unmoved voice.
‘My dear sir,’ said I, sitting down next to him, ‘I should’nt have
dreamed of that remark, if I’d seen _you_; but you were so completely
tucked away in that corner, that I’d no idea you were here, and I must
confess I _was_ uncommonly glad not to see our ’Frisco friends, or the
bummers’ (_Anglice_ commercial travellers).
‘Guess you’re right; they are kind of tiring.’
‘What beats me,’ I went on, ‘is the way people like that, who really
have nothing to say, insist upon saying it, and, by Gad, enjoy saying
it, and are certain you enjoy hearing them say it, and set you down as
a condemned fool if you don’t say it yourselves.’
‘Right,’ said Mr Denver; ‘for a man that spreads himself around to be
dull, give me a woman first, and then a bummer. And yet,’ he went on
meditatively, ‘there are some profoundly interesting beetles amongst
that last tribe; and--amongst the other too.’ He sighed, and relapsed
into the silent puffing of his cigar. I had not travelled from Montreal
nearly to Calgary with Mr Denver without discovering that he was a
silent man on all subjects, and on the subject of women a dumb, and
apparently a deaf image. Try him upon the subject of ‘bummers’ the
oyster might open for once, I thought, but without much hope.
‘Did you ever have anything to do with any curious specimen?’ I said
carelessly.
‘Some,’ he said; ‘one mainly--Irishman--he travelled in wine; I guess
he was the smartest coon I ever struck, but no head--or rather too much
head, like a glass of stout.’
‘All Irishmen are like that,’ I said, sententiously and untruthfully;
then, with a cautious insertion of the opener, ‘what was his name?’
‘Kinahan; we called him Kinjan,’ and--more to himself than to
me--‘Jupiter! I was in the tightest kind of a hole with that cuss and
one other.’
‘Really tight?’ said I.
‘Never tighter, except about three times, and those I don’t take much
stock in talking of.’
‘Women?’ I said hardily. He nodded.
‘And others,’ he added, as if he had thereby over-committed himself.
‘It seems to me,’ said I, feeling the opener deepening in the shell,
‘you don’t “take much stock” in talking of anything, considering that
you really have got something to say; tell me this yarn of Kinjan, and
be a benefactor to a poor sleep-forsaken devil.’
Mr Denver chewed the end of his cigar.
‘Bore you world without end,’ he said.
‘Try me,’ I besought.
‘We must have drinks, then.’ He heaved himself up, and called
melodiously over the car platforms.
When the materials had been brought, Mr Denver constructed himself his
favourite pick-me-up, in which raw egg and cayenne pepper formed the
chief ingredients.
‘Let me mix you one,’ he said; ‘guess you won’t weaken on it; it’s
short, but it’s breezy.’
We drank together, and our hearts were opened within us, and we became
as brothers. Through the open door and window the wonderful silver
prairie night came in, and the lamp of the smoking-room flickered and
went out before its breath. We swallowed another prairie oyster each,
and the strings of Mr Dick Denver’s tongue were unloosed, and he spake
plain, if a little through his nose.
And as he spake, the snoring from the sleeping-saloon and the snorting
of the engine became to me as the roaring of the surf upon the
sea-shore, and the rolling prairie as the sands of the desert, and afar
off a lone clump of trees shining white under the moon as the minarets
of a distant Moorish city.
‘Well,’ he said, ‘I was moving around one time on a cargo steamer,
calculating to go to Madeira or Teneriffe, and see what I could strike
out of those parts. Well, you know, I don’t cotton to “tramps;” they’re
a pretty ordinary lot, and the one I was on that trip was tough, just
tough; from the skipper down to the bacon the whole show was tough.
There were only three passengers on board: myself, this Kinjan, and a
long Britisher, by name Torin--the Hon. Christopher Torin was his full
label.’ Mr Denver paused, and tilted his head back in his seat, and in
this attitude, with his eyes fixed on the ceiling, resumed, through a
cloud of smoke.
‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I guess I am of opinion _that_ Mr Torin was by a
considerable way the coolest and the silentest cuss I ever struck, and
I’ve had experience; but with it, mind you, he was the most reckless
devil that ever let in to make the universe hum. He wasn’t long
out of some mess or other--woman, I heard--and likely enough--poor
beggar!’--and Mr Denver heaved a sigh of smoke that brought a stupefied
mosquito down from the ceiling. Presently he resumed.
‘He was a long, good-looking chap, with a don’t-care look, and one of
those short, fair beards that grow on so many of you Britishers--going
a bit grey--and an extraordinary strong man, thick through, and long
in the limb. He was going down to Madeira, to fetch one of the South
African boats for a shooting trip. We three used to mess together,
you know, and got pretty thick,--Kinjan blowing around and spreading
himself, Torin smoking and drinking, and now and then nodding his head,
and I laying up and figuring them out--not for professional reasons,
but because it’s kind of got to be a habit of mine, and they were two
of the queerest bugs.
“Not alone in their glory,” I thought to myself, but, beyond a grunt of
appreciation, said nothing; the oyster was fairly open now.
‘Well, one evening about four bells,--while we were making down pretty
near in to the Morocco coast, and about a hundred miles top side
of Mogador,--I was leaning over the port rail aft, snuffing up the
phosphorus, and admiring at the right down smartness of the skipper,
shoving in shore on a real reefy coast, when there came an everlasting
jolt, and before I could get in the thin end of a cuss, I guess I
was treading water, and blowing like a grampus, forty yards from a
fast-sinking ship. It wasn’t any good going back--that was clear--she
wouldn’t be above water another five minutes, so I lit out and shoved
for the shore,--a long white streaky line about a quarter of a mile
off, with a blamed current setting me off it. I had to get there, or
bust, and I _got_, but it was stiff going, and when I had made the sand
I was as badly roasted as a leg of pork.
‘I easied a bit, and lay up with my legs in the water, though the tide
running out soon left them high and dry. By and bye, I came round, and
concluded to prospect along that shore, and see if any other wreckage
had come to hand. It was pretty dark, but the sands were easy going,
and there was a moon just getting up. I guess I hadn’t gone above a few
hundred yards when I saw something white, about the height of a man’s
figure, rising out of the sand a short way off. When I got nearer I saw
it _was_ a man, Torin himself, leaning on an oar and looking down at
his legs, which were quite bare.
‘I fetched out a howl of joy, and ran for him. I remember he just
turned his head, and all he said was: “Haven’t got a pair of breeches
to lend a chap, have you?” Seems he’d been in his berth when the ship
struck, and the lower end of his pyjamas had sprung and cut adrift in
swimming, and left him in pale pink above, and another kind of a pale
pink below. Being a tidy sort of a cuss, he was a good piece annoyed,
so I reckoned we had better get right along with the prospecting, and
it might be we should run on that nether end. However, we didn’t,
and presently, as we were a good bit stretched with swimming against
the tide, we lay up under a sand hillock and had considerable sleep.
I guess it might have been an hour or so after dawn, when I was
woke by a curious screechy sort of a noise. As soon as I got my ears
under weigh, I found it panned out something like, “Bedad! ye divils,
begorra, be aisy, bejabbers!”--seemed kind of Irish. I rolled over from
sleeping inland, and, by the holy poker, within fifty yards of where we
had slept, washed up high and dry by the tide, which had turned in the
night and was then about full, was a barr’l with a head on it, and out
of that head was just pouring the thickest kind of Irish. A man could
see that the inside of that barr’l was yearning to have some sort of
consideration paid to it. I roused up Torin, and we went down quietly,
and inspected the cask from behind. It was a very nice barr’l--a butter
barr’l--and I judge about a third full of butter, and may be two-thirds
full of Kinjan; and the funny thing was that the poor coon had been
washed up stuck fast in that barr’l with his head turned out to sea,
so as he couldn’t suspicion we were around, and he was waltzing into
creation with the finest language, and the air was real stiff with
cussing. Well, I guess we laughed some, though we were tarnation glad
to see him,--that is, I laughed, and Torin stood there stroking his
beard, with the nearest approach to a grin I ever saw on him. The
laughing just drove Kinjan mad, and he wrenched round with a mighty
wriggle, and when he saw us he fairly surpassed himself, cussing us up
and down, beginning with our boot laces--which were mighty scarce, by
the way. His remarks were not worth repeating.
‘When he had dried up, owing to a trickle of butter dripping from his
head into his mouth,--he was buttery all over,--Torin said, “Got any
bread with you?” That set him off again, but he toned down mighty
quick, and ended up by saying quite quietly:
‘“Take me out of this, and be d----d to ye, ye leather-headed sons of
bottle-washers!” and then he fainted. So we took him out, and hung him
over the cask, and sluiced water over him, and presently he came to,
ca’m, but pretty yallow.
‘’Pears when the ship struck, he’d been jerked off the poop right into
this butter barr’l, which was standing open and most empty on the lower
deck. When he felt the ship disappearing under him, being an Irishman,
and a genius, with a turn for expurriment,--but I guess mainly because
he couldn’t swim,--he calculated to stay where he was. He grabbed a
bit of wood that came along, and by means of this managed to keep the
barr’l top side up, the sea luckily being as ca’m as a mill-pond. He
said he was first taken out maybe hundred of miles till he could most
smell the Canaries, and then brought in again on the turning tide and
washed up. In his struggles near shore, he’d kicked clean through the
bottom of the cask, and, getting his leg jammed tight through the
hole, was as fast as a tick when we found him. He had a down on butter
afterwards; he never ’peared to go much on it, ’slong as I knew him.’
Over Mr Denver’s face, which had hitherto been as unmoved and
expressionless as carved mahogany, twinkled a fleeting look of joy,
which disappeared with the next puff of his cigar.
‘That was not the most amusing day I _have_ spent,’ he went on,
meditatively; ‘we kept mighty busy looking for fixings and finding
none to speak of; I guess the current must have appropriated all
that was useful in the old tub,--only the most or’nery articles came
along--empty hencoops, and barr’ls, and such like--not a single
tarnation thing to eat or drink. I judge the skipper and most of the
crew turned up their toes, though I heard afterwards that four of
them were saved out of a small boat by a passing vessel. Torin got a
piece of sail-cloth, and made himself a pinafore, which comforted him
some. Kinjan slept most of the day, and when he woke up, he told us
we were fools, and that what we wanted instead of mooning around for
things from the sea, was to go inland and find out if there weren’t any
houses or cities in the vicinity; and then he rolled himself up tight
in the shade of that sand-heap like a darned yellow dormouse, and went
to sleep again; I guess he must have had a most amazing wide-awake
time in that barr’l, I never saw a man sleep so. Torin and I were most
powerfully hungry and thirsty by this, so we went inland a piece and
looked about us for the highest ground we could find,--the country was
as blamed flat, mind you, as this prairie. We found a sand hillock that
rose a bit above the rest of the ground, and Torin made a back and
said “get up;” so I got, and stood on his shoulders, and looked; and
presently out of the distance away to the south-east, it might have
been five or six miles, I could see some white spikey things seeming to
stick up out of the yallow horizon. I told Torin, and he got up on me,
and when he came down--which he did pretty smart, owing to my balance
going wrong--he cursed gently, with his mouth full of sand, and said,
“Minarets, city!”
‘Well, we went back to Kinjan, who was awake, for a wonder, and told
him; and then he said he’d just remembered the whole country round
those parts was in the hands of the rebels, and that if we were seen we
should be killed, so he recommended us to go on hunting along shore,
till we ran across a boat, and get away in that, and he recommended
us particularly to look out for a barr’l of whisky; then he went to
sleep again. Well, we just sat down, and waited for him to get thirsty,
calculating that when that was so, being an Irishman, he would find
us a way out of the fix. And presently he got, and it woke him up,
and after cursing a bit, he sat up quite spry--but a piece yallow
still--and figured out the most beautiful plan of how we would go and
take that city if necessary, and make them provide us with an escort
down to Mogador. Then he said it was no good doing anything till it was
cool and dark. So he lay down again and went to sleep; and after one
more look along shore we lay down alongside and did the same, meaning
to start with the dawn next morning for the city. I reckon we were
played out that evening, and felt real rocky and dispurited.’
Dick Denver’s memories of that thirsty day were here too much for him;
he rose and called again for drinks across the platform. When they had
come, in the hands of a sleepy and coloured individual, he finished a
whisky and soda at a single draught, and resumed.
‘That fellow was infectious, I guess; anyway I slept until a heavy sort
of feeling about my chest woke me, and I found a great hairy nigger
cuss had taken me for an arm-chair. All around us in the moonlight were
a lot of ferocious-looking devils in long robes and turbans, armed to
the teeth. Torin was lying spread-eagled on my right--he didn’t ’pear
to be discommoded--but he spat out a broken tooth, and I heard him
mutter to himself, “You fools, much better have killed me, and have
done with it;” and I judged he was powerfully divided between two sorts
of wish.
‘There was a nigger holding on to each of my arms and legs, so I took
it quietly, and they bound me up like an eternal mummy. Out of the
corner of my eye I could see Kinjan’s face shining round and red in the
middle of a mass of niggers. He rolled his eye at me, and began, “Be
aisy, Dick--Begad! I’ll take tay with ye prisintly, ye hairy haythens!”
Just then one of the niggers stuffed his mouth with sand, so he shut
his head kind of sudden. Then they picketed their horses round us, and
sat on their haunches, and pow-wowed everlastingly.
‘I judged we were in the hands of a band of rebel Moors loafing along
shore in search of wreckage; and a man could see with half an eye it
was a tight place. I wasn’t more than six feet from Kinjan, and I
could tell by the prick of his ears he was understanding the pow-wow;
living as he did at “Gib,” he’d been a lot in the country and _sabed_
the lingo well. Lie low was the only game, and I lay and thunk a lot,
but all the time I felt kind of certain that if we were coming out of
that place, it was Kinjan’s show--and the more so because I knew he was
almighty dry. Their chief seemed a venerable kind of a bug, with a long
white beard and turban, and he did most of the pow-wowing. Presently
they easied off, and after looking us over well, and giving us a kick
or two, set two sentinels, and turned in for sleep. The sentries stood
out about twenty yards; and when the others seemed fixed pretty quiet,
Kinjan gave a gentle roll of his fat carcase towards me, and said, out
of his back teeth (I can’t give his accent, but it was real rich):
“Thanks be to Jasus, one of me knots is a granny. Praise the pigs,
I’ll be out of ut in ten minutes. Tell Torin; and when I give ye the
wink, stand by, and I’ll cut ye loose--then grab what ye can and clear
the camp; whist!” One of the sentries faced round right there and came
towards us; he prodded at me with the butt end of his lance to see that
I couldn’t move when he tickled me, and he rolled Kinjan over with
his foot; we neither of us budged, so he concluded we were fixed, and
mouched back again.
‘I counted the gang; there were fifteen of them. Torin was laying very
low about three yards away, but I judged from a sign he made when the
sentry vamoosed, that he knew things were about to progress. After what
seemed a ’nation long time, Kinjan raised his head, and I saw from
his movements he’d succeeded in freeing his hands; presently he came
rolling gently on to me, and I felt the point of his blamed knife going
in as he cut the thongs; then he handed me the knife, and I rolled on
to Torin and hacked him loose; and just as I got through, one of the
sentries tumbled to it, and came for us like greased lightning. I saw
Kinjan throw out his arm from the ground, and the cuss tripped right
over it on to us, and his spear went into the ground through my coat.
‘Kinjan raised a whoop, and got that spear and ran it through the man
next him--he was a bloodthirsty little cuss. I laid for the sentry’s
pistols--he had two--and drew a very neat bead on the other sentry.
‘Torin he just sat up and purred, and then when the devils began to
come on, he took that fallen sentry by the legs, and got a wiggle
on him, and went for them into the thick; and he swung the poor
devil round and round and cleared that crowd like fury--’peared they
didn’t understand the game. He laid out three of them, and then they
scattered and drew back; I dropped another with the other pistol, and
Kinjan charged right down on the old chief, and bowled him over with
the butt-end of his spear. “’Tis all over, bhoys,” he said, and sat
on the old gentleman; and so it was. When they saw the tail-ends of
their boss waving in the air, the rest of them made tracks. In the
intervals of sticking the business end of his spear into things,
Kinjan had cut loose all their horses but four or five, and there was
a beautiful scrimmage over those sand hillocks, men and horses all
mixed, and travelling in most directions like fury. That was a vūrry
tidy dodge of Torin’s,--maybe it was rough on the sentry, but it was
vūrry impressive--some of the impressions might have been a foot long,
I should judge.’ He paused; the train had stopped with a jerk at a
station, and the engine was blowing off steam with a disturbing energy.
‘Durn the durned thing,’ said Mr Denver; but presently he resumed, as
we droned on again.
‘We--ell,’ and there was an alarming touch of boredom in his tone,
‘after we’d tied the old boy, we had a quiet time, doctoring up those
we’d stretched, as best we could, and figuring out what was to be done.
Kinjan and I palavered over the chances, but Torin didn’t seem to care
what we did, and seemed sort of disgusted with the whole affair. He
stood leaning on a spear by the horses, and once I heard him mutter,
“Damn! shan’t get such a chance again.” I judged he would have let
himself be killed like a sheep, but the fighting instinct was too
strong for him; he was as sulky as he could be, but he did what he was
told, which was the main thing. I was for riding along the coast and
trying to make Mogador, but Kinjan over-persuaded me that a bold course
was the best thing; he wanted to go right there for the city. “We’ve
got the weapons, clothes, horses, and a goide, but we’ve got nothing
to dhrink,” he said, “and ut would be unbecomin’ of us if we lift the
neighbourhood without dhroppin’ a cyard.” He took great pleasure in
dressing us up in clothes taken from the deceased, and fussed around
like a seven-year-old going to a party--the little devil had lots of
sand; he said the great thing was to get _into_ the city, and to do
that we must throw in plenty of style.
‘At last we got rigged out and mounted; I guess we made pretty fair
heathens, all except Kinjan--he was too red and fat. He tied the old
chief’s hands and his feet under his horse, and make him go first. I
came next with a shooting-iron handy, and the other two brought up the
rear. After a stretch, Kinjan rode up alongside the old gentleman, and
began to blandhander to him in his own tongue, and presently he made
me a sign, and then cut the ropes that bound his feet, and the old boy
perked up, and began to spread himself; and by the time we came within
sight of the town, those two were as thick as thieves. I judge Kinjan
would have made a fine poker-player,’ said Mr Denver in parentheses,
with a sigh of regret.
‘It was a light kind of a night, and we could see the walls around
the institution from quite a way off. The old boy was heading us for
the principal gate, and Kinjan turned to me: “The town’s in the hands
of the ribils,” he said; “but, praises to the Almighty! the ould
gintleman’s a big pot amongst thim, and he’s promised to take us to
the Sheikh--or whativer his misbegotten name may be--and git us a pass
and an iscort.” “Bluff!” I said; “’ware snakes.” “Faith! no,” said
he, “’tis a swate old baboo, and ut’s truth he’s telling.” I wasn’t
taking any, but it wouldn’t have done to interfere then, so I shut my
head, and we rode on along the walls. Presently we struck what I judge
was the front door; considerable of a high gate, fortified with iron
spikes, and vūrry strong. There were no signs of hospitality. “I guess
I’ll knock,” I said, and butted the end of my lance against the gate.
A voice cried out from one of the little towers on the walls on each
side in a kind of a sing-song; the old chief sung out something in
answer, and then they had a palaver. I reckon they spoke some strange
lingo, for Kinjan called out to me excitedly, “Can ye understand thim?
May me sowl rust if oi can.” Before I could answer, we heard a sound of
horses tramping, the gate’s hinges turned and it swung open, and there
in front of us, drawn up in line, with spears in rest, was a troop of
most a dozen mounted niggers. “Euchred, be Jasus! The ould schoundhrel!
and the drinks oi promused ’um!” said Kinjan, mournfully; I guess I was
thinking it was about time to throw up the cards and leave, when Torin
trotted his horse past me. “Good-bye, boys,” he said, “_I’m_ going
into the city.” He just waved his hand, clapped his heels into his
horse’s side, and went like a catamount for the troop. They slashed and
speared at him right and left, but they were taken by surprise; and I
guess his release hadn’t been signed, for he went through them like so
much paper. ‘Well, _sir_,’--Mr Denver rolled a cigarette and drew his
breath in with a sharp hiss--‘how it came about I can’t say, but Kinjan
and I, with the old gentleman between us, went through after him--they
were kind of discommoded, I suppose--Torin was a big man, and he left
an aperture. The moment we cleared them, Kinjan put a pistol to the
chief’s head. “Ye son of a herring,” he said, quite forgetting to speak
Moorish, “take us straight to the Sheikh’s palace, or I’ll schatter yer
dhirty brains.” The only words of Moorish were Sheikh and palace, but
they were enough for the old boy; he was as skeered an old cuss as I
ever saw; he ducked from the pistol, touched his forehead, and muttered
something, and we all vamoosed down the rattling stone-paved streets,
like the job lot of horse-thieves we were.
‘The old gentleman was profoundly interested in the business-end
of that shooting-iron, and so we got right there without any more
hanky-panky; you see the streets were just as empty as a nigger’s head,
and we had more than a street’s start of the guard. When we pulled up
sharp in front of a large detached location, we could hear the guard
coming, hell for leather. Kinjan explained to the chief that he had
got to take us to the Sheikh right along, or he would investigate
his interior. Now that old heathen was as swift a man at trapping an
idea as ever I saw; he signed to us to get off our horses, and, with
the end of the pistol working into the small of his back, he called
out loudly in Moorish, and the gate was thrown open for us. ‘Then,’
said Mr Denver, flipping petulantly at his cigarette ash, ‘occurred a
most annoying little affair. We were just passing quietly through the
doorway, and the guard not more than a hundred yards away, coming like
Jerusalem, when Torin pushed me aside, and stepped back to his horse.
“Go on,” he said, “I’ve got another word to say to those fellows.”
He was swinging himself into the saddle, when Kinjan drew a bead on
the horse and brought the whole show to the ground. “Not so fast, ye
suicidin’ divil,” he said, “bear ahand, Dick,” and before Torin could
get his balance we lugged him through the door and shut it. ‘I’ve
often regretted it since; ’twasn’t a neighbourly thing to do,’ said Mr
Denver, thoughtfully, ‘for when a man wants his release real bad, why
in thunder shouldn’t he have it?’ He lounged back in his seat with a
far-away look in his sunken eyes, and I had to jog him with questions
once or twice before he took up the word again.
‘Well, sir, the old chief had vamoosed down the street in the shindy,
and there was only the porter, looking tolerably parti-coloured. When
Torin found himself inside, instead of out, as he’d reckoned to be,
he just folded his arms and shut his head, and I guess neither of us
ever felt like alluding to that incident. Whether the porter took us
for devils or not, I can’t say, but he was tarnation civil, specially
when he felt the end of Kinjan’s pistol. As we passed through a stone
archway into a courtyard, the house began to hum, and we could hear
the guard behind us hammering at the gate we’d just come through.
Kinjan pointed out to the porter in Moorish, and shooting-iron, that
we were going right up to the Sheikh’s bedroom. The unfortunate coon
said he reckoned his head was feeling loose, and kind of wobbly on
his shoulders, but if we would ascend the steps he pointed to, we
would find the Sheikh’s private apartments at the top; we thanked him,
and he said his head felt real loose; but we took him along and went
right there. He played us honest Injun, did that porter, and may be
his woolly top’s on his shoulders yet; but I’m not betting on that,’
drawled Mr Denver, compassionately; and he stopped, turning his head to
gaze out of the window.
‘Look,’ he said, ‘there’s the dawn.’ And sure enough, far away behind
us on the eastern horizon, a pale salmon streak slowly lengthened and
spread; between us and it on the dim prairie lay a still, murky sheet
of water. In front of the train, in its western wayfaring, the young
slopes of the Rockies rose shadowy and faint in the growing light. As
we stepped out on to the car platform the shrill tragic cry of the loon
came floating to us, through the wreathing mist, from across the reedy
pools. We watched the sun rise--and those who are watching the sun rise
on the prairie and the flushing of the early mountain slopes in the
reflected light, are not greatly given to talk. But when it was over, I
turned to Dick Denver. His brown, lean face looked drawn and haggard,
and he shaded his eyes with his hand. Presently he raised his hand to
his hat, and taking it off, stood looking long and steadily at the now
risen sun, and his lips moved. If I hadn’t known him for a hardened
and notorious sinner, I should have said he was muttering a prayer. The
impression was so strong upon me that I waited to speak until he had
replaced his hat.
‘Well?’ I said.
‘Well?’ he replied absently, his eyes still on the far horizon.
‘And then? What happened next? Did you see the Sheikh?’ I lamely jogged
him.
‘What!’ his mind returned unwillingly. ‘You can’t in thunder want to
hear any more after that?’ and he pointed eastwards.
‘I’m very sorry,’ I said, ‘but I most certainly do. I want to hear the
rest of your yarn badly.’
‘Oh! well,’ he said, resignedly, ‘I guess there’s mighty little left to
tell.’
‘The Sheikh,’ I jogged.
‘Oh, yes, the Sheikh,’ he went on in a hopelessly bored tone; ‘we saw
him--he was a vūrry civil cuss, said it was all a mistake, and we were
his dearest friends, and the English were his fathers and his brothers
and all his relations, and I guess--oh, yes, I guess he sent us down to
Mogador with a troop of cavalry, and--that’s all.’ He turned and went
back into the smoking car. The oyster was closing fast.
‘Just one question,’ I hazarded; ‘what became of the other two men
afterwards?’ He drew out a pack of cards, and began shuffling them, and
I had to repeat the question.
‘Oh! I guess Kinjan would be alive,--why certainly he would be; unless
he might have been caught up in a flame of fire, there wouldn’t be any
other kind of a death for him,’ he said with the ghost of a smile.
‘And Torin?’
‘Gone out, I reckon,’ he said impassively.
The curt grimness of this remark jarred upon me, though why it should
have, I don’t know; why expect sentiment from Dick Denver, who lived
from day’s end to day’s end with his life in his hands?
‘In heaven’s name, why indeed?’ I said aloud to myself, as I turned
once again before going through the door to my berth--Dick Denver was
dealing a set of poker hands, and humming softly to himself. It was
broad daylight, and the train still droned along. I was dead tired;
and as I shut the door softly, and turned into my bunk, instead of an
intelligent moral deduction from the story and its teller, all I could
think of was the children’s grace, ‘Thank God for a good dinner.’
ACCORDING TO HIS LIGHTS
‘Life is mostly froth and bubble,
Two things stand like stone;
Kindness in another’s trouble,
Courage in your own.’
--Adam Lindsay Gordon.
‘Prevention is better than cure,’ they say. Quite probably; anyway that
must be the reason why our system of imprisonment is so popular, for
whoever knew anyone cured by it?
What the exact state of Eugene Rattray’s moral sentiments were upon the
day that he was released from Rochester Gaol, it would be difficult to
say.
Judging from the following record, I very much doubt whether the term
of his imprisonment had materially affected his view of things.
What was his offence? The law called it by an awkward name having
consequences; these consequences the law applied to a man who had
come back of his own accord from Australia to ‘face the music,’ as he
phrased it. I myself could never see that the offence was more than
a chance effect of circumstances upon a formed character. It seemed
to me futile to punish a chance effect, seeing that it was the formed
character you wanted to get at; but anyway, ‘they done it,’ as Huck
Finn has it.
When I went to see him in Pentonville, where he was known as ‘that
there tall _I_talian with the strong beard, wot carries ’is ’ead so
’igh’ (certainly Eugene’s origin was half Greek, but then it was _all_
Greek to the warders--hence the _I_talian), he talked cheerfully
enough, poor chap, and without any bitterness as to the past. As to the
future, he put it away; he had to ‘face the music,’ and in doing that
he was hard enough put to it to ‘carry ’is ’ead ’igh’ in the present,
without thinking of the future. I suppose he realised to a certain
degree what it would be like to ‘come out,’ but not greatly, for he
told me that he felt exactly like a wrecked man flung on a desert
island, when, on a February morning, with his certificate of discharge
in his pocket, he walked out of Rochester Gaol into the world.
So feeling, he strolled to the end of the street, and there the sense
of having lived his life pressed so strongly upon him that he stood
debating dazedly whether he would not go back, and ask to be taken
in again. He even took some steps in the direction of the prison,
till the absurdity of the idea presented itself to his mind. He shook
himself like a dog, and, pulling up before a shop window, looked long
and critically at his image in the plate-glass. It was a presentable
reflection, tall, straight, well-clothed; he took off his hat, and
replaced it quickly with a shudder; he registered a mental vow not to
remove his gloves for some days; he gazed at his upper lip blankly, it
did not seem to fit in with his surroundings; finally he turned out his
pockets--one pound fifteen shillings and sixpence.
This pantomime he went through mechanically, with the feeling that he
must do something rational, something practical, however trifling, to
save him from thought; and the next moment, the black waves of despair
came rolling in over his flimsy breakwater one after the other, driving
him with head down and huge strides anywhere away from his fellows.
_This_ was the tug; anything that had gone before was child’s play to
_this_. Out into a world that could look, and point and whisper the
words ‘Convicted felon!’ to which there was no answer. It had been
different in there; what were the words but the common property of all?
It was easy enough to hold one’s head up in that dim world; but outside
it, where everything was so clear and bright, where the light was
strong--he cursed the sun; where everyone could and would read, mark,
learn, and inwardly digest his shame; where he was branded like any
poor devil of a sheep on a bush run. He flung himself down in a field,
and--well, there are some things that are best left alone, and the full
tide of a strong man’s humiliation is one of them.
Two hours later, Eugene walked into Rochester Station, his brow knit
and his head thrown back, and cursing his fate silently in his heart.
He took a first single to London.
‘As long as I have a sou,’ he thought, ‘I’ll give it for the only
luxury left me--solitude;’ and he jingled the few remaining coins in
his pocket.
They say an habitual criminal turned loose again upon society goes
back to the scene of his offence--there is also a saying about a
dog. Eugene was not an habitual criminal, he was only a victim of
circumstances, playing on a formed character, yet he experienced
a vague desire to return to the circumstances. He has told me that
on that short but divinely lonely journey he was able to think his
position over rationally. Item--he had no money, but many relations and
friends, possibly, nay probably, willing to help him. Item--he was of
the leisured class, unfitted for, _and_--a large _and_--disqualified
for anything, except the merest manual labour. Item--he was physically
strong, but happily, so he had been told, not unlikely to die at any
minute. Item--he loved the best of everything. Finally, item--he had
no reputation, and therefore no self-respect. He cast about in agony
for any foundation on which to base a self-respect, and he found one,
whether good or bad, who knows? In the circumstances, to the man, the
only one. ‘Face the music; keep your head up; society has dealt you
hard measure, treat it with the contempt with which it will undoubtedly
treat you; if you let go the plank of your pride for but a minute, you
drown.’
Nobody knew that he was free; his discharge had come a month earlier
than expected, for some reason connected with certain services to the
internal economy of the dim world. So far, good. The practical sum of
his reflections came to this: ‘_Let_ no one know, avoid acquaintances,
work in the docks till you have earned a passage to the diggings, and
then’--he thought almost cheerfully of the ‘then.’
He stepped out of the carriage serenely; after all it was only his
friends and acquaintances that mattered, a tiny eddy in the huge
whirlpool of existence; easy enough to keep out of that eddy. He was
always of a sanguine disposition; it had been very hard, I remember, at
school to persuade him that he would infallibly miss his remove. It is
the sanguine people upon whom circumstances play their pranks; luckily
the payment of the piper is not to them so severe a tax as it is to
the others--the pendulum swings very evenly. He lunched, to fortify
the reaction; he lunched well; it was the first meal he had had for
fourteen months--those in the dim world did not count. A cup of coffee
and a cigar completing the fortification, he walked out of the station
and along the crowded streets, enjoying the stir and bustle around him.
Mechanically he moved westwards. Presently he found himself opposite
one of his favourite haunts--he would go in and read the papers. He
stopped at the steps with a jerk, the waves came rolling back on him
again, he gripped his plank and strode on. Some vague idea of seeking
the docks directed his steps eastwards again through the heart and
centre of the hum. He caught himself gazing with an indifferent,
almost a callous eye at places and objects which were as the very
pivot upon which had turned the whirling wheel of circumstances that
now forced him to walk among his fellows a branded outcast. As he
passed the London and Westminster Bank in Lothbury, a grey-haired man,
hurrying from the door, ran against him, and without apology hastened
past westwards. Eugene, in no mood to be jostled, turned angrily, but
something familiar in the man’s back arrested his attention; the close,
humping set of the shoulders, the head set stiffly forward, the walk of
a man who goes straight to his object, and that object, money. Eugene
looked after him undecided, then crossed the street, and hurrying on,
took up a position that enabled him to see the face.
As he thought--his Uncle Stephen; no mistaking the shark’s mouth
between the close-cut white moustache and beard, the light grey eyes
under thick lids, looking neither to the right nor left, mechanically
summing up the price of the man’s coat in front of him.
‘Not a day older, the same amiable Uncle Stephen; you old beast!’
muttered Eugene between his clenched teeth. He followed him, at first
mechanically, then with a steadily growing resolve.
The one man who had had it in his power in the first place to check, in
the second to annul circumstances--and yet not a hand raised, not even
the kink of the crooked, grasping little finger unbent. The words, in
the saw-like voice, dinned in his ears:
‘You’re a black sheep, sir, I’ll do nothing for you.’
To-day he was bidding farewell to his identity and to his former life,
but he meant to have a word with that man first; merely an expression
of opinion. How he hated that back threading the mazes of Cheapside and
Ludgate Hill, stopping every now and then before a picture or a china
shop, ‘bargain’ in its every line.
‘Four miles a day, and seventy,’ thought Eugene disgustedly; ‘he’ll
live to be a hundred.’ The back threaded its way unwearyingly through
the Strand and Charing Cross, and down the now gas-lighted Piccadilly,
towards the Park, unconscious of the tall shadow that, dogging it
grimly, waited for a less crowded thoroughfare. So journeying, they
neared Hyde Park corner, and the back wavered; a slight drizzling rain
had begun to fall.
‘It’s a cab fare against the gloss of that hat,’ thought Eugene; ‘um!
thought so; the fare has it,’ for the back had turned into the Park,
and was being borne swiftly along under an umbrella in the direction of
Kensington. Eugene turned up his coat collar, and crossing over to the
opposite side, drew slightly nearer to the chase. As he intended the
opinion to be a strong one, he preferred to have a fair field and no
favour, and waited his chance quietly, knowing his Uncle’s usual route
would lead him through a sufficiently deserted region.
To speak his mind!--A very empty satisfaction, but still, some sort of
salve to the bitterness of his feelings.
A nursemaid and her charge pressing homewards in the dim distance were
now the only people in sight, and Eugene was on the point of ranging
alongside, when something white lying in the pathway where his Uncle
had just passed caught his eye. Stooping, he picked it up, and stopped
mechanically to examine the contents of the packet. The light was
dim, and he read the heading words on the covering with difficulty:
‘Seabright Trust.’
He rubbed his eyes, and read it again. No mistake about the words:
‘Seabright Trust,’ the Trust of which himself and his respected Uncle
were, or rather had been, the co-trustees; he tore open the covering.
Quite so; documents of importance, notes, gold, dropped, undoubtedly
dropped by his Uncle. A fierce joy leapt up in his heart; he took one
look at the fast disappearing figure, then drew quickly back into the
shelter of some trees, and turned again to the contents of the packet.
His _co_-trustee--well, not exactly, now--possibly it might have been
better for that gentleman, he thought with a bitter sneer, if he were
still so. Over this Trust he had come to grief, over this Trust that
man--his co-trustee--had shown him no mercy, no saving grace, not even
the grace of a two days’ silence. Hard measure, hardly dealt, ‘black
sheep--black sheep’--that was all. Well, things square themselves: over
this Trust the black sheep would be quits; the documents were _most_
important; the bottom of the Serpentine was quite an admirable place
for them.
What construction the law would put upon their disappearance,
really--he reflected with a grim smile--he couldn’t say; his Uncle
would doubtless know; he knew the consequences of everything so
accurately. The memory of that fourteen months in the dim world pressed
like lead upon his brain; the revengeful Southern blood leaped in his
veins, and he ground his teeth and laughed aloud. He hoped it might
be held _criminal_ negligence, the documents were _so_ important; it
was, moreover, quite unfortunate for his co-trustee that it was at all
events indirectly to the latter’s interest that they should cease to
exist. This would be better than speaking his mind. He leapt a paling
and looked about him for stones suitable to weld the canvas covering
and its contents to their new abode. Let him think; there were also
notes and gold, _these_ most certainly, whatever else happened, _that
man_ would have to restore, therefore by taking them he robbed nobody.
‘By God! What I take from him is my due; he has taken everything from
me; shall there be no exchange?’
‘The notes may go,’ he thought, ‘they’re risky. I’ll give society no
more chances, but the gold will give me a fresh start. Uncle Stephen!
Uncle Stephen! this isn’t your day out, it’s mine, and by heaven I’ll
make the most of it.’
Now, in this matter, as he said when he told me of it afterwards, he
acted with conviction; there was no struggle in him as to the right or
the wrong of the thing--it was so plain--no single qualm of hesitation
or regret tempered the seething delight in the coming revenge, only he
was forced to stamp his feet and grind his teeth to get back a clear
power of thinking to his whirling brain.
He filled the bag with scientific care, first taking out the roll
of gold; then tying the strings, he leapt back across the paling.
The nearest way to the Serpentine led him across the path where the
packet had been dropped. As he crossed it he saw a figure approaching
slowly through the dusk, from the direction in which his Uncle had
disappeared; he shrank behind a tree and watched. If it should be that
old shark, and he were seen--well--a blow neatly given secured the
necessary amount of silence, and did no great harm.
‘He’s an old man, and I don’t want to hurt him, but by heaven I won’t
be stopped--.’
The figure advanced very slowly, and Eugene watched it anxiously in the
fast waning light. It seemed to move forwards down the path a few feet
with a jerk, and then to stop suddenly. It was bent almost double, so
that no glimpse of the face could be seen, but a curious, indistinct,
shrill murmur like the ‘goo-gooing’ of a dumb man came down to Eugene’s
ears.
‘What the devil is it?’ he thought, and as if for answer, one
intelligible word ‘Trust’ came in a half-scream through the chill
evening air, and then the ‘goo-gooing’ began again. Suddenly, when only
some few yards away, the figure straightened itself as if animated by a
spring, and Eugene saw his Uncle.
The right arm hung stiffened at his side, the left gesticulated wildly,
pointing down the path and then to his mouth, out of one side of which
came that weird and curious mumbling. Eugene shuddered; whatever else,
there could be no _fear_ of this pitiable being--he stepped from behind
the tree and moved forward.
The figure continued to advance, dragging itself painfully along--as
it seemed the left leg alone moving--and the eyes fixed on Eugene’s
advancing form had an intense look of agonised appeal. There was no
recognition in them, only an unasked question; the mouth mumbled, the
man’s left hand alternately pointed down the path, and clutched the
breast of his overcoat. It seemed to Eugene that the piteous searching
in the eyes must pierce the covering which his buttoned coat formed
over the lost bag, and with an involuntary movement he threw it open.
The figure staggered, and with an inarticulate cry thrust out its hand
for the bag. Eugene drew back--he must have time to think. His Uncle,
a dim look of recognition struggling through the film of agonised
entreaty, crouched almost double again before him. The drizzling mist
shrouded the rest of the world, and these two figures stood alone.
A thousand thoughts and feelings surged in the nephew’s mind. Gratified
revenge, reluctant pity, and a growing railing at the fates. In a whirl
of disgust he found that the thing he had in his heart to do was no
longer in his power. Why had he lingered that minute to gloat over
his revenge? Why turned his head as he was taking his road _to_ that
revenge? A minute sooner, this miserable, crouching, smitten figure,
with its dumb, despairing look, and its dumb, despairing voice, would
not have been cringing in supplication before him. What had befallen
the man, hale a few minutes before, did not trouble him; he was
bitterly raging at the failure of his revenge, and disgusted with the
stroke of fate which had caused it, tearing from him his fresh start in
life.
‘If I could,’--he swung the bag doubtfully in his hand, and felt the
gold in his pocket; ‘_if_ I only could,--but I can’t, and there’s an
end of it. The old brute--he’s down, and I _can’t_ kick him.’ All
feeling of pity for the miserable object before him was swallowed up in
an amazing regret. He even cursed the training which caused him to feel
the impossibility of that kick.
‘A good many of my late friends would have been on in this piece,’ he
thought bitterly, ‘and glad of the chance.’
He plucked the bag from under his coat, and opening it, dropped the
stones out one by one.
‘I suppose this’ll have to go back too,’ he muttered, and replaced the
gold, with a sigh of disgust. The stricken man’s eyes gleamed, and he
put out his left hand feebly. Eugene put the bag into it, but the grasp
was uncertain, and it fell again to the ground. The shock of seemingly
losing it a second time was too much for the disordered intellect,
and in a dead swoon, Stephen Rattray fell stiffly forward on to his
nephew’s shoulder.
Eugene laid him on the ground, carefully buttoned the packet into the
inner pocket of his Uncle’s coat, and then drew himself away to think.
He couldn’t get a clear grasp of things with that hated figure touching
his. Leaning apart against a tree, and looking down at the helpless
form, he dealt grimly and despitefully in his heart with the feeling
that troubled him; let it stand for want of better phrasing at ‘common
humanity.’ He railed at it; he even took some steps of retreat; he
reasoned with himself.
This man, when a nod of the head might have saved, had reduced him to
the level of the brute beasts--what duty then lay upon him to act but
upon that level? This man lay there, dependent on him for a chance
perhaps of further life. Yes, but there had been a bitter hour, when
their positions had been reversed, and the closing of that hour, with
its depths of horror and degradation, its blotting out of all hope and
life, was vividly before him. This, too, was an old man, at the end
of things, and he had been a young man at the beginning--that was but
an aggravation. As things now were he had done him no wrong, taken no
revenge; the packet was found; it was even himself that had restored
it: the stroke had come through a visitation of the fates, through no
dealing of his.
He searched, and he failed to see any reason why he should lift a
finger to give back life to this hulk. It was adding insult to injury
indeed to expect him to carry his enemy perhaps a mile in search of
help. Leave him here?--and get help?--he would certainly die before it
came. No, either all or nothing; and it should be, by heaven, _nothing_!
He turned on his heel,--and straightway it came upon him that these
things were not done. Just as impossible as kicking a fellow on the
ground, or shooting an unarmed man.
‘By Gad! the other thing’s got to be done! When I’ve lived a few years
in Borneo or some such place, I shall know better how to deal with
you, my friend; in the meantime--’ he lifted him, and with wearily slow
steps bore him disgustedly in the direction of the Alexandria Gate.
Now that he had begun, he meant to see it through; and with many a
halt, for his Uncle was a heavy man, he got him through the fast
closing fog to the crossing of Rotten Row.
‘I don’t want any fuss,’ he thought, as he put his burden down and
paused for breath; ‘can’t afford to have it advertised that I played
the good Samaritan. Evening paper paragraphs--“The Admirable Convict,”
“Rattray Repents,” “Remarkable occurrence in connection with a
scandal in high life, showing the beneficial influences of our prison
system--Nephew and Uncle”--Good Lord!’
He wiped his brow, and propping his Uncle’s motionless form against a
rail, went in search of a cab. He found a four-wheeler at the gate of
the Park, and drove back in it.
‘Now, my friend, bear a hand,’ he said to the driver; ‘this gentleman’s
had a stroke; we must get him home at once. Double fare, and look
sharp--it’s the only chance.’ He gave the astonished man the address,
and between them they lifted the helpless form into the cab.
When they drew up at the house, Eugene leapt out and rang the bell.
‘Hope it’s Ashton,’ he thought. The old butler, a man who had known him
from his youth up, opened the door, and recoiled in blank astonishment
when he saw who was there.
‘Master Eugene!’ he said.
‘All right, Ashton, don’t make a row. Look here, my Uncle’s had a
stroke; he’s in that cab; I came across him in the Park walking home;
better get him in-doors at once. And look here, Ashton,’ he lifted his
hat significantly, and said grimly, ‘you know all about me, I suppose;
well, see that my name doesn’t come out in this business.’
He held out his hand to the old man.
‘Thank you, sir,’ said the butler, taking it, ‘always proud to take
your hand, sir, believe me. I’ll make it all right,--say I picked him
up myself, if necessary; you can depend on me, sir.’
‘Thank you, Ashton,’ said Eugene; ‘and look here, give that chap a
sovereign,’ he pointed to the cabman waiting at the door, ‘and lend me
another, there’s a good fellow.’
The butler pulled two sovereigns out of his pocket.
‘Proud to be of any use to you, sir,’ he said.
Eugene, with a choke in his throat, helped them carry his Uncle into
the house; and as the door closed, turned to the cabman.
‘You haven’t earned that sovereign yet,’ he said, handing him one,
‘it’s all right, but you’ve got to shut your head--d’ye see? Now go on
to the docks, and drive like Hell.’
He sat back in the cab that rattled eastwards through the fog, and he
ground his teeth.
‘That’s over; and the Lord do so to me, and more also, if I’d do it
again,’ he said between them; and with those words, Eugene Rattray
disappeared from among his fellows, and the place thereof knew him no
more.
THE DEMI-GODS
[Music]
PROLOGUE
Into the garden of rest had come trouble and pain, for the end was at
hand.
He sat in the sun, on the stone wall that divided the garden from the
great lake, and swung his legs, silently gazing with his soul in his
eyes, and SHE, in a long wicker chair, sideways to him, shaded her face
with her hand and looked down. The soul went out of him, and hovering
over the waving hair, and the dimple at the corner of the drooping
mouth, peeped through the fingers of the dear hand at its true and only
resting places--those brown pools over whose depths lay the clouding
shadow of the morrow.
_But_ another twenty-four hours, and then back to prison--to prison--to
prison. The thought beat through both hearts, with the level monotony
of a tolling for the dead, for the glorious dead, for the month past of
a sweet and lovely life together in the garden of rest.
To-morrow was the ending of all life and light, bringing with it for
her a separation from the true self, a return behind the triumphant
car of a mocking and over-riding fate, to a caged existence, a loathed
companionship, a weary, weary beating of the breast against the bars;
for him--a legion of mind-devils, torturing, twisting, lying in wait at
every turn and corner of life, ever alert and ever cruel, and a dreary,
craving ache.
To-morrow was the farewell of their love, perhaps till the grave--who
knows? their great and burning love, that had given all and taken
all, that had cared with an exceeding tenderness for every thought
and movement, that was old, yet had not tired, that had known and
understood, having no depths left to sound, no heights to win; that
tree which, planted in the moist, cool earth of comradeship, had
grown steadily and grandly till it rejoiced in the sweet foliage of a
perfect trust, and the glorious flowers of passion. The day looked on,
and laughed in slanting rays of heat and light, and presently on a
snow-cooled breeze wafted between two towering heights came a chime of
far-off Italian bells.
She looked up into his face, and smiled.
‘Shall I sing my Love a little song?’ she said. And as he knelt beside
her, she held his head in her two hands, and sang shyly into his ear,
in time to the drifting cadence.
* * * * *
Out of his eyes fled hunger and pain, and he leaned his forehead on
her breast, and so they drank of the merciful well of peace. The chime
floated faintly past them with a note of invitation.
* * * * *
‘The bells have got into my head, darling. I’m mad, I think,--I can’t
feel anything--Child of mine, come for a drive, and find the bells;
we’ll get drunk on sun, and air, and sky, and mountains, and--kisses,
and forget there is a to-morrow and an ending.’
He stood up straight and strong, and drew her to him.
So they waited, and the chime floated once more past, while they looked
life again into each other’s eyes.
Then, with his arm around her shoulder, and hers drawn round his waist,
they walked through the garden of rest to the gate where the angel of
Publicity threatened such proceeding with a flaming and respectable
sword.
* * * * *
_The Meditations of Pietro._
‘The sun is very yellow and hot here by the side of the water, and the
flies are like to a hundred devils on my good Nicolas--Ugh! Pighead,
what good to shake thy bell! It is not good sitting here, for I have
only money for one--two--three--yes, for four drinkings, in my pouch,
and the last a little one, and the day is hot. Eleven of the clock,
for there begins the morning tolling from San Felice. Where be these
fools of strangers? There be many things to see, also my chariot is
very strong, and beautiful exceedingly, and my good grey Nicolas, is he
not a most willing puller, being still young and lusty? Yet, forsooth,
because it is the Sabbath, they will not stir forth--these fools--but
sit at home in sad garments, and eat, thinking to make the day holy.
‘Ai! What are these? Can it be they are coming? Ai--Ai--_si signore,
si, si, signora, si, si, si.... This_ is several drinkings; moreover
they appear to be English. A very curious peoples, the English--for
some reason known only of God they speak to me in French, as if I,
Pietro, understood French, forsooth. However, it is all the same thing;
the _he_ waves his hat to the West, and says--“_San Felice_;”--now San
Felice is in the South;--the _she_ says “_Campenella_,” and does not
wave anythings,--decidedly she is the more intelligent; and I, Pietro,
the most intelligent of all, for I nod my top once, twice, three times
strongly, and say “San Felice, si, si,” and beat my grey, and lo! we
are off, and they have forgotten to bargain. Ho! A very curious peoples!
‘And yet, now that I regard, perhaps I have done to the English an
injustice. _These_ are no doubt mad, they have a very queer look, their
eyes are all shiny, and they sit very close together, though even I,
Pietro, am hot, sitting up here alone on the head of my chariot.
‘Ting-a-ling, ting-a-ling, sighs my old friend the bell, as Nicolas
shakes his ears at the road; _si, si, amico_, it is long, and it is
white, and--pouff--dusty, and in places even steep.
‘Yes, now I know for a certainty they are mad; it is not for them the
road either too long or too steep or too dusty; they only sit like
coo-doves, and the _he_ sighs, and every now and then he starts upon
his feet, greatly endangering his neck, and points with his fist, and
says, “Look, Carissima, how grand, how _beaut_iful!”
‘I think he talks foolishness, for it is always the same whether we
come to a pool or a mountain, or even where the trees grow thickly,
or there are flowers on the ground. And then what does the _she_ but
uprise also, ah! She is “bella,” the _she_! And puts her hand on his
shoulder, ah! The lucky shoulder! and before she has looked, Nicolas
gives a big pull so that both sit down on a sudden, upon their ends,
and laugh greatly.
‘They laugh always, these--when they do not sigh, and when they sigh
sometimes there comes also to my ears another sound, very gentle, like
the end of a good drinking. Can they already, then, be thirsty? Why,
even I, Pietro, am not yet thirsty, but soon shall be.
‘Yet no, when I turn, saying ‘_Il Signore--ha parlato_?’’ is he not
always tying on his boot--very curious must be the boots of the
English--and she hooking her glove, and both laughing, yes, always
laughing? nor can I see any bottle.
‘Overhead the sky is quite blue, and the sun very yellow, and there be
no shade, but the _he_ throws off his hat, and says, “Grand, glorious,
’twill make to grow the hair, Carissima;” this he says many times, so
that I learn it by stomach, and the _she_ strokes his top, where the
hairs did no longer kiss one another, and purrs--all these things I
know through the back of my hat where the brim is broad, and a man
half-turning can see with the corner of his eyeball.
‘Now, in a good time we come to where the valley runs away down from
the road, and Nicolas, as is the habit of this pighead, when the sun is
hot even to the winking of his master’s eye, walks over till he hangs
above the valley by the hairs of his tail and the strength of my right
arms, and presently with much thanking of God and cursings of that
pighead, I pull him up again; at the which what does the _he_ but cast
himself back laughing, and say, “Do it again, do it again,” which I am
supposing is of great wit, for the _she_ laughs also greatly.
‘Do they think, perchance, that I, Pietro, cannot drive? Chickenheads!
it is now of a surety they are mad--I, Pietro, who am a celebration! I
too laugh, and so we laugh all three, until we come to where there is
good drinking.
‘“_Goutez un petit peu_,” I speak to them in that fool’s tongue--this
much knowing, and that quite enough.
‘“_Si, si_,” they say, and nod their tops, yet do not descend.
Certainly they have drunk upon the voyage, for the day is hot. Well,
well, I, Pietro, am thirsty and so inwards; Nicolas also will drink,
but not of the Asti that bubbles sweet and yellow. Ai! Good! Very good
drinking; is it not so, my pighead? And what of these? they have not
drunk, yet are their eyes shinier than even before, and surely they are
_very_ near together.
‘So we go down into the valley from whence on both hands the big hills
roll up their limbs, and I, coming to that place where it is of the
custom to show where the man from the market was bereft of his goods,
and where his body was cut off, turn on my head, and tell them in
usual words the story.
‘Chickenheads! never yet did any understand, and my Italian is very
pure, very--always in great estimation.
‘These only say, “_Si, si!_” and presently many times: “How far San
Felice? How far? How far?” What shall this mean? I know not, yet surely
I must to tell them--being of great intelligence, so I stop my Nicolas
and speak of the country and how many peoples live in the town, and
the name of the mayor; and then, for greater satisfaction of these,
because they will pay largely--turning a little to think the better,
and outspit once, twice, very skilfully on two hairs of Nicolas’
back-tail--again to them, concerning the other road, and the number of
horses my master has, and how I, Pietro, have a wife (whom God plant!)
and several offsprings.
‘But these only laugh, and point in many ways, having no intelligence,
and say, “How far, how far? More?”
‘Chickenheads! and do? What to do? But nod my top, and on again where
the brown water runs swiftly down from the hills towards its Mother,
the great blue lake. Ai--so it runs busily from the hills where the
snow cloak lies shining in the sun. And now these are quiet, quiet as
the deep Mother herself, or as the tall Father with his white head.
Perhaps they are frightened; well, _I_ was frightened once; that was
many years ago, being but a whipperling; for the Mother is very blue
and still and deep, and the Father is of a giantness strong as the
death itself.
‘So the little brown Son runs over between them, and carries messages
and greeting.
‘Yet not always, for in the great heat comes the Fiery One and licks
him up for a space, and tears off the Father’s white hairs that get
thinner and thinner with every golden dawning. Surely the _he_ with the
hat, upon which he sits, should regard and understand of this, taking
warning lest the same befall; yet perchance there is a difference, his
hair being of a fair mud, as is that of all the English.
‘Now the _she_ is “bella,” with many hairs running in billows like
waves on the shore of the lake, only not white-topped, and her face is
like unto a violet and a star. Yet also is she like unto something that
springs swiftly and far, or unto that which waves its wings in the
sunlight, making many colours, and floats past like the twinkling of an
eyebrow. Also have I seen in shops figures of porcelain of a delicate
transparence, so that a man can look at things through them, that are
greatly like her; so it seems also the _he_ finds her, for whenever
she points and bids him to be looking at the things around, he regards
straightly and without winking at her eyeballs, or--so often as _I_ am
observing at her _eyelashes_, which she then, it seems, wears long upon
her cheeks.
‘Ai! I have seen one or two fairer amongst my own race; but never
amongst these strangers, wearing nets on their faces, with blue
looking-glasses for their eyes, and very thick garments of a sad colour.
‘And so on and on past the great Mother, Nicolas drawing with a good
stomach to where rises the long hill to San Felice, and ever comes
clearer the great chime, it being now the second pulling of it.
‘Then the _he_--mad, as I have said--descends and marches with me,
patting my Nicolas and saying, “Good, good, how old?” With that he
regards his teeth. Now I know well what I must be saying, when one of
these regards where once were Nicolas’ teeth, and says, “How old?”
For I am of great intelligence and have learnt it by stomach,--so
“_Eightee_” I say. “What?” says the _he_, and his eyes grow of a
roundness, then he laughs and wheels his toes to the she, and says
something of a great wit, and both laugh again. Then a curious thing
passes, for the she says, “Ah! Eight_ine_! but _impossible_!” and like
to a shot gun rolls from the chariot moving, and both run and look at
Nicolas’ knees, and again at his teeth. Do they think then that he eats
his knees?
‘Then again both say Eightine! but _impossible_! and I say Eightine,
_si, si_! and nod myself so that they shall not think small of Nicolas,
or that he is too young a horse and fiery, as I was of a fear they
might. Yet they wag their tops very often and as I think, sadly, and
the _she_ looks at Nicolas softly and timidly, and smites him very
gently, and they walk up all that great hill--both--even “_la bella_.”
‘But then it is all same thing, they are English and mad; who knows
what is in them?
‘Now am I thirsty again; but at the end we have become in San Felice,
and after much questioning of the peoples walking in the streets--who
know nothing--I find at the end the place where they wish to drink,
the bells being quite at hand, and very full of noise.
‘So I leave them for mine own drinking. Yet they do not hurry to their
drinking, but go slowly, and as it were without eagerness, looking at
each other, and the “bella’s” eyes shine like two stars in a heaven of
violets.
‘What did they, while for three hours I and Nicolas ate bravely and
drank much, is of a supposition. But now we are again to returning
ready, and see! they come, the “bella” with many flowers in her hands;
and still their eyes shine, and their noses smell the flowers, and they
say, “_Allez, Pietro, allez!_”
‘So, with a crackling of the whip-stick, we roll through the streets,
and down to the other road leading through the valley of the fair view
to the bridge that cuts in two the great Mother, and so home again. Now
I have a liking for this road, and so has Nicolas; it is of a gentle
sloping, with many spots where he that is intelligent can ‘_goutez un
peu_,’ and so we go pleasantly.
‘The Fiery One is hiding him behind the tall Father and his brethren,
and there comes over the earth a great sweet colour as of the sparkling
Asti in this my glass, and all things drink deeply of the flushing
light--even those lying back with eyes very serene, and arms invisible
cunningly--and I, Pietro, even more deeply, for have I not also of the
light inside me?
‘Only Nicolas goes like the pighead he is, without reason, now on one
side, now on the other, and jumps as does the flea when you catch his
tail.
‘Well--well--he is a sure beast, and the way is very long--and
safe--and aww--drowsy, and the light has got into my eyes, and also, I
think a little into my top--aw--w--w--well, I _will_ perchance sleep a
little--’tis a sure--beast--and the way--a--w--w....’
EPILOGUE.
The champagne light faded slowly from the snow-crowned tops, and from
the green and grey sides of the hills, and the violet shadows crept on
over the great blue lake below; the shining in _her_ eyes was fading
too, giving place to a look of great rest and faith, and _his_ face
turned to hers was the face of a man gazing at the Holy Grail.
So, obliviously, unconsciously onwards, the cup of a perfect joy full
to overflowing.
The carriage rolled slowly along the white and dusty road by the
lake-side, the tired horse picking his own way, the pleasantly drunken
Pietro heavily asleep on his box.
In the fast gathering dusk they came to the iron railway bridge that
carved the lake into two halves. The carriage road and railway track
lay parallel across the bridge, divided only by a high partition of
iron-work running its entire length. The gates of each lay open, and a
level crossing tempted the unguided horse past the gate of the road on
to the lines of the railway.
Perhaps some sting of a dormant yet uneasy conscience, or the jolt of
the wheel, caused his slumbering driver to awaken suddenly; the reins,
jerked sharply and mechanically to the left, brought the horse’s head
round into and through the wrong gate. In a minute the carriage was
being dragged along the single railway track with no room to turn.
A frightened cry from the driver, and the grey, terrified by the
jerking at his mouth, and the unwonted nature of the road, plunged
forward wildly. Losing his balance, Pietro fell over to the side of the
line with a groan of terror, and crawled, shrinking, to an iron girder
at the side, to which he clung with trembling arms.
‘Sit still, my darling, it’s a fair course and no favour; can’t go
wrong, Sweet, there isn’t room to upset; we shall be all right at the
end.’
She gave a little shiver and clasped her hands tightly round his neck.
‘Courage, sweetheart; we’ve laughed the day through, and we’ll laugh it
through to the finish; is it not so, O my love?’
The darkness closed in, the horse plunged and snorted in his mad
career, the carriage rocked and rattled fearfully. He strained
her close to him with a laugh, looking with eyes of love into her
face,--and the same sweet look of rest and faith was upon it.
‘Hast thou been happy all this long day, child?’ he said.
‘Ay--ah! How happy!! There is no telling.’
Then suddenly her face changed; over it closed the grim shadow of
the morning, and even in that moment of fear and excitement a black
reaction was upon her. With a low moan she whispered:
‘My own, I want to die now, _now_, with thee in my arms, thy face to
me, thy lips to mine, and no one to see but the sky and the lake; I
can’t face to-morrow and the ending--I can’t--I can’t!’
The passionate whisper rose into a cry, the breathing choked in a sob,
and the calm of her face broke, and vanished suddenly, as the calm of
the great lake breaks and vanishes before the icy blast sweeping down
the mountain gully.
For answer he held her closer and closer in his arms.
‘Gold help me! neither can I, thy wish is mine.’...
From out of the darkness in front, swelling gradually above the
rattling of the carriage and the snorting of the horse, came a
muttering sound.
‘The gods are merciful,’ he said; ‘a train’s on us; it’s all
over--there will be _no_ ending.’
Nearer and nearer came the terrible roar, stunning all the faculties
of heart and brain, and still the maddened horse sprang forward to his
doom.
With a supreme effort HE tore himself free from the bond of numbness
and cried to HER fast in his arms; and through her eyes in that one
last look her soul crept to his.
‘Demi-gods to-day! better this ending than to-morrow’s;--if there be
a future life, darling, it is ours together--body to body, soul to
soul.... One kiss, my darling--closer, closer--ah----’
With a stagger the greedy roar fled past into the purple night, its
hungering stilled--and from over the shadowy lake under the watchful
and silent stars a requiem chime came floating:
[Music]
J. Miller & Son, Printers, Edinburgh.
Transcriber’s Notes
Obvious punctuation errors and omissions have been fixed.
Page 117: “annyway there will” changed to “anyway there will”
Page 157: “in the camp turne” changed to “in the camp turned”
Page 209: “Oue into a world” changed to “Out into a world”
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