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Title: The Mountains of Fears
Author: Rowland, Henry C.
Language: English
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THE MOUNTAIN OF FEARS
------------------------------------------------------------------------
BY HENRY C. ROWLAND
--------------
To Windward
THIRD EDITION
“Crisp and strong, full of breeziness and virile humanity.”—Brooklyn
Eagle.
“A capital story told with a spirit and go that are irresistible. A
strong and dramatic novel. Shows literary genius.”—Newark Advertiser.
--------------
The Wanderers
THIRD EDITION
“A little breathless toward the end, the reader enjoys every moment
spent with Brian Kinard, the roving son of an Irish earl.”—Chicago
Record-Herald.
“Full of complications and surprises which hold the reader’s attention
to the end. An unusually good story of actual life at sea.”—Boston
Transcript.
--------------
Each with frontispiece in colors, by
Ch. Weber-Ditzler.
12mo. Cloth. $1.50
--------------
A. S. BARNES & COMPANY
------------------------------------------------------------------------
[Illustration: “I see that you go in for heads a bit yourself,” said
Lynch.––Page 99]
------------------------------------------------------------------------
The Mountain
of Fears
By
Henry C. Rowland
Author of “The Wanderers”, “To Windward”
and “Sea Scamps”.
Illustrated
[Illustration: Publisher’s Logo]
New York
A. S. Barnes & Co.
1905
------------------------------------------------------------------------
COPYRIGHT, 1905, BY
A. S. BARNES & CO.
Published October, 1905
------------------------------------------------------------------------
TO
DOCTOR LEYDEN
WHOSE ILLUMINATING PERSONALITY
AND STRANGE EXPERIENCES I HAVE
VENTURED TO INTERPRET IN THE
HOPE THAT WHEN HE RETURNS FROM
HIS QUEST IN THE “FORBIDDEN LAND”
HE WILL PARDON MY PRESUMPTION.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CONTENTS
-------
THE MOUNTAIN OF FEARS 1
OIL AND WATER 46
THE SHEARS OF ATROPOS 80
ROSENTHAL THE JEW 118
TWO SAVAGES 158
TWO GENTLEMEN 199
THE BAMBOULA 245
INTO THE DARK 270
------------------------------------------------------------------------
THE MOUNTAIN OF FEARS
------------------------------------------------------------------------
THE MOUNTAIN OF FEARS
“DOCTOR,” said my shipmate, Dr. Leyden, “have you ever made any especial
study of nervous diseases—_central_ nervous diseases—morbid conditions
resulting from a derangement of the central cells?”
I told him that I had done only such work in this branch as a general
practice would require, but that I had observed some few cases of
especial interest during a military surgical service in the East, and
proceeded to cite one or two instances of mental vagaries resulting from
gunshot wounds in the head.
Leyden leaned both elbows on the taffrail and listened restlessly. Our
little ship swashed through the short sling of the Spanish Main, the
Pole star gleaming ahead, the Southern Cross blazing astern, and all
about the white, flashing crests of the phosphorescent sea. Usually
Leyden was a good listener, but this night he seemed impatient, restive,
to such an extent that I finally paused, annoyed, for nothing is so
irritating as lack of attention to a solicited reply.
“Ach! but those cases are in the line of the ordinary!” he exclaimed.
“Pardon me,” I replied, “but the last case I have given was distinctly
_out_ of the ordinary.”
“I am awkward, Doctor,” said Leyden, apologetically. “I mean that the
relations of cause and effect follow the usual course—the histological
changes in the cell produced impaired function of the organ and these
primary changes were the result of trauma. But have you ever had
occasion to observe the reverse of this condition—the action of the
organ on the center—like a nightmare, where one has the liver poisoning
the central cells——”
I interrupted in my turn. Leyden was no doubt a skilled naturalist, a
close observer and a man of deep power of thought and analysis, but he
was not a physician, had never made a regular study of physiological
chemistry, and was, therefore, scarcely in a position to argue with a
person who had.
“Such cases are not infrequent,” I answered. “The ancient Greeks
understood that much, as we see from their terms. ‘Hypochondria’; under
the ribs—the liver probably poisoning the brain, if you like; then there
is the condition of hysteria often accompanying a movable kidney; the
action of certain drugs on special centers——”
“Such as _cannabis indica_?” interrupted Leyden, “which affects the
sense of elapsed time and makes the subject happy—or—what is that
principle, Doctor, which produces xanthopsia, or yellow vision, and
makes one sluggish and depressed?”
“Xanthopsia is an early symptom of _santonin_ poisoning,” I answered.
“The alkaloid is obtained from the unexpanded flower-heads of the——”
“Artemisia maritima—yes—I know the plant—but the active principle might
occur elsewhere?”
“Possibly——”
“It is wonderful,” mused Leyden, in the self-communicative tone that was
often difficult to follow—“the microscopic filament that makes or
unmakes a man; the minute neurons which carry such a potent impulse—like
the flash crossing a continent on a tiny wire to send two great nations
to war. The wire is short-circuited, the nation disgraced; the neuron
short-circuited, the individual disgraced. Such a thing once happened to
me, Doctor.
“This was in Papua, an awesome country which holds in its dark recesses
many of the things one wants—and most of those which one does not. I had
gone there with two other white men to look for gold. It is a marvelous
country, Doctor; I do not think there is any other like it; such a
country as was pictured in the old imaginative school of painting; a
valley, through which winds a mist river flowing intangibly from a
mirage through a canyon bridged by a rainbow; travelers’ palms,
tree-ferns, lianas, dream-trees heavy with strange fruits and brilliant
blossoms, in the distance mystic mountains rising as they recede, green
yet forbidding, the homes of genii; their summits fantastic—the whole a
beautiful, impossible, frightfully fascinating fairyland. This was that
place where we went to look for gold.
“My two companions were failures—most gold-seekers are. I was not old
enough to be a failure myself. No matter what the faults of these
others, one did not deny their virtues. One was a Hollander, Vinckers,
an engineer, a brilliant man, but one ready to step over the edge of
heaven in sheer restlessness and a desire to see what was held by the
abyss; the other was a Scotchman, disagreeable, morose, taciturn, harsh
of speech and visage. Both held hearts of steel; they were the most
quietly courageous men that I have ever known. I ask you to remember
this, Doctor, in consideration of what came later. Their courage had
been tried and proved in many desperate situations.... Ach!”—Leyden
began to mutter again, shaping his thoughts with his tongue until I
could with difficulty catch this thought—“the filament—the neuron—cut
the sympathetic nerve in the neck of a horse and the animal begins to
sweat upon the affected side; puncture the floor of the fourth ventricle
of a dog—diabetes.” He raised his voice. “There is a little center of
thermogenesis, is there not, Doctor, the irritation of which will raise
the temperature——
“We wandered through this shadow-land, this illusory place of promise
whose inhabitants were ofttimes starving. Cannibals?—yes; many white men
have been that through acute starvation; chronic only tends to confirm
the vice. They were a strange, shy, kindly people—to us, who understood
such. The ‘Barbary Coast’ in San Francisco, the parks in Melbourne, or
the water-front in Hong Kong, are all more dangerous than Papua. We
wandered through these people, accompanied by kindness, a whole tribe
sometimes bearing our burdens until they reached a district dangerous to
them, but where we made new friends. We wandered through this dreamland
unmolested, walked with its fantastic peoples, black and brown and
piebald; strayed in and out to the click-click-click of our little
hammers, meeting dangers, it is true—the dangers which might confront a
child walking blindfolded through a botanical garden filled with perils
to its ignorance—and we tap-tap-tapped with our little hammers—right up
to the slopes of the _Malang-o-mor_—the ‘Mountain of Fears’—and we
tap-tap-tapped on its slopes of quartz and basalt, little thinking that
we knocked at the door of an evil spirit.”
The bluff bows of our little ship smashed the short seas into a flat
track of phosphoresence, and against the pale background I saw a tremor
of some sort shake Leyden’s square shoulders, and it seemed to me that
his voice was slightly breathless.
“‘The Mountain of Fears,’ so our Papuans called it, and threw down their
burdens at the edge of the stream and refused point-blank to stir
another step; more than that, they implored us to go no farther
ourselves, and a girl given to MacFarlane by a chief threw her arms
around the knees of the rough old Gael and wailed like a stricken soul.
An odd thing, that, Doctor, this cannibal girl given to the Scotchman a
month before by this chief, to whom MacFarlane had given a harmonica on
which he had first rendered ‘The Bonnie, Bonnie Banks of Loch Lomond’ in
a manner which should, by right, have got him speared. The girl had
fancied him, slaved for him, followed him everywhere like a dog, and had
ended by _softening_ him—to such an extent that he ceased to curse and
his manner was less harsh—the elevating effect of a cannibal upon a
Covenanter!—another inversion in this hallucinating country where the
only actuality seemed the rapping of our little hammers.
“This girl, as I say, implored MacFarlane not to go on; for Vinckers and
me she did not care; none of the women had much fancied us, while
MacFarlane’s lack of comeliness was almost bizarre; they were
_obedient_, of course—but that was about all.
“MacFarlane leered up at the great forbidding mountain as it thrust
against the dome of the sky its summit of snowy quartz, a-glisten in the
bright sunlight thirteen thousand feet above the level of the sea.
“‘A cauld slope yon—too cauld for a lass in naething but a kiltie. Ye’d
best bide here ’til I come.’ He spoke to her in the vernacular, with
which we were all three familiar, and told her to await his return.
“It was hot in that valley—a stewpan, withering, stifling with the
equatorial reek which wilts one to the bone; the nights stunk of fever.
It was the southeast slope of the mountain which presented to us; and as
we gazed up toward it from the little nest of trees where we had made
our camp, the late sun blazed against its worn flank, and suddenly the
broad, barren belt between the forest and the formation of quartz above
the timber belt seemed to burst into flame and shone and sparkled and
glittered as if flecked with scales of gold.
“‘An omen!’ cried Vinckers. ‘The Mountain of Hope—not the Mountain of
Fears! Something tells me that we shall find gold there—veins of it,
knuckles of it—perhaps the bones of the mountain are solid gold; why
not, in such a country as this?’
“The sun dropped behind the high hills to the westward, swiftly, as it
does on the equator, and even more swiftly the gray shadow ran from the
foot to the summit of the great mountain. It was as if one saw the color
fade in the face of a dying man, and it seemed to me that a cold draught
struck down from the heights.
“‘The Mountain of Fears,’ said I—‘the Mountain of Fears,’ and as I
stared at the monster on whose bristling hide we planned to crawl,
parasites, searching for a spot to lodge our stings, the first shadow of
foreboding swept over my spirits, just as the swift shadow had risen to
throw its cold, blue light across the snowy quartz-field.
“In the valley we found the first signs of plenty; there were fruit and
game and a sort of wild yam in abundance; and here we decided to rest
for several days on the edge of the stream, for MacFarlane had a
suppurating heel where he had trod upon a thorn, and Vinckers was
suffering from a great nettle-rash upon his body. All three of us were
hungry and our blood ran too thin to encounter the cold nights higher up
the slope.
“We camped in a grove of trees which looked like the _papaya_ and bore a
fruit unlike any I have ever seen. It was shaped like an _avocado_, had
a pulp like wax, or bone-marrow, which was greasy to the touch, oily,
and held a faint flavor of sandal-wood. At first we tried it with
caution, for our native friends would not eat anything which grew in the
shadow of the _Malang-o-mor_; neither would they sleep in the narrow
valley, but retired each evening to the edge of the forest on the
farther slope.
“We rested and we slept, and we ate of the fruit, which I called
_myela_, because I did not think that it had ever been described, and I
called it so from its resemblance to marrow; also, we drank of the
stream, which was a deep ruby, spring-cooled and fragrant, but of which
none of the Papuans would drink excepting the girl, Tomba, given to
MacFarlane by the chief. She ate and drank and shuddered and watched her
lord narrowly, as if waiting for the curse to fall and wishful to avert
it.
“In the early morning we hunted the game or clicked with our little
hammers on the crumbling quartz through which the river gnawed its way.
There was gold in the country, gold in the stream; one could pan enough
dust in a light day’s work to pay highly for the labor. But we wanted
more than dust—we wanted the pure metal which none doubted we should
find on the virgin breast of the mountain, and our fancy saw us winding
back to the sea with our native tribe deep-laden with the wealth of
buccaneers—winding out through defiles of mountain and forest, heavy
with the plunder of the dread _Malang-o-mor_.
“Odd, Doctor; gold and dreams and sweat and death—how they all mixed
together to strike the average which maintains the trim of the world——”
Leyden’s voice had sunk to muttering again, and he shivered, despite the
humid warmth of the night.
“Daytimes we dwelt in Paradise and at night lay down to sleep, having
first drunk of the stream, which we christened ‘Lethe,’ because on its
banks we forgot the hardship and hunger of our long journey to the
valley. A Lethe it must have been, because each morning, when the late
sun looked over the shoulder of the mountain and whipped up the blanket
of mist stretched like a tent from the slope to the hills beyond, we
forgot the miasmas of the night and the fetid fever smells and spores
that spawned through the hours of hot darkness, and all of the while we
ate more of the fat, oily fruit and less of other and more wholesome
things, for this fruit of itself appeared to satisfy all needs, and we
looked at each other and laughed at the physical changes of the few
days, for we were growing fat and flabby as paretics. We slept a great
deal, too, days as well as nights, and the sleep was at first of that
delicious kind which one enjoys in the moments between waking and
rising—a conscious sleep, in which one feels the myriad renovative
changes of tissue, when each little cell seems to stretch and tingle and
feed against the waste of the coming day. Feed they did, for the flesh
came back, full and soft, to our gaunt frames, and we looked at one
another and laughed fat, gurgling laughs, and lay and smoked with our
heads in the laps of the girls, and the tapping of our little hammers
was heard but seldom on the flinty foot of the Mountain of Fears.
“The tribe had camped, as I have said, across the valley on the edge of
the forest, but each day they came to see us, and we laughed at their
surprise when they saw that all was well. We held them with beads and
baubles and food and friendliness—chiefly the latter, for natives, like
dogs, love to place allegiance with the higher mentality. One was
puzzled that physical need had not run counter to superstition, for
despite the plenty of the valley we found no trace of other inhabitants.
“Perhaps, we had been three weeks in the valley, when one night I awoke
dripping with perspiration and with a sense of nameless ill. ‘A
nightmare,’ thought I, ‘of which the color is lost and only the
depression remains.’ It held me broad awake—and then for the first time
I fully realized the nauseous reek of the fever-fog. One smelled odors
which seemed to emanate from the entrails of the earth. You know,
Doctor, the nauseous, charnel stench of rotting insects and vegetation,
with the fetid breath of the flower that issues from the mouth of a
great, carnivorous plant? You have seen these trap-like flowers, if one
may call them such, which grow in the botanical gardens of Demerara?
_Br’r’r’rgh!_ And as I lay, hot and cold and clammy, with a heavy weight
upon my chest, and thought of how we had lain and breathed that thin
effluvium, the vehicle for myriad infusoria and plasmodiæ, this
hypochondriac fear became reasonable, and I marveled that we were still
alive.
“Vinckers and MacFarlane slept heavily, torpidly, and their breathing
was the stertorous gasping of drunkards. We lay in hammocks of plaited
grass under a shelter of thatch; the girl’s hammock was beside
MacFarlane; and as I lay there, broad awake and still depressed, my
lungs half drowned in the dense humor of the valley and my ears ringing
from the clamorous insect mob without, I heard a stifled, whimpering
cry—the moan of a little child who has been whipped for inheriting
nerves. It struck a chill—there was a great deal that was chill in that
place of hot fears, cold passions, joyless content and light-hearted
sloth—a place where one’s skin crept clammily while the bones were
burning.
“‘Who is that?’ I asked, quite loudly, for I did not care if the others
awoke.
“There came in answer the whimper of one too frightened to speak. Did
you ever, as a child, Doctor, waken with the nightmare, afraid to cry
out, afraid to move, tortured by the whimpers wrung out in reasonless
terror? It was that kind of a sound.
“‘What is it?’ I asked.
“‘It is Tomba.’
“‘What is the matter with you?’ said I.
“‘I am afraid.’
“‘And what are you afraid of?’
“She found her voice then and began to tell me, but there my limited
knowledge of the dialect failed, for I had no such linguistic scope as
to-day, when one dialect more or less is simply a matter of ear and
comparison. There was something in her speech of devils and death, and
she kept repeating this and I do not know what besides—and then, as I
was trying to reassure her as one might a child or a horse, less through
the reason than the senses, the soothing of primitive sounds, a
startling thing occurred. MacFarlane, whose breathing had become more
labored, like that of a man rapidly climbing the ladder of consciousness
from deep oblivion, gasped once or twice and awoke with a scream.
Vinckers, roused with the echo ringing in his ears, awoke with a muffled
shout—a strangled, bleating shout such as might come from a slaughtered
animal. MacFarlane, but half awake, screamed again. At this Tomba’s
breathless terror found outlet in a shriek that swept out under the low
mist, struck the mountain-side and quavered away in countless
reverberations.
“Vinckers shouted again and leaped from his hammock.
“‘Be still, you fool!’ I cried, roughly.
“‘Wha—wha—wha——’ quavered MacFarlane.
“‘What’s the matter with you?’ I cried, impatiently. ‘Are you a couple
of girls just out of a convent?’
“‘What _is_ the matter?’ asked Vinckers, thickly. Tomba was sobbing
hysterically.
“‘MacFarlane wakes up with a nightmare!’ said I, ‘and sets you howling
like a maniac.’ My own fright made me irritable.
“‘Odd,’ muttered Vinckers; ‘odd—I had a nightmare, too.’
“‘Ye hag-ridden fule,’ snarled MacFarlane, ‘bawlin’ and yammerin’ like a
bull! I had no nightmare mysel’!’ He rolled heavily in his hammock.
‘Fetch me a drink o’ water, lass—water!’ he added, in the vernacular.
“Vinckers sat up in his hammock, let his feet hang over the side and,
dropping his head between his heavy shoulders, stared down the valley.
There was a moon somewhere behind the mist; this mist, diaphanous,
vague, of any depth, yet lifted well above our heads, shone, not white,
or colorless, as a vapor should, but a golden yellow; everything seemed
golden, was becoming more golden daily the longer we stayed in that
place of mockeries, and the reason of this was based on something more
solid than a sentiment. What was the name of that drug, Doctor, which
when ingested gives the yellow tinge to the vision? Santonica?—yes,
perhaps that was it; perhaps its alkaloids were contained in that fatty
fruit; perhaps it was only that the moon was one of those ripe,
luscious, golden moons one sees on the equator. At any rate, the light
came not pale and ghastly, as it should have been, but a luscious golden
yellow; and that made it the more unearthly, as it illumined and gave a
golden color to these dream objects—the fan-palms, the vague rock-heaps,
the vistas between which should have been ethereal, but, because of this
succulent, sickly yellow light, were too material; and the aroma, which
should have been dank, no doubt, but elusive, was a physical stench.
Ach! a witch-fire would have burned in that place like a fat pine torch;
one would have scorched one’s hands near a _feu-follet_; there was a
ponderosity to this place of ghosts. Can you conceive a _fat_ ghost,
Doctor—a fat, _unclean_ ghost, who has clanked around, dragging his ball
and chain until the sweat pours down his fat face—a malodorous sweat—a
sweat that physically offends while it frightens? Once in my youth, in
Leipsic, I went into the anatomical laboratory, and there was on the
table a fat subject—a woman—and she still wore some gold-washed rings
and had some baubles in her ears of too mean value to appeal to the
cupidity of whoever had fetched her there. _Br’r’r’rgh!_ She was
pathetic, of course, but I was not old enough to feel that then. I can
never forget how much more awful she was to me than were the thin,
meager, attenuated subjects who were consistent with the place. It was
such a ripe, rotten ghastliness as this that was held in that valley
which glimmered away at the foot of the Mountain of Fears.”
Leyden paused, quivering, shuddering. One did not need to see him
silhouetted against the phosphorescence to see that he shuddered; he was
in a tremor, and the light from the _rook kamer_ striking his strong,
keen, nervous face showed that it was damp, wet, viscid with a moisture
other than the humor of the Gulf Stream. He was living the thing over
again with all of his high-strung, Teuton nervousness; and suddenly it
struck me that it was hardly decent to let him go on—that it was my duty
to interrupt him, just as it has been my duty at times to interrupt the
unpleasant indulgences of other morbid impulses. But, on the other hand,
speech is the safety valve of the mind; also, it is just to sit
passively and watch for the symptom which states the case.
“Vinckers observed this thing,” continued Leyden. “Vinckers was an
unimaginative man, and consequently the impression on him was as it
would have been upon a dry plate, or the tracings of a seismograph, or
any other machine which records automatically without contributing
anything of its own. Vinckers was rather low in the animal scale—by low
I mean primitive; as a man he was a splendid specimen, but he was animal
enough to get rather more from his instincts than from his
reasoning—like most women. He watched this thing, this yellow light
coming through the mist and touching with its sickly yellow tinge all of
the fantastic objects in the picture that belonged to the imaginative
school of painting. He looked quite steadily at the dream-trees, too
symmetrical to be real; the fantastic rock shapes, too fancifully
grotesque to be the work of nature; he observed the yellow light upon
the sluggish stream, which flowed like molasses, and looked rather like
it, too; the fringe of the forest—in fact, all of the component parts of
the picture just as some morbid painting genius would have placed
them—and Vinckers growled like a dog who sees something moving about the
camp-fire invisible to his master.”
Leyden turned to me insistently, claiming my corroboration of all this
that he had worked out through hypertrophied recollection. “Is it not
true, Doctor, that logic supplants instinct; that as soon as we learned
how to tell by deduction where the person we sought had gone we were no
longer able to lay our noses to the ground and decide the matter?” He
began to maunder again—his auto-philosophy which was so hard to follow.
“There are plenty of plants in nature which would poison the animals of
the section if instinct did not prompt them to avoid these; a man will
often eat of something and subsequently wonder at the cause of his
derangement; the animal will know and avoid this thing. At that time I
was conscious of a morbid physical condition, but was unable to trace
its source. Vinckers, lacking imagination, knew at once. ‘Heaven,’ I
heard him mutter, ‘was there ever such a mockery! We come to look for
gold and we land in—quarantine!’ It struck me as a new idea and I almost
laughed. Gold and death, sickness and disease! How appropriate that they
should be unichromatic! But it was Vinckers’ next words which struck me.
‘It is that accursed corpse-wax!’ he muttered, ‘that greasy stuff that
we have been growing fat on!’ _Ugh!_ You see, Doctor, he was able to
link physically cause and effect.
“MacFarlane began to mutter. Tomba brought him some water and he drank
thirstily, swallowing with the audible gulps of a horse.
“‘I’m feverish,’ he said, panting from the long draught, ‘verra nervous
and feverish. ’Tis a feverish place, this.’
“‘It’s rotten with fever!’ growled Vinckers, who, like myself, spoke
English better than the Scotchman. ‘It stinks of fever—smell it! We were
fools to stay here so long.’
“‘We are a pack of lotus-eaters,’ said I. ‘You are right, Vinckers; it
is this accursed stuff we have been eating—this adiposcere! We will get
out of here to-morrow.’
“‘Do you feel as if your inside was filled with lead, Leyden?’ asked
Vinckers.
“‘It is worse than that,’ said I—‘molten lead.’
“You see, Doctor, we had been living on this rich, fatty stuff, which
certainly contained a great deal of oil and I do not know what else
besides—narcotics, no doubt. You know the richness of an _avocado_? They
will tell you in some places that this fruit produces biliousness, but I
have never heard that it had a soporific effect, as undoubtedly had the
_myela_ fruit. Then we had taken no exercise.
“I think that night was hotter than most; we could not sleep, so up we
got and smoked and discussed our plans for the future—at least, we
started to discuss them, but even as we argued a lethargy came over us,
and one by one we fell asleep, though dreading to do so and striving to
keep awake through fear of another nightmare. An odd condition, Doctor,
this drowsy fearsomeness; no doubt like a patient narcotized before an
operation; dread fighting a drug until the latter triumphs and the
patient whimpers off into fear-filled somnolence.
“The sun came to suck away the fever-mist and with it much of our dread.
We laughed at the fears of the night and awaited the coming of the
Papuans, but awaited in vain. I think, Doctor, that Tomba’s scream had
floated across the valley, telephonic beneath the mist to reach the
listeners in the hills. At any rate, no human thing came near us that
day. Later, when the shadows began to lengthen again, we wandered out,
Vinckers and I, prospecting towards the native camp—I with a rifle,
watchful for game, Vinckers humming to himself an old Dutch tune,
careless in the full force of the sunlight, wandering behind me and
clicking on the rocks with his little hammer.
“I was strangely lacking in breath as I climbed the hillside; as for
Vinckers, he halted at the end of a hundred steps and would go up no
further. Back at our camp MacFarlane lay smoking, with his head in the
lap of the girl. I alone toiled up the slope, soft in heart and fibre,
the sweat pouring from me in streams, sodden, with the spring gone out
of my ankles and everything about me of a strange, sickly yellow hue
which darkened as my breath came faster.
“I found the Papuans departed, so back I went, blubbering with
breathlessness, muttering, fatigued, depressed, sluggish with sleep.
Vinckers I found with his back against a rock, sleeping heavily. As I
bent to rouse him my eyes fell upon a specimen which lay between his
knees, and I saw that the little hammer had cleft it open to lay bare a
thick band of virgin gold. Vinckers had tapped at the door of Fortune
and she had opened, and Vinckers had looked within and—fallen asleep!
Had the goddess ever a more loutish lover? He was sweating, too, in his
sleep, and I saw where the sweat had left a yellow stain upon his
neckerchief, and as the late sun struck him it seemed to me that his
skin also was of a chromish tint. You know the flabby pallor of the
clay-eater? It was like that, fat and flabby, but yellow rather than
pale.
“Back we went to the camp, where MacFarlane still lay and smoked or
slept with his ugly, shaggy head in the lap of Tomba.
“‘Gold!’ I said, ‘the mountain is full of it. It lies about loose here
on the hillside, think of what it must be yonder where the mountain
springs have done our hydraulic mining and washing in the same
formation!’ I pointed above us to the flank of the _Malang-o-mor_; the
late sun struck it aslant, throwing sharp, purple shadows into the
numberless seams and fissures eroded in the crumbling crust; it flashed
as it had each evening and glowed redly; high above, as the sun sank
lower, the quartz beds threw back the deepening azure of the sky.
“‘Perhaps it is gold,’ said I, ‘that bright stuff which glitters so; at
any rate there is gold to be had for the taking, while we lie here and
bloat and rot and waken screaming in the night. To-morrow we must go
up.’
“‘I’m no fit mysel’, lad,’ said MacFarlane. ‘I hae the fever; I maun
rest.’
“‘You will rest here through eternity,’ said I, ‘if you do not come away
at once. You are yellow as a Chinaman and there’s not a line left in
your face.’ And with the aid of the girl I set about preparing a meal.”
Leyden sucked in his breath sharply—filled his deep lungs like a man
coming out of the dense, polluted atmosphere of a crowded car or clinic.
“That night I awoke thrice, and each time a cold terror was clamping my
heart, until I seemed to shrivel in the utter obliteration of all else.
The dread was featureless; there was no dream, only this crushing,
numbing, withering fear which froze sound and motion; and I lay and
listened to the quick, faint _tick-tick-tick_ of my heart-beats and
waited to die—and, instead, I slept again, even while sweating with
fear. The last time I remained awake; and as conscience dawned fuller
this fear sat upon the distorted objects of the place, the swinging
bulks of my companions, the dark roof, and as I looked out into the
lambent, mellow-lighted valley fear walked beneath the vague,
symmetrical palms and the shimmering umbrella-trees and lurked in the
recesses of the fantastic rocks. Fear walked on the water of the oily,
sluggish river that flowed with the sheen of molten gold through raw,
eroded banks where the lips of the rocks protruded like the ragged edge
of an ulcer.
“I lay inert, paralyzed, and presently heard a faint, shuddering sigh;
presently a moan, deep, hopeless, almost expiring.
“‘Are you awake, Vinckers?’ I managed to whisper, and my tongue could
hardly articulate the words.
“‘Yes—are you, MacFarlane?’
“‘Ou aye, ou aye—what is it—oh, what is it, man?’
“‘Have you had the nightmare?’ I asked.
“‘Yes—without the dream—only the fear—what _is_ it?’
“‘Ou, lads, we maun leave this place as soon as ’tis light——’
“‘Hush!—ah, hush!’ whispered Vinckers. ‘I am burning up—come over here,
Leyden—I am afraid to move—I was never afraid before—never in my
life—ah—what was that!’
“‘Ah, tush, man!’ MacFarlane’s rough voice choked. ‘D’ye want to drive
the heart of a man from his body? Tomba, lass, Tomba!’ There was no
reply.
“‘Tomba!’ said I, sharply. ‘Tomba—Tomba!’
“‘Hush!—ah, hush!’ whispered Vinckers.
“‘Why shall I hush?’ said I, and my voice was shaking. ‘Waken her,
MacFarlane.’
“The Scotchman thrust out his great arm slowly, and in the faint yellow
light I saw him snatch it quickly away; heard the choking rattle in his
throat; felt my own heart flickering like a candle burned low.
“‘Ou—ou—ou——’
“‘Hush—hush—s’h’hh!’ whispered Vinckers.
“And then, Doctor”—Leyden’s voice had sunk until one scarce caught the
bitter mockery—“I did the bravest act of my life. I slid out of my
hammock.” Leyden laughed in a way that sent a chill through me.
“Can you understand, Doctor? Do you know what fear is? Did you ever
awake suddenly from a dreamless sleep with a devitalizing fear crushing
the very blood out of your heart? No dream—no recollection—only the fear
sometimes hung like a black mantle over the nearest object, no matter
how familiar. Purely reasonless—the organ acting on the cell; an
inversion of effect on cause. In our own case, if one presumed that our
diet, or water, or the fever, or any other extrinsic cause had deranged
the organ—perhaps the liver—and thus poisoned the cell—the single center
of Fear—as some drugs affect other centers—murderous—erotic—as Charcot,
I believe it is, demonstrates that the odor of certain perfumes will
throw the hypnotized patient into paroxysms of fear——
“I never did a thing so difficult as to get on my feet and walk to the
hammock of that poor girl. She was quite dead—and the wet frost of the
fear which had killed her lay moist and chill on face and breast. I did
not dare to light a match to look at her; there is a limit, Doctor, to
the courage of every man. I was never really frightened before; I can
never remember being really frightened since; and my profession is one
of countless risks to life. This was something far, far worse—the reason
stampeding with the will——
“Then the lethargy crept on again. I crawled back to my hammock and,
still fighting the fear, fell asleep. The others slept before I—and I
could hear them whining and whimpering like young puppies taken from the
litter.
“I was the first to awaken when the light came. My fear was gone and I
lay drenched in perspiration, yet comfortable, unwilling to rouse
myself.
“‘Oh, the awfu’ nicht!’ moaned MacFarlane, and covered his face with his
gnarled hands. Vinckers did not speak, but shouldered his kit.
“‘Let us go,’ he said, and we filed away from the place without looking
back at the cannibal girl in the plaited hammock, her drawn face covered
with the Scotchman’s only neckerchief.
“We wandered down the valley looking for a place to ford the stream and
begin the ascent. We had no carriers, no goods, no especial hopes, but
these things did not trouble us. We wandered along the banks of the
dream-river and beneath the symmetrical trees, and filed between the
fantastic rocks, which, from habit alone, we tapped with our little
hammers; and still the sun had not looked over the edge of the eastern
rampart of the valley, and we journeyed in the shadow of the Mountain of
Fears. The Mountain of Fears—the Mountain of Fears—and nothing but peace
on every hand! Nothing of harm—no danger of man or beast, nothing of
heat, nothing of cold—a misty, dreamy peace; the dreads of the night
supplanted by an apathetic shame which forbade discussion of these
things. As for Tomba—why, she died of fever, poor girl—what else?
“We wandered down the valley and soon we came to a ford; there we
crossed and toiled on up the slope of the mountain—up, up, up, panting,
sweating, breathless, not clear as to purpose, but struggling to get up
because—we did not know! As we climbed we tapped at the stones, because
we were used to tapping and chipping with our little hammers, and when
we halted for the night we were high up on a wooded plateau, and the air
was fine and thin and sweet with healthy odors of moss and fern and
clean flowers. We were on the hip of the Mountain of Fears.
“We crouched on the edge of the precipice and peered down into the
valley as the sun slipped over the crest of the opposite hills and drew
after it the curtain of mist which hid the greasy river and the unreal
trees and the jumping rocks, which from above looked like Titan children
frozen at play. The mist hid all of these things, but now we were above
instead of beneath it. Before it grew denser it formed a thin, flat pale
through which one might look and see these objects, symmetrical and
bizarre, fantastic and uncouth, which lay beneath, as one looks down
through the thin water-line of a clear but stagnant pool and sees the
fairy-like structures of an alien element. ‘To-night,’ thought I, ‘we
shall not slumber in that cistern.’ It seemed to me in that thin,
bracing air, that we had wriggled to the surface like the larvæ of
mosquitoes, and, after incessantly gyrating up and down, had crawled
clear and grown our wings in the drier medium. But even while thinking
these things the sun slipped down behind the opposite hills, the mist
thickened, a cold draught sucked around the side of the mountain, and I
heard Vinckers let out his breath with a shudder. I had noticed that
each evening we grew depressed as soon as the sun was gone.
“‘What is the matter?’ I asked.
“‘Oh, God!’ he shuddered. ‘Don’t you see that it is all getting yellow
again—a nasty, greenish yellow?’
“‘Ou aye,’ said MacFarlane, ‘but it has been yellow all day!’
“It had a yellowish tinge to me, Doctor, but I had tried to persuade
myself that it was something in the spectrum of that equatorial sun and
the vivid greens which filled the valley. There was no denying that as
the sunrays left the air the yellows came out with frightful intensity,
and to my imagination it seemed as if we were cursed with the curse of
Midas—a curse because we had profaned the _Malang-o-mor_, except that it
was not necessary to touch a thing to turn it into gold. Of course, at
that time I knew nothing of such things as xanthopsia, and my mind
rebelled at aught of a superstitious character. The result was that I
became worried and confused—like a dog listening at the receiver of a
telephone to a sourceless voice. With Vinckers and MacFarlane it was
different; they were of the unimaginative type which goes at one leap
from stubborn disbelief to frenzied superstition—and just because
everything was turning yellow they would not raise their voices above a
whisper.
“We had practically nothing wherewith to camp; in fact, we had come to
wandering through that dream-country with only dream-needs—the needs of
an opium-eater or any other slave of the lamp. Of course, we had some of
the fruit—the stuff that grew on the Mountain of Fears—I have never seen
it anywhere else. We made a shelter and crept in to sleep.
“I suppose that it was hot enough, but for a month we had dwelt in the
steam-room of a Turkish bath. Being younger and stronger, I had given my
poncho to Vinckers, who had felt the chill of the higher air. Perhaps it
was this circumstance which brought me through the night with my reason,
for the cold wakened me before that moment of low-ebbing vitality which
comes between midnight and dawn. I awoke shivering, dew-damp with the
terror of the night before, and as I lay there waiting I heard the other
two twitching and muttering. I suppose that I should have awakened them.
“The moonlight, which should have been clear on the mountain, was yellow
as in the valley below; the moon was still high, and we lay in the
shadow, but as I waited it passed the zenith and began its swift
descent, and soon the lower rim was cut by the edge of our leafy roof.
For an hour no sound had come from the others, no stir; they had lain
like dead men; and in my abject nervelessness I was afraid to
investigate, but waited until the moon should sink lower and look
directly into the place. MacFarlane was nearest me, and as the moon sank
lower the yellow light crept up his body, which was motionless, as if
carved in stone. It reached a hand lying palm downward on his thigh, and
I saw that the back glistened with moisture. The sharp, golden moon-ray
crept higher, and I watched breathlessly for his face, my own still in
the shadow. His straggling beard turned golden; I saw his yellow teeth
gleaming, the bristling lips drawn up and the breath hissing between in
quick gasps. ‘He is having the nightmare,’ I thought, and might have
found courage to awaken him, but at that moment the light shone full in
his face, and I saw that his eyes were wide open, fixed, staring,
brimming with an anguish of dread before which my soul shrank. He was
staring straight in front of him at Vinckers, who was stretched out at
his side, and as I watched, the moonlight fell on _his_ face and showed
_his_ eyes also wide open and staring straight into those of MacFarlane.
“For perhaps five minutes—five hours it seemed to me—these two lay
inert, stricken paralytic from dread, gazing each one into the crazed
eyes of the other, motionless, soundless—while I, watching from the
shadow, saw the water trickle down their yellow faces in little, golden
drops. Then, with a consciousness of the danger of this thing, I tried
to break the spell—and did!
“‘Vinckers!’ I croaked, and before the sound of my voice had died away
Vinckers screamed—a rasping, throat-splitting scream, straight into
MacFarlane’s face. MacFarlane gurgled and his eyes opened and shut
rapidly. Vinckers screamed again—and at this something inside me which I
was striving to hold in check, some irresistible impulse, seemed
suddenly to tear away—and sweep my will before it—at least, this is a
nice way of putting it, Doctor——”
Into Leyden’s voice there had crept again that biting mockery which was
almost jaunty in tone.
“It is so,” he continued, “that one auto-analytic—a student of
psychology—his own—might refer to these subjective symptoms. The brutal
stranger watching this phenomenon would spell it in five
letters—P-A-N-I-C—an elemental emotion which can be the source of much
learned argumentation—and stamp the lives out of women and little
children—and grab all of the lifeboats—and _has_! Yet it is an emotion
quite common to certain low types of humanity, the kind who do their
thinking with their spinal cord—and it is one of those lovely primitive,
primordial, brutal, unregenerate and degraded emotions of which certain
others of its type, such as ungoverned lust and anger and revenge, are
much admired by many modern devotees, the bestial primitive—to my mind
all of these things sweep together through the same sluice.”
There are no words which will convey the bitterness of Leyden’s tone;
mockery soared high in comparison.
“_B’r’r’rrgh_! how I loathe all such unicellular impulses in a man—a
finished animal product! And that night on that mountain I yelped and
howled in fear with those other two hairy animals—and I think that we
fought and bit and struggled, for the next morning we were masses of
minor wounds. Yet so far had we harked back on the trail of our savage
forbears, driven screaming before that primitive and degraded passion of
fear, that none of us was badly hurt!—which was even more shameful. I
suppose, Doctor, that our terror was too elemental and reasonless to
lead us to use weapons, whereas our limbs lacked the strength to enable
us to kill each other with our naked hands; so that, instead of digging
out each other’s hearts with our finger-nails, we suffered most from
skin-scratches, upon which the flies settled. Ach!—I should like to say
an obscene word, Doctor! Let’s smoke!—let’s have a drink!
“Oh, yes—we all came away the next day. Nothing happened to us—just as
there was nothing to be afraid of. Please tell me that it was all due to
a toxic action on the center of Fear—that is what I tell myself—and what
a savant of Leipsic was good enough to tell me. Nevertheless, when I met
MacFarlane in Sydney four years ago I crossed to the other side of the
street—and he looked once and then away. There are some things in a
man’s past difficult to face; most difficult in mine is that last night
on the broad hip of the Mountain of Fears.”
------------------------------------------------------------------------
OIL AND WATER
WE were skirting the Island of Margherita, which belongs to Venezuela
and produces pearls of small size but excellent quality. I was smoking
an after-dinner cigar with Dr. Leyden, the collector, who earns his
living by supplying museums and professors with specimens from the
animal, vegetable, and mineral worlds.
“Did you ever notice, Doctor,” he asked, suddenly, “how African blood is
curdled by being mixed with Anglo-Saxon?”
“I had always thought,” said I, “that African blood mixes badly with any
other.”
“No. With Latin blood it will combine like whisky and soda, but the
Anglo-Saxon plasma exerts upon it an action like that of alcohol upon
albumen——” He paused and absently followed the course of a school of
flying-fish that flickered suddenly from the swash alongside and
skittered away across the dancing waves.
“What suggested this topic to your mind?” I asked, curiously, for we had
been discussing the relative naval strength of Germany and the United
States.
“That island.” He nodded toward Margherita as it rose, rough in outline,
but with the misty softness of distance, from the quiet, pink and purple
sea. The sun was resting on the rim of the sky-line, and its late rays
bathed the lavender slopes of the mountains, that rose in tumbling
confusion, their summits blazing with high-lights and their feet already
clothed in slanting shadows.
Almost as we watched, the sun slipped under the sea; a multi-colored
breeze rippled the face of the water; opalescent flashes sparkled here
and there from the sails of the little Portuguese men-of-war, and then
the day-light began to wane, as it seemed, in rhythmic beats.
“Odd,” continued Leyden, clinging with Teutonic persistency to his
theory, conscious but unaffected by his exquisite surroundings. “The
popular idea is that an individual having a drop of African blood is
more negro than white, even though the white predominates, as in the
case of a quadroon or octoroon. This is wrong, Doctor. The white is by
far the more potent strain, but, because it is more apt to color the
mind than the skin, it is not recognized as such.”
“Primitive organizations are usually more virile,” I began.
“It is not of the physical but of the mental that I speak!” he
interrupted, a bit testily. “It is an undeserved compliment to the negro
and an unjust insult to the white to claim that a man having an equal
amount of both strains is more black than white, but if the white strain
is Anglo-Saxon or Scandinavian, then he is both white and black, and all
of each, for they will mix no more than oil and water.”
He was silent again, and I waited, for I knew that he would presently
back his theory by an illustration.
“You know Margherita?” I asked, presently, to help him get under way.
“Better than is necessary,” he replied, and was silent again. The swift
tropic twilight had almost faded; the slopes of the mountains were
somber with mysterious shadows; a huge cumulus cloud, still crimson
about its edges, was stranded on the highest peaks, and above it a
dainty crescent moon was swiftly growing brighter.
“Let us go aft,” muttered Leyden. “These cattle make too much noise!”
He was quite right, for that part of the deck was infested by our
fellow-passengers; the Venezuelans were chattering like a band of apes;
naked babies lived and moved and had their unclean little beings where
they listed; near us a British engineer was arguing in Spanish with a
German coffee planter, and behind him an Austrian Jew who had been
buying pearls in Margherita was showing his wares to the wife of a Dutch
officer returning to Curaçao from a visit to relatives in Surinam, and
the two were chattering away in voluble French. Our captain, a fine
specimen of a Hollander, was playing chess with an Italian, and the
latter was winning, having no ship on the coast and his brain unfilled
with plans regarding the securing of a cargo for Havre or Amsterdam.
Through the crowd came a stolid Dutch quartermaster, picking his way
along the deck to read the taffrail-log, which he did, and returned
oblivious to all but the number in his head, as I could see from the
moving of his lips as he muttered it over to himself.
Leyden led the way aft to the grating beside the hand steering-gear—the
place where we usually held our sessions of swapping experiences. I drew
out a fresh cigar and the German lit his big porcelain pipe, an
apparatus especially adapted to the needs of the _raconteur_, as one
could take a puff or two and then bank the fire until the next
stopping-place.
“It was several years ago,” he began. “I had been sent up the Orinoco by
an American university, a new one in the Middle West, to which some
sausage-maker had given a fortune to build and stock a museum of natural
history. The president of the university sent for me; I can never
sufficiently admire the capability of this young man for his position.
He took me into the museum and showed me at least a kilometer of empty
shelves.
“‘This place must be chock-a-block by commencement time,’ said he. ‘I
have four men at work in North America, two in South America, four in
Europe——’ and so on, all over the face of the earth. ‘I wish you to take
charge of South America, north of the Amazon. There is a man in the
Amazon Valley chasing up the fish and reptiles, and one in Peru, out for
mammals. You are to get after the birds and insects; of course, if you
should happen to run across anything rare that’s not in your line just
gather it in, anyway.’ He glanced at some typewritten memoranda. ‘That
ought to give us an A1 stock of South American goods, and before we get
through if we don’t have Putney University bluffed off the boards _I’ll_
go to h——’”
Leyden paused, and I heard his china stove splutter as he laughed
softly.
“It was a good outfit, that of mine—the best I have ever had. There were
four large boats, with a crew of five men in each. As quantity was
required as well as quality, I stocked up as if for a trading
expedition. You know, Doctor, natives are themselves born collectors;
moreover, an observant savage knows a rare thing when he sees it. I have
had a large experience with aborigines and know the capriciousness of
their tastes. The objects which one would expect to attract them they
often positively refuse to look at, while for something else they are
ready to do murder. If a man is fortunate enough to strike a popular
fancy he can buy a whole tribe. And that is what I proposed to do.
“There was a friend of mine in New York, a German, who had traded on the
Orinoco, and from him I formed some ideas in regard to trade-stuffs,
for, you see, it was my plan to subsidize some tribe and have them doing
my collecting while I stopped in camp to pack and preserve specimens.
Before leaving New York I went to one of the big wholesale ‘notion’
stores on Broadway and explained my needs to the superintendent. The
first thing which he showed me—as a joke, I believe—was a consignment of
fawn-colored opera hats which had been made for some minstrel company
which went into the hands of the receiver before the goods were
delivered. They were light and folded compactly, and you know how
savages delight in elaborate head-gear. I bought three dozen for twenty
dollars. Then I bought two dozen harmonicas and two dozen bright
jew’s-harps. Of course, I got the usual stock goods—fishhooks, calico
prints, aniline dyes—and finally the proprietor, who had a keen sense of
humor, presented me with a case of four dozen old-fashioned iron
spectacle frames which contained no glasses. As I wear spectacles
myself, I decided that possibly I might set a fashion up in Orinoco, and
accordingly took them along.”
Leyden paused to turn the forced draught on his tobacco crucible, and in
the silence I caught odd snatches of conversation in at least five
different tongues: “_Tres pien marche—tres pien marche_,” came the
guttural voice of the pearl-buyer. “_Cuanto por la picinia_,” from the
Venezuelans, followed by a snigger of that peculiar note that goes with
an improper anecdote; a sort of falsetto giggle—everyone knows the kind.
Then the captain got checkmated, and swore a good, hearty Dutch oath
that sounded strangely clean and honest and wholesome as compared to the
staccato fragments on all sides.
“I had my outfit towed up as far as Ciudad Bolivar,” Leyden continued.
“There I found a German named Meyers, who had a big trading station. He
told me in confidence that he was planning to call in his loans, as far
as he was able, and leave the country, as the rapacity of the new
government made it impossible to carry on a profitable trade. He was a
man of about fifty, unmarried, and had lived at least half of his life
on the river.
“It happened that my lieutenant, a young German-American named Lefferts,
had contracted the fever on the way up the river. He was the son of an
old friend of mine in New York, and I had promised to take care of him.
You have had some experience in tropical malaria, Doctor. Or perhaps it
is not malaria; at any rate, one dies in rather an indecent hurry, and
quinine is about as efficient as so much flour. I sent the lad back on
the steamer and asked Meyers if he knew of any one with whom to replace
him—a white man, of course, as it is always well to have at least two
white men when there are things to steal.
“When I asked the question it seemed to me that Meyers’ pale yellow face
took on a more lifelike color.
“‘There is a young man in my employ whom you might persuade to go,’ said
he. ‘At present he is keeping the store. I will send for him—but I beg
of you not to say a word concerning what I have mentioned in regard to
my returning to Germany.’
“‘Certainly not,’ said I. Meyers gave an order to a servant, and a few
minutes later I saw a broad-shouldered young fellow walking toward the
house. Even before he came within hail his striking resemblance to
Meyers told me what he was.
“Few men could have told that he was not a German born, and still fewer
that African blood flowed through his veins, but my calling is one which
demands close powers of observation. His hair was of a light brown,
straight, but utterly without lustre; his blue eyes had a muddy tinge,
and his skin, although fair, had that peculiar purple tint of raw meat
which one sees in blonds with African corpuscles.
“Meyers explained my needs, and the young man, whose name was Frederick,
listened attentively, as I did also, for as the older man talked I
became conscious of an odd accent of fear in his voice. Each time that
his natural son turned his eyes in his direction Meyers would seem to
recoil and his voice would grow faint and irresolute. It did not take me
long to see that the trader was in mortal terror of his offspring.
“Frederick listened, as it seemed to me, a bit sulkily, and once or
twice gave Meyers a sidelong glance of suspicion, as if he was trying to
discover some ulterior motive—which indeed was not lacking, as I very
well knew that Meyers would not be there when I returned, and I more
than half suspected that Meyers would have left before had it not been
for Frederick.
“‘What will you pay?’ he asked, suddenly, turning to me. I told him.
“‘It is not much,’ he observed, in a surly voice.
“‘I am not urging you to come,’ I replied, quietly. ‘There is the
proposition; take it or leave it.’
“‘I will let you know in the morning,’ said he, and left us with no
salutation.
“When he had gone Meyers turned to me with a weak and somewhat
frightened smile.
“‘I think that he will go,’ said he. ‘He is fond of money. Of course’—he
smiled in a way that made me want to kick him—‘you understand—the—eh—my
position——’
“‘No’—I answered a bit brutally, I fear—‘I don’t. If you care enough
about him to educate him as you appear to have done, why do you want to
desert him?’
“He shrank as if I had struck him, and for a moment seemed on the verge
of collapse, then recovered and clapped his hands feebly. A yellow girl,
in an unclean pinafore which rather emphasized the nakedness beneath,
flopped out of the house, holding her frock partly together with one
hand, and asked what he wanted.
“‘Schiedam and bitters—and bring a water-monkey,’ he answered. Rather to
my surprise, the wench did as she was bid, favoring me with a rather
bold stare.
“It was intensely hot—just before the afternoon shower. We were sitting
on the raised veranda of Meyers’ house, and down below us the river
oozed along, viscid and brown and sticky-looking, like molasses flowing
out of a stove-in vat. The clouds were banking up black and forbidding
on the other side of the stream, and occasionally a rumble of thunder
reached us.
“‘You do not know—do not understand,’ said Meyers, finally. He raised
one skinny, mottled hand to his red, untidy beard, which was getting
gray around his muzzle, like an old collie, which, in fact, he somewhat
resembled. ‘Of course, you see the relationship.’ His fingers massaged
his lips, a frequent gesture with people of vacillating character. ‘I
was fond of him as a boy and flattered myself that his negro blood was
in no way evident, though his mother was a mulatto—but it was only in
process of incubation; it has since shown itself—not physically, but in
more sinister manifestations: in the workings of his mind.’ He reached
for his gin-and-bitters, slopping half of it down the front of his
tunic. ‘My conscience demands that I should warn you,’ he went on, after
gulping down his gin and wiping his gray muzzle on his sleeve. ‘He is
intelligent, and when not crossed his disposition is cheerful and
kind—when not crossed, you observe, because it is when his resentment is
aroused that the black blood comes all to the surface. At such times he
is a fiend incarnate—but there is no reason why in your case any such
condition should arise.’ He glanced about him nervously, then hunched
his chair closer to mine. ‘I will tell you something that you would
never guess,’ said he, pushing his face toward mine until his gin-soaked
bristles almost touched my cheek. ‘At times’—his voice dropped to a
whisper—‘at times I am actually in fear of him!’
“‘Do you think that he will accept my offer?’ I asked, leaning backward,
for the man was getting momentarily more repugnant to me.
“_B’r’r’gh!_” Leyden arose suddenly and, walking to the taffrail, spat
into the water. “I can see the fellow yet, Doctor,” he said, turning to
me apologetically. “He—and his unhealthy, exotic surroundings, that were
partly luxurious, partly rotten, like one of those beautiful carnivorous
orchids with their wonderful tints and charnel-house odor—mauve and
carmine outside and inside full of decaying insects. Meyers was rich,
and he had a fine house and a beautiful garden, and European delicacies,
and books, and _objets de vertu_, but his setting was poisonous!
Mangroves and fever and humid heat—and whenever you went in and out of
his place you would catch a glimpse of slatternly, half-naked native
women poking and prying and getting out of the way. Then he would
receive you in a limp, unbuttoned sort of a way—you know the type.
“He was of exceptionally good family and a man of highest education, but
I fancied that he had pretty well degenerated——”
Eight bells were struck forward, and Leyden paused to strike a match and
hold it to the dial of the log. The Dutch captain came aft at the same
moment and held the lighted end of his cigar against the dial. He paused
to chat with us for a moment, then went forward to see if the youthful
mate on the bridge was still awake, for the strain of work is terrific
on the coast, and I doubt if the mates had averaged four hours’ sleep in
the twenty-four for a week.
“Frederick finally decided to accept my offer,” Leyden went on, “and the
next day we left Bolivar and proceeded up the river. I explained my
project to Frederick, who told me that he knew of a tribe located near
the head of one of the tributaries of the Orinoco, whom he had once
visited on a trading expedition, and, as I judged that the district
should be rich in the material of which I was in search, I decided to
visit it.
“It was tedious working up that everlasting stream; hot, too, for there
was seldom a breeze, and sometimes it seemed to me that the dome of
humidity rising from that sluggish river acted as a lens, or burning
glass, to focus upon us the rays of that withering sun. My crews turned
out well; a few had the fever, but what surprised me was that Frederick
seemed to suffer from the heat more than any of us. Yet he was a useful
man—a good driver, although it seemed to me at times that he was
unnecessarily abusive.
“Once we entered the tributary, the ——, it was much better, for there we
could keep in the shade of the great forest which rose right from the
banks. I had already secured quite a number of specimens, and was
altogether much satisfied by the way in which things were going.
“One peculiarity of Frederick which I had several times noticed was his
personal vanity, a trait which at times made him ridiculous. I had
observed the covetousness with which he regarded some of my personal
effects, and had given him several trifles, among them a pair of bright
yellow leather puttee-leggins, at which his delight was like that of a
child. That was the African. The contraptions were too hot for me, too
hot for anybody, but Frederick wore them constantly.
“I had not said much about my trading junk, thinking that he might
regard me as a business rival, but one evening when we were encamped on
the edge of the river I had the case of hats opened, as I had noticed
the ants coming out of the crevices and wanted to see if the goods were
damaged. I drew one of them out, punched it open, and was examining it,
when I happened to glance at Frederick, who was standing near. His eyes
were fairly bulging and his loose mouth agape.
“‘Why have you those hats, Doctor?’ he gasped, in astonishment.
“‘Trading stuff,’ I answered. ‘Do you think that the natives will like
them?’
“‘The natives! But they are far too good! They are beautiful hats, such
as gentlemen wear in the United States, are they not?’
“I glanced at him curiously, and saw that he was looking at that hat as
a starving man might look at a loaf of bread. Really, in spite of Meyers
having given him what would be equal to a good high-school education,
the man was simple as a savage, and he had never been away from the
Orinoco.
“‘You appear to admire them,’ I answered, carelessly; ‘perhaps you might
like one yourself. They are light, and should be cool.’
“His eyes glistened; he could hardly thank me, he was so pleased. I
overhauled the lot until I found one that fitted him, and after that he
wore it constantly, to the great admiration of the native crews.
“A few days later we found the tribe, with whom I immediately opened
negotiations. They were remarkably quick in learning what was required
of them, and they were pleased with my goods. Especially they admired
Frederick, who went about clad in bright yellow puttees, moleskin
trousers, a white drill tunic with a military collar, and a fawn-colored
opera hat. It seemed to me that the elegance of his attire had some good
effect, for he certainly had great authority with those red Indians—more
than I.
“Things went on swimmingly for a while; the savages brought me in
specimens of every description; my packing cases were becoming filled,
and it looked as if, where my part of it was concerned, Billings
University might yet have Putney University ‘bluffed off the boards.’
The interest of the natives had begun to flag slightly, but I had
refreshed it by serving out the harmonicas and jew’s-harps—a step which
I soon regretted, as my camp became a nightmare of sound. A fortnight
later, business becoming slack again, I served out the opera hats, and
whipped up their ardor still further by exhibiting the spectacle
frames.”
Leyden paused and chuckled into his pipe until the sparks spouted from
the big china bowl like a roman candle.
“Imagine, Doctor, such a spectacle! I had brought a lot of mosquito
netting—pink, it was—and with that I had shown the savages how to make
insect nets. Such a sight! Forty or fifty Indians and bush-niggers, some
naked except for a fawn-colored opera hat and a pair of iron spectacles
without the lenses; others swathed in flaming calico prints, sitting
around my camp blowing into a harmonica or a jew’s-harp, or sneaking
through the jungle with shrimp-pink butterfly net! The very crocodiles
used to crawl out upon the banks and laugh! And the natives all so proud
and pleased!
“Then one day a few of them came in and said that they had trapped a
_maipuri_—a kind of water-tapir—over on the other bank. I took a few men
and went over to superintend the skinning of the beast, and while so
engaged two of the Indians came rushing up to say that a small steamer
was coming up the river.
“It turned out to be a little gunboat. Shortly after we left Bolivar
there had been one of the semi-annual revolutions, and the new governor
of the district, knowing that I had gone up the river, had come up to
see what could be made out of me. The matter could have been arranged
peaceably enough had it not been for Frederick. On sighting the steamer
the fool had promptly armed the boat crews, and when the people from the
gunboat landed near the camp they were confronted by an array of twenty
half-caste Caribs, armed with bored-out Springfields, and about
two-score of Indians, gorgeously equipped with opera hats and
spectacles, many of them blowing furiously into harmonicas and all armed
with bows and spears.
“Those Indians, as you know, are the most harmless people in the world,
but the Caribs will fight, and from all I could learn, for I was across
the river at the time, that fool of a Frederick went roaring about,
making frenzied orations and challenging the Venezuelans to try to land.
“They did land, and at the first volley Frederick rolled on his back,
absolutely unhurt, and howled for mercy. The Caribs retreated firing,
and managed to kill one of the people from the gunboat and wound three
others. I started back the moment I heard the firing, but by that time
my allies had been routed, and I was promptly arrested and put down
below in double irons.
“They confiscated all of my specimens, stowing them away on the gunboat,
took the boats in tow and down the river we went, leaving the Indians
and boatmen in the bush. All of my protests were vain; I had been
trading without a license from the government—which did not exist when I
went up—in addition to which my people had fired upon government troops,
killing a man and wounding others. No appeal to my consul would be
permitted; I was no better than a pirate, etc.
“Frederick was chained up near me on the trip down, and he alternated
between raving curses at our captors and whimpering like a pup when they
cuffed him for it. You see, Doctor, the alien strains were always at
work in that man. One minute he was white, the next black. Your French
or Spanish or Italian half-caste would have had the cunning that is one
of the compensations of the mongrel; but Frederick was in two layers,
and sometimes one would be on top and sometimes the other, but they
never mixed. It was even so with his personal appearance, for I noticed
that when he was in charge of our men he looked the typical German; his
features were aquiline, composed, dignified and showed character. On the
other hand, when he was hurt or frightened the actual color of his skin
was all that proclaimed him white. His eyes would bulge until the whites
were visible all the way around, his forehead crept down, his nose would
actually flatten and his lips rolled back in the typical African manner,
showing their red linings and the big ivory teeth.
“Before we had reached the mouth of the river he was moping in the usual
negro way, and I think that he would have died, as negroes will if their
despondency lasts too long, had we been a week longer _en voyage_.”
Leyden ceased speaking and jerked his head irritably toward the fat
Italian who had been playing chess with the captain. He had fallen
asleep in his chair, and, being a large man, his head had rolled back
over the cross-bar. A shaft of light from the “_rook kamer_” fell upon
the expanse of pale, flabby throat, stretched tense by the weight of the
pendant head, and as I glanced that way it vibrated with strangling,
unwholesome noises.
“_Humbert!_” called Leyden, in a soft, feminine voice, then quickly
turned his back. The sodden mass convoluted; the noises culminated in a
strangling snort; one almost heard the vertebræ creak as the strain came
upon them; then he sat up and stared about in bewilderment.
“Nothing like the sound of one’s name to wake one, especially in a
strange place,” chuckled Leyden, softly. “I saw on the passenger list
that his name was Humbert.” He walked to the taffrail and leaned upon it
for a moment, watching the glowing disks of phosphorescence whirled to
the surface by the screw. They glowed and faded and then glowed again,
to merge finally into a broad band of luminous silver that formed the
wake.
“They left my specimen cases at Bolivar,” he resumed, talking to the
rudder, apparently, “and took us around to Cumana, where they lodged us
in the nasty little jail which I will show you to-morrow, if we are
permitted to land. After a month of it—fever and starvation and vermin”
(he scratched his shoulder with a squirm)—“I itch yet when I think of
it—after a month of all this I became _ennuyé_ and decided to leave.”
His voice grew ominously hard. “So one evening I took Frederick and we
came away. Frederick was at pretty low ebb by that time, and it took
about three days’ skillful jockeying to coax his German blood to the
top; but eventually I got it there in sufficient volume to make me think
that it would remain for an hour or two—and it did!—long enough to
enable him to kill one of the devilish nigger guards with his naked
hands. I crushed the skull of another with a jagged piece of rock, and
then we wandered down the beach, found a rotten old canoe and paddled
out to sea.
“The canoe was half waterlogged, and I knew that it would not carry us
very far, so I decided to try and get to Margherita and take our chances
on the rest. When the day broke I could just distinguish the outlines of
the island, with the usual big cloud hanging over it. We paddled all day
long, without seeming to get any nearer; then Frederick grew sulky all
at once and threw down his paddle with the remark that he was going to
die.
“‘You certainly will,’ said I, ‘unless you keep at work.’ I had filled a
water-jug that I found in the canoe before we started, but we had
nothing to eat since afternoon of the day before, and what we got then
was not of a tissue-building character.
“‘I am going to die,’ Frederick repeated—and then, confound him, he lay
down in the bottom of the canoe and _did_ die!”
I grunted—for that seemed to me to be an adequate epitaph for such a
person as I fancied Frederick to have been.
“I did not discover it at once,” Leyden went on, “but when I did I was
rather relieved, as it is harder to share one’s nerve with another man
than one’s food. I slid him over the side of the canoe and kept on with
my paddling. Really, Doctor, that day is an absolute blank. About sunset
I struck some of the outlying boats of the pearl divers and the next
thing that I remember is waking up and finding myself lying in a nasty
little hut covered with flies. I think that it was the smell of the
shell-heaps on the beach that brought me to life again. But it was odd
about that man Frederick, was it not?—and rather illustrates my theory,
don’t you think?”
“Never mind your theory,” said I. “Tell me the rest of the story.”
“That was rather odd, too.” Leyden permitted himself a few reminiscent
puffs. “The chap that rescued me was a French Jew who controlled quite a
bit of the pearl-fishing industry on the island. He was clever enough to
guess how I came to be floating about in that hollow log, but made no
comment at the time. As soon as I was able to get about again, which was
in a couple of days, he asked me if I wished to work for him. I declined
with thanks, whereupon he said that in that case he felt that duty would
compel his handing me over to the authorities. Practically, you see, I
was his slave, but there seemed no help for it, so for the time being I
took command of one of his larger boats and her crew. He gave me some
clothes and my food and that was all.
“In the end I got even. One day, when I had landed my cargo of oysters
on the beach and was about to begin opening—for you know the pearl
fishers down here open the shells instead of rotting out, as they do in
the East—an old native woman who had been squatting near the edge of the
pile hobbled over to where I was standing and begged for one of the
bivalves to eat. They are not bad, you know. I told her to help herself,
expecting, naturally, that she would pick one up at her feet; but
instead of that she went around to the other side of the heap and
selected one there. This struck me as a bit odd; then, as she hobbled
off, it seemed to me that she was in some haste to get away. Acting
entirely upon impulse, and with no distinct idea of my motive, I picked
up a couple of the oysters and ran after her.
“‘Here, mother,’ said I, ‘take these and give me that one which you have
there.’
“She favored me with a look which actually reeked with malice, but, as
there was no help for it, handed over the oyster. As I took it I saw my
employer—or jailer, to be accurate—walking down the beach from his
cabin—for he always superintended the opening of the shells, for very
obvious reasons, and I had orders never to begin the work until his
arrival. He was still some distance off, so, turning my back to him, I
whipped out my knife and slit open the mollusk, and there, right on the
very lip, was the largest pearl which I have ever seen on Margherita!
“You see, Doctor, when the oysters are thrown down on the beach the heat
from the sun and the hot sand often causes them to open an inch or so.
This old woman, who had come down, no doubt, with the purpose of begging
an oyster to eat, was squatting in front of this especial one, and
caught sight of the pearl through the slit between the two shells.”
Leyden turned to me suddenly. “What would you have done in such a case,
Doctor?”
“Exactly what you did, I fancy,” I answered.
“Yes,” he replied, slowly; “I was justified. This Frenchman was
detaining me through blackmail and forcing me to work like a dog for
fear of being turned over to the Venezuelans. I kept the pearl and a
week later managed to escape to Curaçao on a schooner. There I sold my
pearl for eight hundred dollars, and as soon as I had the money I wrote
to the gentleman who had broken up my expedition and offered him five
hundred dollars for all my effects delivered to me at Curaçao. They came
on the next Dutch steamer and were handed over to me by the captain upon
my payment of the money. Three weeks later they were gracing the shelves
of the new museum of Billings University and I was on my way to Mexico
to collect Aztec relics for the same excellent institution.”
------------------------------------------------------------------------
THE SHEARS OF ATROPOS
“WILL you please tell me why it is, Doctor,” said Leyden, “that when you
and I are foregathered in this part of the ship at this hour of the
evening we must immediately proceed to rake the lockers of our
recollection for the morbid and anomalous?”
I told him that it was perhaps because the accent of a man’s mind was
largely influenced by his profession, and that as the morbid was my
source of livelihood and his the rare and _sui generis_ of Nature, our
interests touched these topics.
“_Ach!_ there is something in that,” said Leyden, “but not all. It is
that only in these violent upheavals do we get to see the hidden things
of life, the more superficial of which are evident to a man who can
translate the languages of his five senses and has perhaps a dialect or
two in reserve.”
He was silent for a moment, letting his steady gray eyes rest upon the
streaks of phosphorescent spume churned up about us by the stiff
following trade. Abeam lay the moonlit isle of Curaçao, so near that one
could see the towering yuccas standing sentinels upon the ridges of the
broken hills—could almost see the yellow of their blossoms, for this
moon gave color as well as perspective.
“This was in Borneo, Doctor,” he began abruptly. “I had been sent there
on a head-hunting expedition. Odd, is it not, but appropriate! A
countryman of mine who was writing a book on anthropology had sent me
there to take photographs and notes and measurements and to collect
specimens of skulls as I saw fit—attached or unattached, that was my
lookout. You know, Doctor, that although the coast of Borneo is occupied
by Malays, Bajaus, or Sea Gypsies, Bugis, Chinese and immigrants from
Polynesia, very little is known of the interior, which is the exclusive
domain of the great family of Dyaks, which is itself divided into
several tribes. It was of the Punan and Olo-ot, who are fairly pure,
that my employer wanted specious information.
“I had taken with me one white man, oddly enough a tourist, a New York
lawyer named Lynch, whom I had met in Singapore—a gentleman who had
inherited a little money and was taking a trip around the world. A great
explorer was lost in that man, Doctor—and there are too many good
lawyers already.
“As a rule, I prefer to go into a savage country with no other white
man, as once or twice it has been my misfortune to have all of my work
undone by the single careless or tactless act of a companion; in the
present case I needed an assistant, as I had just come down from the
Irawady and was running a temperature which I thought possible the hills
of Borneo might develop into a sharp attack of fever.
“I will not attempt to describe our adventures, nor what we found inside
the island, for all of that you can read in my patron’s book. Eventually
we struck the head of a river which, according to my reckoning, would
take us down to a little trading port called Bangan, and I had learned
from a few friendly natives that there was a missionary station not far
below us. I had not known that there were any missionaries in that
section; but then, they are universal perennials which one is apt to
encounter anywhere.
“We slipped down this rapid stream, and late upon the third day, as we
turned into a long reach of the river, saw a clearing at the other end.
I was heartily glad, for my fever, which had developed, as I feared, did
not yield to medication as it should, and, to tell the truth, Doctor, I
did not really believe that I would reach sea-water alive. Lynch was in
perfect condition—hard, seasoned, alert—but then, you see, he was not
chock full of Irawady microbes when we started, and the country through
which we had passed was not unhealthy.
“He had been of the greatest value to me; three times I owed my life to
him that trip. Often he made me laugh by the ease with which he adapted
his ultra-modernism to his primitive surroundings, for he was not a man
who was used to roughing it. He treated our half-wild Dyaks as if they
were the bellboys of his club; appeared to have not the slightest notion
in the world that they could so far forget their manners as to become
insubordinate; would sometimes relax and joke with them a bit. He would
turn his back upon the most dangerous, sleep with both eyes apparently
shut, seemed contemptuous of danger or treachery; yet the twice that it
did occur he had anticipated it. Between us we were an efficient
combination, for I am governed by instinct, Doctor; Lynch acted only
from coldly wrought logic.
“To continue: We arrived at this clearing and were surprised to find
near the edge of the bank a new stockade; the gum was still oozing from
the stakes. To the right were some long, low buildings, of which I did
not like the look. These also were very new—in fact, still in process of
construction—and as I examined them through my glass I discovered some
bungling contrivances hanging from a projecting rafter.
“‘Neck-yokes,’ said I to Lynch. ‘We have stumbled on a slaver!’
“‘Here comes a white man,’ he replied. There were a few natives watching
us from the top of the bank, and through these there came a man of huge
stature, with a rough, red beard and dressed in a suit of embroidered
silk pajamas. The people wilted away from him as he approached, then
fell in behind, walking with the curious drop-kneed gait of bush-folk
the world over when ill at ease. This giant strode to the edge of the
bank and stood glaring down without a word.
“‘Good evening,’ observed Lynch, and shoved the canoe to the bank.
“‘Where are ye from?’ said the fellow, with a rough Caledonian accent,
and staring down with his red beard thrust out and his small, pale eyes
watching us suspiciously. His sleeves were rolled up to the elbow and
his huge forearms, covered with shaggy hair, were folded across his
bulging chest.
“‘From the other side of the island,’ said Lynch. He stepped out on the
bank as if he had been invited and proceeded to moor the canoe.
“‘What’s this ye’re doin’?’ growled the red-bearded giant above him. His
great arms had dropped to his side and one could see how the thick
muscles held them with bent elbows.
“‘Hitching the boat,’ replied Lynch, indifferently. He did so, and
walked to the top of the bank.
“‘Whose house is that?’ he asked.
“‘The hoos is mine,’ growled the man, and ’tis no tavern I’m
keepin’—d’ye see?’
“‘Oh, I quite understand that,’ said Lynch, pleasantly. ‘Of course, you
wish us to be your guests.’ He turned to me. ‘Doctor,’ he said, ‘this
gentleman wishes us to stop the night with him.’ He turned to the other.
‘Very decent of you, I’m sure, especially as my friend has a touch of
the fever and ought to rest up a bit.’ He proceeded to direct the
unloading of the canoes, even calling some of the red man’s retainers to
assist.
“The face of the fellow was purple, but it seemed as if Lynch’s
assurance had robbed him of speech. He stood glowering like a great
Guernsey bull, while Lynch went back and forth about him as if he had
been an obstructing tree.
“‘You see, we are naturalists,’ Lynch began, talking as he worked. ‘Some
of these boxes contain trade-stuffs, but most of them are full of
heads—skulls, you know, very interesting—I will show you some if you
like. I suppose your people are honest? I fancy this stuff will be safe
right here where it is. Hi!’—he relapsed into the dialect, and before I
knew what was going on two of the boys had me up the bank.
“‘Permit me to introduce Dr. Leyden; I am Mr. Lynch,’ said this
extraordinary lieutenant of mine; ‘and now, sir, if you will lead the
way——’
“‘Ye’re takin’ a deal for granted,’ began the man in a surly voice.
“‘I’m taking it for granted that you are the missionary,’ said Lynch,
calmly. ‘If you are not, it really makes no difference. No white man
could help being glad to accommodate two other white men in a place like
this, and, although you do not keep a tavern, perhaps we can render you
some service in return for your hospitality. We have more firearms than
we will need——’
“‘Ye’re verra kind,’ growled the man, but I saw his pale, swinish eye
lighten a bit, and guessed that Lynch, with his usual tact, had touched
him. ‘Of course, I’ll gie ye a lodgin’ for the night, though I’ve little
to offer strangers.’ He walked sullenly ahead, Lynch following him, and
I noticed that, although my companion was a tall, well-built man, the
other topped him by half a head and the breadth of a hand across the
shoulders. I do not think that I have ever seen a more powerful
brute—all bone and muscle, and something in the shiftiness of his pale,
cunning eye told me that he was not without a corresponding share of
guile.
“As we drew near to the stockade I saw that it was quite new, and then
Lynch reached behind him and pinched my foot as I lay on the stretcher,
and, would you believe it, Doctor, on every sharpened stake that formed
the front of the stockade there was a _human head_! They had been there
varying lengths of time, I judged, but the—eh—evidences of the recency
of some were quite apparent.
“‘I see that you go in for heads a bit yourself, Mr. Cullen,’ said
Lynch, in his pleasant voice, but hardly was the name between his lips
when this hairy giant of ours wheeled on him like a boar. You know the
stiff, muscle-bound motion, Doctor: the swift sling of the rigid body
all on one axis, the great, brutish head swung on its thick neck, the
mean little eyes slanting up evilly. That is what this hairy brute was,
a boar, with all of the cunning and surly moroseness of this animal.
There was something horribly brutish in the swing of his shock head
between the hulking shoulders as he turned on Lynch, and something
horribly sinister in the yellow glint of his teeth between the
bristling, red mustache, which seemed to roll upwards like that which
one sees on the headpieces of ancient Japanese armor. If he had turned
to me like that I would have presented him with the muzzle of my
pistol—_Ach!_—and very possibly the bullet as well, for the secret of
long life in my profession is to take no chances. I could not see,
however, that Lynch moved a muscle, except to smile.
“‘Where got ye that name?’ snarled the man. His beard was thrust almost
into Lynch’s face, and I could see the twitching of his thick fingers.
“‘On the collar of your pajamas,’ said Lynch, calmly. ‘Do you observe,
Doctor,’ he continued, turning to me, ‘that some of these skulls are
quite different from any we have secured? Possibly our host might be
willing to exchange——’ He turned to survey the exhibit with interest.
‘What a Golconda it is, to be sure!’ cried my New York lawyer,
enthusiastically. ‘You are to be complimented on your collection,
Mr.—eh—eh——’
“‘McAdoo,’ supplied the red man, sulkily, but with a strange quaver in
his voice. I glanced up at him quickly, then looked away and at the
stockade, for the glimpse I had of his face told me that the burly
ruffian had received a fright. He could not have been pale, even if he
had been dead, but there was a look in his eyes that meant fear, yes,
and meant murder, too, for a beast of that sort cannot become frightened
without becoming homicidal at the same time.
“‘Ye’re very obsairvin’,’ he managed to say, in a thick voice.
Lynch turned and regarded him benevolently.
“‘You are very modest, Mr. McAdoo,’ he replied, genially. ‘You really
have a noteworthy collection here.’
“‘They were folk not wanted here,’ retorted McAdoo, with what I could
see was a considerable effort. And then he gathered himself together for
a supreme stroke—the one heavily delivered blow of this round; and yet,
do you know, Doctor, in spite of the man’s overwhelming physical force
and ominous aspect, there was something rather ridiculous in his manner
of delivering this last menace—something of the lout of a schoolboy who
defies his pedagogue, although he half believes that there may be a
thrashing behind it; defies him because his nature is too churlish and
too abundant in a swinish sort of courage, born of the sense of a potent
vitality, to feel the fear of the result, appreciable to a creature of
the same courage but a higher power of imagination.
“‘_Maybe ye’d like to add to this same collection_,’ he said, and he
said it with one mental arm raised toward, in a manner of speaking.
“Lynch laughed outright. It might have been a part of his—what you
Americans call _bluff_, but I believe that it was sheer amusement. I
began to be convinced that Lynch possessed a very keen sense of a very
dangerous sort of humor. He saw the thing just as I saw it; of course he
would see it so, because, although I was a trifle slow in discovering
it, he had put this man ‘McAdoo’ on the witness stand the very moment he
heard him speak, and he was cross-examining him and deriving infinite
amusement from the process. Moreover, McAdoo himself, while too
coarse-grained to understand it, was beginning to _feel_ it, and there
grew to be in his manœuvres something of the sweating nervousness of a
horse at the howl of a far-distant wolf; yet his ears were well back.
“‘That’s just exactly what we want to do, McAdoo,’ he answered, and it
almost seemed as if he was going to pat the ruffian on the shoulder,
‘but we want to take a head or so in return.’ He smiled genially into
the wicked face, and actually _turned his back_ upon the man and walked
in through the gate as if entering the compound of an old friend.
Perhaps something told him that I had a hand on the butt of my revolver.
“Once inside the stockade Lynch pushed matters; in fact, he carried it
to the verge of spoiling everything; but, you see, Doctor, if this
McAdoo had possessed the wit of a cockroach, or had been a little more
lacking in that hereditary feudal instinct which made him uncomfortable
in spite of himself in the presence of a gentleman, he might easily have
slipped away and arranged our assassination, and this was precisely what
Lynch did not intend that he should do. He told me afterwards that, like
_Javert_ in ‘Les Miserables,’ he was born with an instinct for a
criminal, but I do not credit this particularly, as I myself could
deduct that this man McAdoo had more reason than mere surliness of
disposition for not wishing us to stop at the mission-house. You see, it
had to be a mission; it was either that or a fort; there was nothing
there for which to trade.
“All of this had entered my mind, just as it had Lynch’s; but, although
apparently careless, Lynch was in reality a painstaking man.
“We had entered the stockade, an enclosure of some size, in the middle
of which stood a bungalow, which had once been pretty and which was
evidently far older than the structure surrounding it. There was not a
soul in sight, yet one had the feeling of furtive eyes peering from
behind slanted jalousies. Lynch looked about him critically.
“‘Quite like an Australian ranch-house, is it not, Doctor?’ he remarked;
then turned sharply to our host. ‘Have you ever been in Australia,
friend McAdoo?’
“One could see the man’s heavy jowl drop a trifle beneath his coarse,
red beard; his face looked flaccid—just for the second, and then the
blood came pouring back until the veins across the side of his forehead
became distended. His pale, little eyes began to dance, just as those of
a hog when he is about to make a rush—you know the look.
“‘Where is Mr. Cullen—the missionary?’ asked Lynch, sharply, and at this
direct question the congestion of McAdoo’s face faded in blotches and
the glitter of his eyes changed to a gleam of cunning.
“‘He’s gone away, leavin’ me in charge o’ the station, and now if ye’ll
kindly step inside’—the brute actually mustered a sort of grin which
was, no doubt, intended for an expression of good-will—‘I’ll leave ye
for a minute or two.’
“‘Thank you,’ said Lynch, calmly. ‘Doctor Leyden will wait here on the
veranda, but I believe that I will go with you, if you don’t mind. I
should like to look around a bit.’
“‘There’s little enough to see,’ growled McAdoo, but his tone was
growing wary. ‘I’ll ask ye to bide here for a bit.’
“‘Thanks,’ said Lynch, and there was actually a sing-song tone of
sarcastic _ennui_ in his voice, ‘but I’ve conceived such a fondness for
your society that I really can’t bear to have you out of my sight,
friend McAdoo. We’ll go together; the Doctor does not mind being left
alone.’
“This to that desperado whom we both believed to be an escaped
Australian convict, whose presence in the mission-house was still to be
explained. Lynch was armed, of course—armed with one of the big
revolvers your cowboys carry, and, in fact, he had been a plainsman for
a while after leaving college, and I knew that, for all his languid air,
if McAdoo laid a hand on the butt of either of the two revolvers which
he carried he would be a dead man before the weapon was half-drawn, for
Lynch was a master of your Western American art of lightning
extermination. It did not seem to me, however, that this would help
matters much, as I had seen that the man kept a swarm of Malays about
him; and Malays, even when ill-treated, are apt to be faithful brutes,
if the master who ill-treats them inspires their respect, as no doubt
McAdoo must, or he would have been dead long before.
“McAdoo did not permit himself another exhibition of badly suppressed
rage; the situation was growing too serious for such petty
self-indulgence. Instead, he assumed an air of awkward good-nature,
which was far more sinister.
“‘Please yourself,’ said he, and walked away toward the gate, with Lynch
walking at his side; this time, however, I observed that my companion
went out _last_.
“When they had disappeared I entered the silent house. My fever would
not mount until late in the evening, and in the meantime, though very
weak, I was able to get about. I went into the first room, which
appeared to be a library and living-room. I had been in hundreds of such
rooms in mission-houses the world over. The same classic pictures, the
same neat rows of classic and unread books, and the same little heaps of
much-read periodicals from ‘home.’ Then there were the local curios
draped over the photographs of smug-faced relatives. Everything was in
perfect order; there had been little traffic in that room since
the—departure of the former occupants.
“I passed from that to a room beyond, which I saw at a glance had been
the missionary’s study. There was here the same hushed waiting. One of
the drawers was half-opened and there was a sharp line of dust across
the papers within. There was a native-made waste-basket, half-filled,
and on top was an envelope with an English stamp addressed to ‘Rev. R.
M. Cullen.’
“A man of method, as the order of his effects proclaimed him to be,
would never have left his house without putting away his personal
effects, Doctor, so I decided to rummage. I knew that missionaries
invariably kept journals, for the sake of subsequent writing, if nothing
else. I reasoned that this diary would be in the desk, probably under
lock and key, so I tried the different drawers and found one of them
locked. When I had pried it open with my hunting knife I found the
journal.”
Leyden paused to light a fresh cigar, which I knew would go out after
the first three puffs. Some of the smoke must have found its way into
his trachea, for he coughed once or twice before proceeding.
“I am a hardened old campaigner, Doctor, and I have never had much
sympathy with missionaries, who have usually impressed me as inspired
asses, but I will confess that as I read the poor chap’s journal my
throat swelled until it was difficult to swallow. Perhaps it was because
I was weakened by my fever; at any rate, I must confess that when I had
finished it the tears were pouring down my face. It was the record of a
Christian hero, Doctor, a Christian martyr as well, as I discovered on
reading the record of the last four days.
“First, there had been three in the family—the missionary, his wife and
a daughter, who, as I read on, I discovered to be a deaf-mute. Within
the last year the wife had died, and not long after her death McAdoo had
come up the river, ‘prospecting,’ as he said. At this time the
missionary was planning to return to England.
“McAdoo had remained a month with the missionary, during which time
their relations had grown ‘somewhat strained.’ He had then departed, as
Mr. Cullen hoped, for good, but _only a fortnight_ before our arrival,
Doctor, he had returned with the news that there was a trading schooner
at the mouth of the river, and that the captain had agreed to give Mr.
Cullen and his daughter a passage to Batavia, whence they could take a
steamer to Amsterdam. McAdoo kindly offered to assume charge of the
mission until he should hear from Mr. Cullen. In the meantime, however,
the missionary had decided to remain, at hearing which McAdoo ‘was
unable to conceal his disappointment!’
“The following day McAdoo came to Mr. Cullen and advised him to leave,
saying that he feared there was a plot among the natives to kill him.
Mr. Cullen scoffed at these fears. The day after that he had a quarrel
with McAdoo and ordered him to leave the premises finally. The last
words in the diary were: ‘To my intense relief the man McAdoo has gone
down the river, and I pray that I may never see his wicked face again!’
“So much for the efficacy of prayer! I arose quickly, shoved the diary
in my pocket and made for the rear of the house. I passed through what
had been the dining-room on my way—_Ach!_ that was where the swine had
nested! Something—superstition, distaste; I do not know what—had kept
him away from the more intimate retreats of his victim; but the
dining-room—I have seen more cleanly barracoons!
“Rustlings had preceded me as I had moved through the house; they do in
Oriental houses, you know, Doctor, just as they do in the forest,
wherever furtive beings hold their existence. Now, I moved too rapidly
for these rustlings, and in the kitchen I flushed some frightened Dyak
servants—three women and an old man.
“‘Take me to your mistress,’ I said to one of the women, and I said it
kindly, but I do think I have never seen more fright on a woman’s face.
After all, Doctor, to witness the horror of some one else is far more
gruesome than the thing itself, is it not?”
I thought of the look I had once seen in the eyes of a man whose
shoulder had been carried away by a piece of shrapnel, as he had glanced
down and seen his wound.
“Nothing is more contagious than dread,” I murmured.
“So I discovered a few moments later,” muttered Leyden. “The woman led
me to a hut a hundred yards behind the bungalow—a well-furnished hut; I
think it may have been the mission hospital—and there I found the
daughter, the deaf-mute——”
Leyden’s voice had dropped until it was almost inaudible. I could not
see his face in the dark, but I shivered.
“Of course,” he went on, in a careless sort of way, “I could talk with
her, for, although my ten modern languages and some twenty dialects all
are spoken with the mouth, there is one dialect which is universal—and
that is spoken with the eyes. We had a little conversation in this
tongue, and then I sat down beside her and patted her hands and made her
actually smile. They are simple folk—those on whom the hand of God has
been heavy in this regard. Perhaps they are above these mundane
things—but at the time I did not look at it in this way. Instead I went
back to the bungalow and waited in some impatience for the return of
Lynch and McAdoo—and, will you believe it, Doctor—just at this time,
when I needed myself the most, these accursed _plasmodia malariæ_, or
whatever kind of species of _fission-fungi_ it may be, began to start
their segmentation, and segregation, and proliferation in my blood
vessels, and I could feel the delirium creeping up my spine to my brain,
just as some poor devil of a Passamaquoddy might have felt the
fifty-foot rise of the Fundy tide creeping up _his spine_ when some
coterie of tribal enemies had staked him out on the flats at low
water—except that in his case it was cold and in mine it was red-hot!
“I had not long to wait, however. Back they came, McAdoo sullen but
studious, and Lynch smiling and talking as if he were the honored guest.
I noticed that his holster was unbuckled, however, and while he had been
away I had entertained no fears for his safety—because, you see, I had
heard no shot. Our co-operation was really quite admirable!
“‘Lynch,’ said I, and it seemed to me as if my voice came from a very
great distance—the fever, Doctor, not emotion, I beg you to believe; I
was never more composed mentally in my life. ‘Lynch,’ said I, ‘will you
and Mr. McAdoo kindly come into the library—there are some matters which
I wish to discuss with you both.’ It was growing dark then, so I clapped
my hands, quite softly, but a servant flittered out of the shadow like a
bat. The tension was high in that bungalow that night.
“‘Bring lights,’ I said in the vernacular.
“‘And food?’ suggested Lynch.
“‘The food can wait,’ I muttered, fighting hard against the inclination
to sleep—to drowse—to be let alone, to enjoy my intoxication in peace.
‘Come into the parlor!’ I said, and Lynch told me afterwards that my
manner was as snappish as a dog with distemper.
“‘After you, friend McAdoo!’ said Lynch, rhymingly, and the accursed
jingle got caught up in the swirl of ideas racing through my fevered
brain, so that while I talked I kept hearing over and over, ‘After you,
friend McAdoo—after you, friend McAdoo—after you’—_b’r’rgh_! What is
more frightful than trying to do mental work in the face of a delirium?
“I am not clear as to just what McAdoo said; it was Lynch who made the
opening move, and this time he did not say, ‘After you, friend McAdoo!’
He drew his revolver and waved McAdoo to a large lounging chair. I shall
never forget that chair; it was a home-made, or rather a native-made
chair like those one sees to-day, with a back the angle of which is
regulated by a rod behind, which is dropped into notches—you know the
kind. At the top there was a little pillow for the head to rest
against—a little ‘baby-blue’ pillow—and it was hollowed in the middle
where poor Cullen’s head had rested, and worn until the fabric held in a
streaky sort of way that showed the white beneath. It was probably made
in England by some girl parishioner, and there was something in its
homeliness that made me feel as the diary had.
“It was crushed beneath McAdoo’s great shoulders as he sank into it—and
he _did_ sink, Doctor, as if he had been hamstrung. In the middle of the
room there was a little bamboo table, on which the servant was about to
set the lamp, but Lynch motioned to place it on a shelf behind him. He
himself sat at the table, facing McAdoo, his back straight, as the back
of a thoroughbred should be, and the revolver lying in his hand near the
middle of the table.
“I walked up to him, staggering a little, and threw down the diary.
“‘What is this?’ asked Lynch.
“‘After you, friend—the diary of the Rev. R. M. Cullen! What do you
think it is—a skull?’ I snapped. He raised his eyebrows.
“‘There is a divan at the end of the room, Doctor,’ he said, without
taking his eyes from McAdoo. ‘Lie there, if you please, during our
proceedings.’ There was a cold, official note in his voice which seemed
to recall the shuffle of heavy feet, whispers, whimpers, somnolence on
one side of the room and nerves stretched like the strings of a violin
on the other. Dulled as I was, I could see that it brought back
something to McAdoo, for it was at these very first words that he began
to slump—doubly armed from the start as he had been, surrounded by his
servants and in the house which he had claimed as his own.
“Then Lynch began to read—intently and with no apparent thought of the
man opposite him. I had sunk in a heap on the divan, deliciously
relaxed—leaving it all to Lynch, and humming, ‘After you, friend
McAdoo,’ to myself, as I thought, until Lynch remarked, coldly: ‘Doctor,
kindly refrain from interrupting the reading of the testimony.’ Then I
subsided, very much embarrassed.
“_Ach!_ how I see it now, Doctor, just as I saw it then; as if I was
standing apart—a fourth person regarding the other three: Lynch with the
light behind him, his face in the shadow, carefully reading the journal
and apparently oblivious to the fully armed giant who appeared to have
shrunk on sinking into the chair of his late victim; apparently
oblivious to me also as I lay muttering on the divan at the other end of
the room, and rousing myself at longer intervals, as the conflagration
within my veins gained headway. The servant in placing the lamp upon the
shelf had moved a little clock, which had run down, and the jar had set
it ticking, and this and the sharp rustle as Lynch turned the leaves
were the only noises in that room—unless my mutterings were audible,
which may have been.
“Such a fever as mine is like a fire, Doctor; it leaps upward, then
sinks, flickers, smoulders for a while, and then bursts out to rage with
fresh fury. It was in one of these lapses, one of these returns almost
to the normal, that Lynch finished his perusal.
“I opened my eyes as he laid down the journal with a smart slap. Lynch
had turned half-way in his chair, and the yellow light threw out in
sharp profile his straight brow, short aquiline nose and firm legal
mouth and chin. There is a forensic type, just as there is any other
type, and this was Lynch’s, except that there was to him an element of
the terse and martial rather than the parliamentary. His revolver was
lying in the center of the table, and his sinewy hands were in front of
him, just beneath his chin, the finger-tips touching, the elbows on the
arms of his chair.
“McAdoo was in the same position—the position of the rabbit confronted
by the stoat; shoulders hunched, head sunk, muscle-heavy arms hanging
limp outside the arms of the chair, utterly relaxed, yet held half-bent
by the tonic contraction of the biceps, and so utter was this relaxation
that the hands seemed swollen, the veins on the dorsum stretched to
bursting. His bloodshot eyes were fastened on the revolver in front of
him, which was nickeled and threw the limpid lamp-light from its
separate planes in steady tongues of flame. Perhaps it was this that
held him—the hypnosis, the somnambulizing of the optic nerve.
“‘Where is the daughter of Robert Cullen?’ asked Lynch, crisply. McAdoo
started; his great head was raised with a jerk of such suddenness that
one could almost hear the creak of the cervical vertebræ. And his voice!
Ah! it was ridiculous. You have heard the whistle of this steamer,
Doctor, when on entering a port the cord is pulled while the whistle is
still filled with the water of condensation? It was such a noise.
“‘Where is the daughter?—answer me, man!’ said Lynch, sharply.
“I clapped my hands and one of the soft-footed women slithered to the
door of the room. It was the same who had taken me to the deaf-mute
girl.
“‘Bring your mistress hither,’ said I. The woman vanished.
“Our speech had brought a change in McAdoo. The lusterless look had left
his eyes, and even in my benumbed condition I detected a twitching of
his thick fingers.
“‘After you——’ I began, thickly, then realized that I was talking
nonsense, but Lynch also had seen the movement. His hand fell upon the
revolver.
“‘If you move a muscle you are a dead man, friend McAdoo,’ he said,
softly. ‘I fear that you are no better than a dead man as it is—but I
should advise you not to bring the matter to a climax until all of the
evidence is in.’
“We waited in silence; even the clock had stopped its ticking; the
journal was lying on the table. Lynch, I remember, was twisting the ends
of his wiry mustache with his free hand. Perhaps the tension had cleared
my head; perhaps the drugs, taken, as usual, four hours before the
paroxysm was due, were beginning to act; at any rate, my mind was
active—abnormally so.
“The crisis had passed with McAdoo; he was no longer held by shock,
surprise, rage, the psychic force of the man in front of him, or the
hypnotizing force of the shining weapon. The little bullet _in_ the
weapon was all that held him now—and I do not think that it would have
held him long—in that position, for he had the pluck of a pig, and his
eyes were beginning to dance again, when there was a rustle in the
doorway and a white-clad figure paused on the threshold.
“I looked at her face—and the sight of it chilled the fever in my blood
and whipped the mist of delirium from my brain. When I had seen her
before it had been the face of a beautiful child—a frightened, wretched
child—but now it was different, matured. Lynch saw it, too—just the
swiftest glance, and then his keen eyes flew back to the man, who was
only awaiting his opportunity. Afterwards I learned that Lynch possessed
the science of the sign language practiced by these folk; he possessed
also the science of developing upon his brain an instantaneous
photograph taken with the eyes, and _this_ science made the first
unnecessary, for you see, Doctor, the girl was looking at her father’s
murderer—and who knows what beside! Ah, how true it is, as you said a
little while ago, that the horror reflected from the eyes of another is
far more dreadful than the thing itself!
“Lynch made a movement of dismissal with his hand—a judicial gesture
which told me that it was over; the verdict rendered; sentence
pronounced. But I was puzzled for the next—eh—step.
“‘Take her back,’ I said to the servant.
“‘Dr. Leyden,’ said Lynch, ‘do you feel that you are in possession of
your faculties?’ My head was roaring like a cataract, my skin like ice,
and my bones were smouldering coals, but my brain was clear—for the
moment—too clear.
“‘Quite,’ I answered—‘in so far as this man is concerned.’
“‘What is your opinion? What course would you advise in the matter?’
“‘I would advise shooting him,’ said I. ‘He requires to be shot, and I
do not think that we should waste much time about it. If you do not care
to shoot him, I will do so myself,’ I added. Personally, his death was
necessary to our safety in a way, yet that did not occur to me. I was
thinking of the diary, the little blue pillow and the deaf-mute girl.
“‘It makes no difference,’ said Lynch, and his hand tightened on the
stock of the revolver; then he suddenly paused—and I guessed why.
“‘She cannot hear,’ I said. ‘She is deaf.’
“‘That is so—I overlooked the fact,’ softly.
“McAdoo was watching Lynch in a fascinated way—and I was watching
McAdoo. When the report came he pitched forward, and I scrambled to my
feet and rescued the little blue pillow.”
Leyden was silent—and so was I. He did nothing, said nothing, but we
both sat and watched the growing lights in the sea, the increase in the
phosphorescence as the moon set.
“It was really a very simple matter,” said Leyden, lightly, “and it has
always been a source of satisfaction to me. It was all so sensible; so
many fools would have wanted to give the brute a chance. Lynch had the
right idea; he did not even invite any closing remarks; the only one
that was really apropos was made by his Colt, and was quite
unanswerable.
“Would you believe it, Doctor, the people were sufficiently
Christianized to regard the whole thing as a visitation. Not a soul was
in sight when we left, taking the girl with us. Lynch himself conducted
her back to England and placed her in an institution.
“Yes—the trip was a success. My anthropologist thought so, I thought so,
Lynch thought so, and I have not the slightest doubt that the
semi-civilized Dyaks, who still slip through the shadows and peer
between the jalousies of the ruined mission-house at the thing which is,
perhaps, still held in that ample chair, think so as well.”
------------------------------------------------------------------------
ROSENTHAL THE JEW
LEYDEN and I paused in our conversation and, leaning our backs against
the steamer’s rail, listened in some amusement to an argument between a
group of our fellow-passengers. That is to say, I was thoughtless enough
to be amused; Leyden listened with his usual quiet consideration.
At Paramaribo there had taken passage for New York a wiry little Jew
named Gonzalez. He was a cheerful little man, who was pleasing from his
sincere politeness. The other passengers, especially the Dutch, had
rather made a butt of his provincialism, and it seemed to me that their
attitude toward him was edged with a bit of malice. Apparently they
resented his claim as a fellow-countryman.
The argument grew warmer; I could not follow it, as they spoke Dutch,
but it was easy to see that Gonzalez was growing angry; the others were
laughingly sarcastic. Presently the Jew, whose shrill voice had risen in
key, said something bitter and walked rapidly away, and as he passed us
I saw that his thin face was working with emotion. The others frowned;
one gave a short laugh, then looked at us a bit sheepishly. Leyden made
a little gurgle in his throat, a sound which carried disapproval. I
glanced at him inquiringly.
“They are baiting him because he claims to be a Dutchman,” said Leyden.
“It is a shame; he is a good little man. He told me yesterday why he was
going to New York. It seems that he has a half-sister with Pott’s
disease of the spine, and he is going to consult a specialist to
determine whether anything can be done for her, also how much it will
cost. Probably there is not a person on this ship whose errand is so
unselfish. _Ach!_ They are a much maligned people, the Jews!”
For several moments he drew vigorously at his big porcelain pipe.
“Doctor,” he asked, presently, “did you ever meet Isidore Rosenthal?”
“No,” said I. “Who is he?”
“A Jew, a power in the West Indies. This little chap reminds me of
him—because he is so different. There are three people in the West
Indies who are worth knowing. One is Mallock, another is Arjolas and the
third is Isidore Rosenthal.”
Leyden stirred the ashes of his pipe, while I waited. Gonzalez, who
passed near me, had swallowed his pique and was talking in bad English
to a Portuguese adventuress. “Yes, Madame,” he was saying, “I have
traveled a great deal. I have been to Demerara, to Trinidad and to
Venezuela. Now I am going to New York. If a man has the means it is his
duty to travel; he should see the world, improve his mind—and I, I have
the means. I own a chemist’s shop in Paramaribo——”
“Rosenthal,” said Leyden, “is a Czechian Jew, the most malignant type;
aggressive as a hotel child. When he dies, if the Hebrew heaven is not
up to his ideas, the Christians will have a hard time to keep him out of
theirs. He is a big-boned, muscular, hairy brute, with the push of a
peccary and the vitality of a dose of Chagres fever. His present
occupation is selling the Santo Dominicans expensive things which they
don’t want. As soon as he gets _all_ of their money he will go somewhere
else.”
“He appears to have qualities,” I observed.
“He has—some of them ones with which you would not credit him. We were
once involved in an affair, and there are few men for whom I have more
respect.
“I first met Rosenthal in Curaçao, where he and his younger brother,
Jacob, as poisonous a cripple as ever drew breath, were doing a nice
little business which combined gambling and pawnbroking. Their method
was this: Having the _entrée_ to the select circle of South American
exiles and refugees and conspirators—for you must know that almost every
South and Central American revolution is hatched under the protection of
the Dutch flag—Jacob, who was rather expert at cards, would manage to
start a game. No doubt the play was honest; his policy was neither to
lose nor to win a great deal, but simply to keep things moving. In time
some one would lose heavily, for Jacob had a talent for drawing the
others out and was liberal with cognac and champagne. These South
Americans, as you have observed, possess a passion for jewelry; the
first thing which your South American who has made a successful
financial _coup_ will buy is a gem; on the other hand, when he loses
heavily he is open for a good offer on his solitaire or brilliants, and
this was Isidore’s department. He would manage to be about with some
stones to show the winner and ready cash with which to purchase from a
loser, or perhaps to negotiate a loan, and he was diplomatic enough to
accomplish this without becoming unpopular. He had a manner of loud and
blatant _camaraderie_, was ready to give way in trifles, and I have even
known him to loan out a good round sum without any security whatever. He
was a friend of the friendless and had the reputation of being honest
and liberal.
“Between them the pair should have done very well had Jacob been
designed on the large scale of Isidore, but he was not. I think he
envied Isidore’s physique and manner and popularity, whereas the elder
brother loved Jacob devotedly and would nurse him like a mother through
his occasional attacks of illness, for one of Jacob’s lungs was far gone
with tuberculosis. I remember Isidore’s boarding the steamer once in
Vera Cruz when I was returning from an expedition into Yucatan. It seems
that he had heard of my being aboard, and he came to me haggard with
watching and worry and told me that he feared that Jacob was dying of
fever.
“‘These doctors are a set of fools!’ he cried, in his big, discordant
bass. ‘They do not know the fever when they see it; they say it is the
lung, but I know that it is the fever, also.’
“‘But, my dear fellow,’ I protested, ‘I am not a physician; I am nothing
but a collector.’
“‘_Peste!_’ he answered, for, as he was an Austrian and I a Hollander,
we talked in French. ‘There is no one who knows more of the pernicious
malaria than yourself. Will you come and see the little Jacob?’
“‘But I am already overdue with my specimens,’ I objected.
“‘_Diable!_’ he growled. ‘What are weeds and stones and ancient rubbish
to the life of my dear little Jacob? You shall lose nothing, and if you
save his life’—he hauled a chamois bag from some recess of himself and
threw a glittering handful of gems upon my bunk—‘help yourself; take
them all, if you like. Some of them I hold as security, but it makes no
difference’—the man grinned—‘I get them all in the end.’
“‘Put up your ill-gotten gains,’ said I, much provoked. ‘I’ll wait over
a steamer and see what I can do because I like your affection for your
brother.’
“He grinned again. I got out my microscope and went ashore with him, to
find that he was correct. The cripple’s blood swarmed with the malarial
organisms, but we managed to overcome them. When I came to leave he was
quite out of danger.
“It was about six months later that I was in a little hotel in New York
much frequented by people from south of the tropic, when who should come
in but Rosenthal. I saw immediately that he was in trouble. His big,
swarthy, Satanic face was seamed and lined and his shaggy black eyebrows
almost hid his fierce green eyes.
“‘_Bon jour_, Dr. Leyden,’ said he, roughly. ‘I heard that you were here
and have come to engage your services.’
“‘Indeed?’ said I.
“‘But yes—it is Jacob again. Ah, _mon_ _dieu_!’ He broke into violent
profanity, and his yellow teeth gleamed from beneath his bristling
mustache. ‘He is in the prison at Porto Cabello.’
“Personally, Doctor, I thought no doubt that that was precisely where he
belonged, but I naturally did not say so to Isidore. Instead I asked him
for particulars.
“‘You have heard of “La Fouchère?”’ he snapped, ‘the wife of that nigger
doctor from Hayti who spends most of his time hanging around the _Moulin
Rouge_?’
“‘They are acquaintances of mine,’ said I.
“‘The ——!’ I will not repeat the term which he applied to the lady,
Doctor. ‘When I left Curaçao a month ago,’ said Rosenthal, ‘she was
there waiting for the French steamer on her way to Paris. You know she
is as white as myself’ (as a matter of fact La Fouchère would have made
Rosenthal look a Zulu, as the woman’s skin was like a piece of paper
held against the light) ‘and she is as beautiful as sin. Little Jacob
must fall in love with her, like the child he is. They go together to
Caracas, and while there she falls in with an old flame, General Trocas,
and the two of them plan to get possession of the bag of gems which I
left with Jacob while in the States.’
“‘Bad business,’ said I. ‘I know Trocas also.’ He was the chap, Doctor,
who broke up my Orinoco expedition and landed me in the prison at
Cumana.
“‘Is it not, _mon cher_? But the little Jacob is no fool; they have had
him arrested and searched on a charge of conspiring in Curaçao, but they
have been unable to find the gems——’
“‘And so have lodged him at Porto Cabello until the stones are
forthcoming?’
“‘Rather through spite, and it is to get him out that I wish to engage
your services, my dear Doctor.’
“‘Indeed?’ said I.
“‘My plan is this,’ said Rosenthal. ‘The fortress is, as you know, full
of political prisoners from the last revolution, and, as there is no
immediate prospect of another revolution, they are apt to remain there
for some time. You know, Doctor’—he grinned at me—‘how very poor are the
accommodations of these hostelries. I know of a dozen wealthy exiles in
Curaçao who would contribute a large sum toward the rescue of their
friends. My plan is to quietly raise such a subscription and proceed to
Porto Cabello and get the gems, which I will turn over to the commandant
of the prison on consideration that he permits the escape of Jacob. You
in the meantime will quietly charter a schooner in Curaçao for a
scientific expedition, sail across and on a certain night be off Porto
Cabello. We will communicate there. The prison guards on that night will
be blind to a boat under the sea-wall, and instead of the escape of
Jacob alone there will be an escape of _all_ of the political prisoners.
The subscription of the others will reimburse me for the expense of
ransoming Jacob.’
“I reflected for a moment, then asked him if he thought the commandant
of the prison would keep his faith.
“‘We must take some chances, of course,’ answered Rosenthal. ‘For your
part, Doctor, there is no risk, and you may name your own figure.
Remember that I am already deeply in your debt.’
“I turned the thing over in my mind, Doctor, and it seemed quite a
reasonable proposition. You have seen the prison at Porto Cabello; it is
on that little sandy island about five hundred yards from the town and
only about eighty miles from Curaçao. The prison guards were a lot of
shiftless half-breeds and would no doubt be drunk by ten o’clock of the
appointed night. Curaçao schooners were always coming and going—on the
whole, it seemed no difficult achievement, and it certainly is a
commendable act to get any one out of a Venezuelan prison, whether he
belongs there or not. I made a bargain with Rosenthal for five hundred
dollars, which he paid me on the spot. The next day we sailed for
Curaçao on the Red D.
“There was no difficulty about my part of the programme. I chartered one
of the chunky little tubs which you saw in Curaçao, engaged three
_Papiemento_-jabbering negroes and a cook and cleared for Porto Cabello,
giving it out that I was on a collecting cruise along the coast.
“It took me six days to slam that old tub against the trade to Porto
Cabello, about eighty miles in a straight line; weather just as it is
now—as it always is down there—the wind dead ahead and blowing the top
off the water, and the sky bright and clear and blue. Arrived, I
anchored near the mouth of the little inlet, and, after being duly
inspected, went ashore to see if I could gather any information; but
there was nothing to be learned.
“For a week I hung about that hot, wretched hole; then the Dutch mail
steamer arrived from La Guayra, and on going aboard to greet some old
acquaintances the first man I met was Isidore Rosenthal.
“The Jew’s Satanic face was more malignant than ever; the glare in his
green eyes put one in mind of a jaguar; I saw at once that something had
gone wrong.
“‘Ah, the ——!’ he snarled, when we were alone. ‘You were right, Leyden!
The pigs! The robbers! The vile liars!’ His rage was positively
alarming. His black eyebrows worked up and down, and his yellow teeth
gnawed at the corner of his black mustache.
“‘They got your gems?’ I asked.
“‘Yes, and they warned me to leave on the next steamer; they would have
thrown me into prison but that they feared to have the story get out and
be obliged to divide——’ He broke off suddenly from his tirade and
surprised me by grinning with amusement. ‘I should like to see their
faces a few days later!’
“‘Whose faces?’ I asked, in surprise.
“‘Trocas and that ——!’ He really had a very poor opinion of ‘La
Fouchère.’
“‘Why?’ I asked, although I had my suspicions.
“‘Oh, never mind. There are other things to think of. Bribery has
failed; there is left only force.’ He looked at me inquiringly.
“‘Force!’ said I, for at that time a Jew and a fight were not associated
in my mind.
“‘_Tiens!_’ said he, ‘we cannot return and leave the little Jacob in
that cesspool! Think of his lung, my dear Doctor; besides, it would be
necessary to refund the money subscribed by our friends in Curaçao.’
“‘Did you give them receipts?’ I asked, curious to get at the odd
principles of the man. He looked at me reproachfully.
“‘There, there, Leyden! Did you ever hear of Isidore Rosenthal going
back upon his word?’
“‘I apologize. What is the next move?’
“Rosenthal shrugged. ‘They are not much to be feared, these nigger
guards at the prison.’ He glanced at me furtively. ‘Suppose we take a
boat to-night and go over and get little Jacob?’
“I did not at once reply. To tell the truth, Doctor, I was too much
surprised at the suggestion to reply. I knew that Rosenthal possessed
the stubborn courage peculiar to his race; but this policy of cold,
aggressive daring seemed incompatible with the Hebrew. He watched me
narrowly.
“‘I am not a fighter, my dear friend,’ said he, thrusting out his hands.
‘I am a man of affairs, a financier, a diplomat, but there are times
when all of these things fail. No doubt I seem to you like a fool’ (he
seemed positively ashamed of himself—as ashamed as might another man, a
Gentile, of a display of cowardice), ‘but what would you have? They will
not keep their faith; to offer more bribes would be to throw good money
away after bad.’ He shrugged, chewed at the end of a cigar, glanced
about him furtively, then took to gnawing his nails, while I sat and
considered the proposition.
“To tell the truth, Doctor, it was not at all attractive. To be sure,
the guards were a scrubby lot, but there were plenty of them, and the
prisoners were locked up and had no knowledge of any plan for escape.
Moreover, we did not know in what part of the prison they were confined,
nor had we any plan of the inside of the place.
“‘You do not object to making an attempt, Leyden?’ asked Rosenthal, who
had been watching me narrowly.
“‘Not if I were able to see how it could be done,’ I answered, slowly,
for, you see, Doctor, he had engaged my services for a particular piece
of work and I was professionally bound. If it had been my custom to
abandon a project because it was dangerous I must long ago have sought
another profession. ‘Would it not be much better to wait until we can
try to bribe the guards or establish some communication with the
prisoners?’ said I.
“‘No,’ he answered. ‘It must be done to-night, because Trocas knows with
whom he has to deal, and unless I am mistaken there will come an order
to-morrow to remove little Jacob, probably to Caracas, and you know he
does very badly in the cold, damp air of the mountains; also, the change
of altitude is apt to bring out another attack of the fever.’
“‘Have you thought of any definite plan?’ I asked, irritably. He grinned
at me like a baboon.
“‘That is for you, my dear Doctor,’ said he. ‘You have had more
experience in such matters.’
“‘That is all very well,’ said I, ‘but you seem to forget that I am
engaged by you to carry out _your_ orders. Now, go ahead and issue
them.’
“His grin left him at this and he began to scowl and reach for the
overhang of his mustache with his big yellow teeth. Finally he said: ‘I
engaged you, as you say, Doctor, to carry out my orders, but I will do
better. One cannot be avaricious when the life of one’s brother is
concerned. If you will get the little Jacob out of that hole I will pay
you three times what you have received.’
“‘How about the others?’ I asked.
“‘Oh, the devil take the others! If their friends want them let them
come after them. I will refund their money.’
“‘Very well,’ said I. ‘And now I will go ashore, as I want to think this
thing out alone.’
“Rosenthal grinned his sardonic grin, and I left him and, passing
through the custom house, strolled on across the square, past the
monument to the American soldiers and over into the park opposite the
baths, where I sat on a bench and tried to think against the infernal
clatter of the ‘_Q’est ce qu’il dit?_’ birds.
“For about an hour I sat there, and I can assure you, Doctor, that my
brain was not idle. There were several very potent reasons for my
wishing to carry through the task which I had undertaken. In the first
place I needed the money very much. Again, there was an old score to
settle with Trocas, but I think that more than all it was a matter of
professional pride. It was easy to see that Rosenthal was confident that
I could carry the thing through, yet try as I did I was obliged to
dismiss each plan as impracticable. If word could be got to the
prisoners of our co-operation it would have been so much easier, but I
was afraid to bribe any of the guards, as there was danger that he would
pocket the money and then betray us.
“I was determined that there must be no bloodshed. I had no doubt that
Jacob _had_ been conspiring against the Venezuelan government and had
been betrayed by ‘La Fouchère.’ I am averse to killing people, Doctor;
moreover, I am a Christian and believe in God, and I try to keep the ten
commandments. In spite of the hazardous character of many of my
expeditions you would be surprised to learn how very few men I have been
obliged to kill or have killed, and the memory of these unfortunate
affairs is attended with regret, but no remorse.
“While I was vexedly working at this problem I heard the blare of a
discordant bugle and a clatter on the pavement of the square, and,
looking over my shoulder, saw a company of dusty soldiers stacking their
arms in front of the café. They appeared to be mostly Venezuelans. They
promptly swarmed into the café, and I arose and strolled over in that
direction. The lieutenant in command was a short, fat young fellow, and
as I drew near he said a few words to his sergeant and then left his
company and walked over toward the café of the bathhouse. I followed him
indolently, and as he entered the building I took a chair on the
verandah and called for spirits and cigars. As I was lighting one of the
latter my lieutenant came out, glanced at me inquiringly, then seated
himself at a table. A moment later some tourists from the Dutch ship,
killing time as best they might, strolled up, and to these I bowed
casually as to acquaintances of the voyage. They did not know me, of
course, but they returned my bow, called for beer, drank it and strolled
on. As they were leaving I remarked in English to one of them,
apparently an American:
“‘The ship does not sail until night, does she?’
“‘Not until one o’clock,’ he replied, agreeably, no doubt taking me for
a passenger from Porto Cabello.
“For awhile we sat in silence; then my lieutenant, who evidently found
himself greatly bored, turned to me and said, in fair English:
“‘You are a tourist, sir?’
“‘Yes,’ said I, ‘and much regretting that this is the last which I shall
see of Venezuela for many months.’ There promised to be some truth in
the last part of this statement, Doctor.
“‘You enjoy Venezuela?’ inquired the officer, evidently pleased.
“‘I have conceived a great admiration for the people and the country,’
said I.
“We talked for some time of the beauties of Caracas, he apparently
enjoying the unaccustomed exercise of his English. I extolled the
country, the people, their traditions, their bravery, likening their
history to that of the United States, Bolivar to George Washington. He
expanded like a flower in the sunshine. Presently I asked the honor of
drinking a bottle of champagne with him, to which he agreed, remarking
that Americans were to him the most delightful of all foreigners. Before
long I asked him if his military duties confined him to Porto Cabello.
He sighed deeply.
“‘Ah, my friend, it is very sad. No, I have simply come down with my
_commando_, which you see across the square. I return to-morrow, leaving
the troop in the fortress yonder, as the present garrison was considered
insufficient to guard the desperate political prisoners confined there.’
“It struck me that this was rather a tribute to the respect entertained
for Rosenthal by Trocas.
“‘Indeed?’ said I, somewhat idly.
“He sighed. ‘It is a tedious journey, but I requested General Trocas to
commit the care of the men to me, as I expected to find here a
friend’—he smirked at me—‘a lady in whom I am interested.’
“I laughed indulgently. ‘You young officers are roving blades,’ said I.
‘One cannot blame the ladies, however.’
“He brightened, then sighed again. ‘It is very sad,’ said he. ‘I learn
from the keeper of the hotel that she has sailed for Curaçao on the
steamer before this. She was very beautiful, a Portuguese.’ He twirled
his thin mustache.
“‘Permit me to offer my sympathy,’ said I. ‘But, of course, there is
still wine left, if the lady has gone,’ and I ordered another bottle of
champagne.
“Before the bottle was finished, Doctor, he loved me as a brother. I
suggested that we go aboard the Dutch ship and have an American
cocktail. It was a little dangerous, but I wished to clinch his
confidence in me. He readily agreed and we strolled across the square
together. On the way we passed his command, which was what I wished. The
men were still drinking, but the sergeant was outside the café and
saluted as we passed.
“‘A good fellow—he knows my errand,’ observed the lieutenant, referring
to the sergeant, and added that there was no hurry to cross to the
fortress; it was a place stiflingly hot, and his men were in need of
rest and a little refreshment.
“‘You are, of course, acquainted with the officers of the garrison?’
said I.
“‘No; there is only the _commandante_, a rough old fellow’—he shrugged
as if to signify that the man was scarcely of his own social caste.
‘There were many promotions from the ranks after the revolution,’ he
added.
“This, as you can guess, Doctor, was valuable information. I changed the
subject and we boarded the ship. I caught a glimpse of Rosenthal as we
went up the ladder. His eye glinted as it met mine; then he turned his
back until we had gone below.
“It was then three o’clock. For two hours I poured cocktails into my
officer, and by five he was very drunk, so drunk that I was able to
leave him long enough to tell Rosenthal to meet me by the fountain in
the park in an hour. Then I returned to my officer, who was nodding over
another glass of spirits. I got him upon his feet and managed to return
with him to the hotel without being interrupted. There I poured into him
another bottle of champagne, after which he quietly subsided into
inertia, when, with the aid of the proprietor, whose disapproval I
silenced with a fee which he put down to drunken generosity, we
undressed and put him to bed.
“The next step was the crucial one. I quickly took off my clothes and
put on those of the lieutenant. Then I crossed the square to where the
_commando_ was still drinking. I found the sergeant in the dirty little
café, himself somewhat intoxicated. At sight of me he sprang to his feet
with an oath.
“‘Silence!’ said I, in Spanish. ‘Your lieutenant has persuaded me to
take his place for a few hours.’
“‘Where is he?’ demanded the sergeant, suspiciously.
“I gave him a drunken leer and slapped him lightly on the shoulder.
“‘Can you not guess?’ I asked, meaningly.
“‘But it cannot be,’ growled the man. ‘And who are you? It is as much as
his commission is worth!’
“‘It would be worth more than his commission was worth if he were to
accompany his command in his present condition,’ I snapped. ‘You do not
seem to understand that I am doing him a favor at a personal risk; also,
he told me to give you this and to tell you to keep your mouth shut,’
And I slipped some gold into his hand. ‘It is only necessary for me to
cross to the fort, deliver the command to the _commandante_ and return.
Your lieutenant is not known to any one there.’
“The fellow wavered, grumbled, slid the money into his pocket, eyed me
suspiciously; but I laughed and told him that a good sergeant must stand
by his lieutenant; then, rising, I told him to get his men together and
I would return directly to get them to the fort. Although by no means
satisfied, he made no protest, not knowing just what course to take. I
left him and walked around the far side of the park to where Rosenthal
was waiting.
“He laughed softly as I joined him, and his yellow teeth gleamed in the
dusk. I simply told him to have the boat lying off the sea-wall of the
prison until he heard from me, and then returned to the _commando_,
which was drawn up in a somewhat vacillating formation. The men no doubt
took me to be an officer of the garrison to which they were committed,
but the sergeant was very ill at ease.
“I put the column into motion and marched them down to the water, where
I requisitioned the nearest boats at hand and we crossed to the island.
At the gate of the fortress we halted until the arrival of the officer
of the guard, to whom I presented the papers which were in the pocket of
the lieutenant’s blouse.
“The officer was a dangerous-looking old fellow, apparently a thorough
soldier, and, while polite, I could see that he was somewhat disgusted
at my condition.
“‘At what time did you arrive in Porto Cabello?’ he inquired, a trifle
coldly.
“‘An hour ago—perhaps two,’ I answered. ‘There seemed no great hurry; it
was very hot and my men were in need of refreshments. Also, I had some
messages from my uncle, his Excellency the President, for some friends
upon the _Hollandez_.’
“His manner changed a trifle. He gave a few orders to the sergeant, who
marched off his unsteady company, with a backward glance in my
direction, which I affected not to see.
“‘Will you come up to the headquarters?’ he said. I thanked him and we
strolled off together.
“Before we had reached headquarters I had restored his good nature, told
him some good stories, made him laugh heartily and evidently convinced
him that I was a careless good fellow and not to be taken too seriously.
I declined any refreshment, saying that I had been entertained aboard
the ship, and after a rather dull evening I begged leave to retire.
“As soon as he was gone I slipped out into the enclosure. It was a
starry night, still, but with no moon. I lit a cigar and walked
leisurely toward the casemates fronting the sea. At the end of fifty
yards I came upon a sentry sleeping peacefully against the wall. Walking
to him, I shook him roughly by the shoulder. He awoke with a start;
then, seeing an officer before him, scrambled to his feet and saluted.
At the same moment there came from one of the casemates a fit of violent
but muffled coughing.
“‘Is this the sort of watch which is kept in the prison?’ I demanded,
roughly. ‘His Excellency, my uncle, would be pleased to hear of it.’
“The man was badly frightened. He stammered something about not being
asleep; then, as I peered into his face, I recognized him as one of the
men of my command.
“‘Ah, my friend,’ said I, in an altered tone, ‘you are one of those who
arrived to-day?’
“‘Yes, _Señor Capitan_,’ he answered.
“‘But that is different,’ said I, kindly. ‘How is it that you are on
duty? There has been some mistake. I gave orders that you were to have a
night’s sleep. There has been a mistake, but never mind, sleep here, if
you like; God knows you have reason to be tired, and that there are
three times men enough to guard a handful of miserables.’
“‘Thank you, _Señor Capitan_,’ he answered; and as he spoke, the violent
coughing broke out again from some dark recess.
“‘There is a poor wretch who seems very ill,’ said I, conversationally.
‘Is it one of the garrison?’
“‘It must be one of the political prisoners, _Señor Capitan_,’ replied
the soldier. ‘They are all confined in the casemates yonder.’
“‘Poor wretch!’ said I, and, nodding to the soldier, strolled on toward
the ramparts. Before I had gone far I was halted by another sentry. I
peered at him through the murk.
“‘Are you one of the new men?’ I demanded.
“‘No, _Señor Capitan_,’ he answered, saluting.
“‘The lazy rascals!’ said I, tersely. ‘I gave orders that they were to
go on duty immediately as a reward for abusing my good nature and
getting drunk. Are they in the _cuartel_ with you?’
“‘No, _Señor Capitan_; they are in the _cuartel_ yonder at the angle of
the wall.’
“‘_Bueno!_ I will soon break up their sweet dreams, the drunken
vagabonds. Who is your sergeant?’ He told me the man’s name.
“‘And when are you to be relieved?’
“‘At midnight,’ said he.
“‘Very well. You may return to your quarters, and if your sergeant is
awake tell him that I have put one of my men in your place. Go!’
“‘_Si, Señor._’ He saluted and slouched away.
“I proceeded, and in a few minutes had relieved two more of the regular
garrison and bid one of the new men sleep at his post.
“It was then ten o’clock; there were two hours ahead of me. I made my
way to the sea-wall and, reaching below the rampart with one arm, struck
a match, extinguished it, struck another and extinguished that. A moment
later I heard the soft grinding of oars and the boat glided out of the
darkness. Rosenthal’s great frame hove itself up over the rampart, then
dropped into the shadow under the wall, and I heard his discordant laugh
stifled to a hissing gurgle. He carried a pick-axe.
“‘_Diable!_’ said he. ‘I heard you relieve the sentries! I was close
under the wall. It was funny! Have you found where they have put little
Jacob?’
“‘Yes,’ I answered. ‘Follow me.’
“I led him along the angle of the wall until we came to the casemates
where the sentry had said that the prisoners were confined, and then, as
we paused before the first of these, the utter stillness was again
broken by a paroxysm of coughing; and this time, although no less
violent than before, it struck me that there was in it an accent of
exhaustion—an extreme exhaustion as of muscles too fatigued to respond
even to a reflex.
“‘_Sacré!_’ growled Rosenthal, and gripped my arm. ‘Do you hear that? It
is the little Jacob.’ He flew to the door of the casemate; the port on
the other side opened on the sea, and was, of course, heavily barred.
Rosenthal smote the heavy door several times with the ball of his hand.
“‘Jacob!’ he called, softly. ‘Jacob, Jacob, my dear little Jacob!’ He
leaped back and raised his pick; it seemed as if the sounds of his sick
brother’s distress had robbed him of his senses.
“I seized the pick, and he whirled on me with a snarl. Indeed, Doctor,
the Jew was like a tigress who hears the wail of a captured cub.
“‘Idiot!’ I whispered, ‘do you want to rouse the garrison?’
“‘Listen!’ said he, and raised his hand suddenly. I listened, and in a
lull of the surf there reached our ears a series of pathetic sounds. You
know the sound, Doctor; the feeble strangling of a pulmonary patient
when too weak to cough, something between a cough and a rattle—and then
it suddenly ceased and there came to our ears, in a voice as thin as a
wafer’s edge: ‘_Isidore!_’
“And then Rosenthal went mad. He knew, we both knew, that Jacob was
dying; there was no mistaking that. It would be a matter of at least two
hours’ hard work to liberate him without noise, and we both felt that by
that time he would be already liberated; and Rosenthal, the Jew, whose
habit and training and every instinct was that of weighing cost and
gain, decided that he could not afford to wait, garrison or no garrison.
Apparently life held nothing which could compensate him for the
privilege of holding his crippled brother in his powerful arms while the
struggling soul was fighting its way to the God of his fathers. Before I
could interfere—and, indeed, I did not try very hard to interfere,
Doctor, for was I not paid to carry out the man’s orders?—he had raised
the pick and assailed the heavy door with a fury that filled the silent
fortress with thundering reverberations.
“Lights began to flash out in the barracks; at a distance a sentry fired
his piece for an alarm. I heard shouts and cries and orders, and through
it all Rosenthal, the Jew, stood and hewed away at the door, till all at
once, even as I saw a squad of men running toward us, it fell away, and
Rosenthal, throwing aside his pick, leaped into the casemate, and from
the blackness within I heard a fierce sob as he gathered his dying
brother to his breast.
“For me there was no time for sentiment. As the first group of soldiers
drew near there arose from the landward side a strident blast. I
recognized the whistle of the Dutch steamer, which was going out. In
sight of the soldiers I sprang to the open door of the casemate, peered
within, then rushed to meet them.
“‘Some prisoners have escaped!’ I howled. ‘See, the door of the casemate
has been torn away! Did you not hear the noise, sluggards? Look!’ I
pointed toward the town, where, above the farther wall, we could see the
masthead light of the steamer. ‘They have fled to the _Hollandez_!’
“The cry was taken up: ‘They have fled to the _Hollandez!_’ and the
soldiers, with a glance at the dark entrance of the casemate, turned and
made off toward the main gate. On the way they met the _commandante_,
who, hearing their cries, rushed to the jetty and bawled at the steamer
to stop.
“The place was deserted again and I softly entered the dungeon. I could
see nothing in the gloom, but from the shadow I heard a deep, choking
voice say: ‘_Jacob! Jacob! Ach, mein lieber Jacob! Mein kleiner, lieber
Jacob!_’
“‘_Isidore—mein bruder—Isidore!_’ came the thin answer, and then there
was a gurgle, a strangling cough, a sigh as of a soul exhausted, a body
spent with vain struggling, and yet a sigh filled with promise of an
infinite peace. I heard a rustling, such a sound as comes from a tired
child as its head falls back upon its mother’s breast. There was the
sound of a multitude of kisses, a choked sob—then silence, which endured
for many minutes.
“‘Come, my friend,’ I said, softly. ‘We must go, if you wish to take
Jacob away.’
“I led the way and Rosenthal followed me out into the night, bearing the
body of his brother in his arms, his broad chest shaken with sobs. We
scaled the wall, called softly and a moment later our Curaçao men pulled
the boat alongside.”
Leyden paused, relit his pipe, puffed a few times in silence.
“They overran that Dutch steamer like cockroaches,” he continued, with a
chuckle, “and for a while the government seriously considered
withdrawing the privileges of their ports to the line. Ultimately it was
decided to let them off with a reprimand, because, you see, the steamers
were the only opportunity the port officials had of getting their weekly
allowance of spirits for nothing.
“Rosenthal? We made the run back to Curaçao in thirty-six hours,
because, you see, the trade always blows the same way. The day we
arrived Rosenthal paid me fifteen hundred dollars, the price agreed for
the rescue of his brother.
“‘It is too much,’ said I, ‘especially as we did not liberate the other
prisoners.’
“‘It was the price agreed,’ he said, ‘but if you say so I will take off
ten per cent. for cash.’
“‘Even then it is too much. There were the jewels which you gave to
Trocas——’
“Rosenthal chuckled. ‘They were imitations,’ said he. ‘I got them in New
York. Those I left with little Jacob were also imitations. I knew my
little brother’s weaknesses,’ he added, and the tears gushed out of his
eyes.”
------------------------------------------------------------------------
TWO SAVAGES
“WE must really turn over a new leaf, Doctor,” said my shipmate, Dr.
Leyden, the collector of natural rarities. “Our tales have been growing
more and more gruesome each night, until mere murder has quite lost its
pungency! To-night I will tell you a different sort of story—a love
story, from the view-point of the primitive; a funny story as
well—although it would be hard to say whether the humor belong to the
Stone Age or some age still to come.
“I was telling you last night about the expedition into Borneo for the
heads; this was immediately after. When we reached the sea I was in a
very bad way—running a steady, low fever, with diurnal rises, when I
would become quite delirious, and the region about my spleen was so
tender that it pained me to breathe. My companion and his charge
departed immediately by a vessel which was sailing for Sarawak, but I
waited for a few days and then sailed by a schooner for Sulu, as this
was a shorter voyage, and I wanted medical attendance as soon as I could
get it.
“This was before your war, Doctor, when nine out of ten Americans would
have told you that if Sulu was not in South Africa it must be somewhere
in the West Indies. You know Jolo, the pretty little toy city, with its
mediæval walls, where the sleepy Spanish sentries drowsed on the
ramparts and gaped down into the immured market-place, ogling the pretty
Mestiza girls, when they should have been keeping watch to see that none
of the Moro gentry went _jementado_ and proceeded to reduce the
Christian census. It is the freshest place in the archipelago and the
coolest, although so near the equator, for the trades sweep right across
the little island and blow the most of the time.
“You remember the Englishmen who were doing so well with the pearls? A
temporary manager of theirs proved to be an old acquaintance of mine—a
harum-scarum sort of chap, undoubtedly well-born, unquestionably badly
behaved, handsome, vicious, kind-hearted when the notion took him, at
other times as rough as a Liverpool navvy. I always suspected his
escutcheon of bearing the baton sinister.
“Stewart was his name. I had known him in the Marquesas, where he had
been the agent of an Australian firm. He asked me to his house, and I
was glad to accept, for I liked the scamp, in spite of his wickedness,
and, besides, I was in no condition to be left to the tender mercies of
native inn-keepers.
“Stewart used to swear like a trooper when one of my chills would shake
the whole of the little basket-house and disturb his siesta; then up he
would get, clad only in the lower half of his pajamas, and rough the
servants about and work over me as if he loved me. _Ach!_ how it seems
like yesterday that I have seen him, naked to the waist, leaning over
me, with his hands full of hot-water bottles, and his mouth full of
blasphemies when one of them burned his fingers, the great muscles
rippling the fresh skin of his arms as he moved me in the bed and his
fierce, handsome face, with its deep lines of hard living, puckered in
doubt—one could see the two natures fighting it out within him.
“The officers of the little garrison gave him a wide berth; they were
afraid of him. In fact, about everybody in the place was afraid of him,
from the Governor-General down to his own native women, of whom he had
an interesting collection. He was a sort of blond devil. I am sure that
I do not know why he so befriended me, unless it was because it was
pleasant to find some one who was _not_ afraid of him.
“I had begun to get about a little, but was still an invalid, when there
arrived in the port the auxiliary yacht of the Count Asquin. I was
admiring the vessel from our little balcony, when Stewart came up and
suggested that we go out aboard her. At first I declined, as the people
were not known to us, nor we to them.
“‘What’s the odds!’ said he. ‘Perfectly good form in a hole like this.
They’ve come purposely to see the place and people. They’re our guests,
by Gad!’
“There was something in this, so I agreed and we put off. I am rather
diffident, Doctor, but I knew that Stewart would carry the thing off
with his usual blunt, reckless, high-bred ease; there was so much style
to the fellow, and he looked so fresh and well-groomed and aristocratic,
and altogether the gentleman, which in so very many ways he was not.
There was a strong ranginess about him which suggested the university
athlete; the curly, crisp, yellow hair, the close-cropped mustache and
the fresh but weather-beaten skin, all marked him for a thoroughbred. If
he had got drunk every night of the week and slept in all his clothes he
could have got up in the morning and given himself a shake and looked
the same. The secret lay in good blood somewhere—the close set of his
small, well-shaped ears and the poise of his small head on his broad
shoulders. _Ach!_ If his behavior had only been as fine as his
appearance——
“As we pulled alongside we saw a lady and a gentleman under the after
awning, but they did not rise. There was a burly Breton quartermaster at
the gangway, and he saluted and called a natty steward to take our
cards. A moment later the owner came to greet us, and we observed that
he was a man past middle age, gray, sallow, delicate, but distinguished
in face and carriage. He regarded us for a moment in polite inquiry;
then, divining that the call was purely social, courteously invited us
aboard.
“‘Hope we’re not intruding,’ said Stewart, as he stepped on the deck,
‘but we exiles are so keen for news from the outer world; besides, it’s
no end of a treat to see new faces, and if you’re going to stop any
length of time perhaps we may be of service. I’m Stewart; this is Dr.
Leyden.’
“Our host bowed his acknowledgment. ‘I am the Count Asquin,’ he said. I
had already observed that the schooner was under the French flag.
Stewart was staring at the woman under the awning; the Count was
scrutinizing Stewart. I murmured acknowledgments and took a mental
photograph of the Count. ‘A French nobleman,’ I thought. ‘An invalid who
does best at sea; asthma possibly; a student, erudite, polished—a
philosopher, and withal a man of heart.’ Physically he seemed a wreck,
but one saw at a glance that a high vitality had been consumed in his
body and conserved in his brain. His eyes were very large, very
lustrous, of the reddish-brown which told of sentiment, of mind—the eyes
of a poet. There was kindness in the large nose and the full-lipped
mouth was sensual, but neither weak nor selfish; pleasure-loving, but
wishful to share with others. He wore a grizzled mustache and imperial,
which gave a bizarre mask of the martial to a face which clearly could
not have countenanced the killing of a mouse. It was a pleasant face—the
face of a man with more friends than admirers.
“Stewart was still staring at the woman under the awning with that bold,
British stare which would be insulting were it not so primitive—the
stare of a savage, inquiring only, and utterly lacking in the volume of
suggestion which makes the stare of the Latin so insupportable.
“The Count, satisfied with his scrutiny, invited us aft, and as he
glanced from Stewart to me I thought that I caught a flicker of
amusement in his lustrous eyes. I also had obtained a glance at the
lady. She was evidently young and more than evidently lovely; quite
young enough for a daughter and far too lovely for the wife of this
burned-out elderly invalid.
“‘Will you come aft, messieurs?’ said the Count. ‘Doctor, it is evident
that you have been ill; permit me to offer you a _chaise-longue_ here in
the breeze.’ He led the way, and as we drew near the lady I saw that I
had done her injustice. She was more than lovely; she was positively
radiant with a beauty of the most alluring type in a land where every
one is weary and relaxed; glowing with youth and health and high
vitality, she was as fresh in that sodden clime as a clear wind from the
north—and yet, there was something beside, something less clear, more
earthy, a lavishness of charm and form and feature; her type suggested a
creature bred for the slave mart. It was evident that she was an
American; the women of no other race possess that peculiar blending of
subtlety, ignorance and audacity. ‘A Californian,’ thought I; ‘a
survival of the fittest New England stock transplanted from a climate
where only the very fit _do_ survive to a country whose finest crop is
babies.’
“I glanced at the Count, the lax, yellow tissues of whom suggested a
squeezed orange, and when he introduced us to her as his wife I almost
laughed. _His wife!_ The conceit of the term, Doctor; he in whose eyes
one could see the after-glow of extinguished flames. And yet—her fate
might be far worse. One saw with what care he fostered the orchids
hanging from the awning ridge-rope; beautiful, interesting, a care, a
treat for the eye, costly epiphytes requiring support. Ah, Doctor, youth
cannot appreciate the higher motives which inspire age with its craving
for beauty.
“The Countess murmured a few words, and I judged her neither well-born
nor clever. You know, Doctor, there are in nature certain freaks of
superabundant beauty just as there are freaks of deformity, and she was
one of these. There was not much else; planted with powerful instincts
to take the place of mind, as in the lower animals; fairly well educated
in a machine-made, American way—‘advanced,’ very possibly, but as savage
as if she roamed the Carpathian scarp clad only in her abundant hair,
which no doubt she would have very much enjoyed.
“She offered us her hand after the manner of ‘the Slope,’ and as Stewart
took it in his I saw the blood surge up beneath his yellow, tropic tan;
his pale eyes shone like those of a gull, and one could see the deep
chest swell suddenly as he caught his breath. Consider the nature of the
man, Doctor—more animal than a well-bred dog, who, after all, has many
elevated traits, whereas Stewart’s were mostly low—and the fact that he
had not seen a fair woman for months.
“The deep blue eyes of the Countess were fixed upon Stewart with a sort
of startled wonder; no doubt the contrasts of the man’s crushing
masculinity with the colorless shell of her husband’s sex may have
struck her as a positive shock. There was almost a physical weight in
the impulse which he projected toward her. One saw that she took it with
a little shudder—as an hereditary drunkard might gulp his first glass of
spirits.
He stood holding her hand and saying what was necessary, and while he
was saying it his light, wicked eyes were devouring her. The thing was
so outrageous that I could not help glancing at the Count, and at the
same moment his soft, dark eyes met mine, and, to my amazement, he
actually smiled! He saw the thing as I saw it; no one could have seen it
differently; in fact, there was a sort of mutual understanding in his
smile, but nothing unkindly.
“The Countess was quick to recover her poise; not through breeding nor
modesty, but from sheer combativeness. She seemed suddenly to
realize—and I have no doubt that it struck her as quite a new idea—that
a man could be too familiar with his eyes alone. There was plenty of
fight in her, as one could see from the flash of her dark blue eyes and
the rounded squareness of her jaw. She promptly assumed so great an air
of chilly condescension that Stewart stared again and then began to
grin. He was a good talker, however, in his rough, staccato way, and
soon I saw that she was beginning to forget about herself and think
about him.
“‘You have been ill, Doctor?’ said the Count to me. ‘Myself, I am also
in feeble health—asthma, with a uric acid diathesis and a bad leak in
the mitral valve. Hence the sea, the tropics, a sedentary life. By
nature I am active, and I find it less difficult to remain quiet where
there is abundant passive motion, as aboard a vessel.’
“I explained to him the nature of my own illness and my reason for
coming to Sulu.
“‘_I_ came to rest in smooth waters,’ he replied. ‘It is a charming
island.’ We talked of other things and soon discovered many mutual
friends. When at last we left, at my insistence, the Countess, at the
suggestion of her husband, invited us to dine the following night.
“Stewart was silent on the way in—moody, taciturn, tugging at his crisp
mustache. As we entered the house he burst out:
“‘Did you ever see a more beautiful woman, Leyden? Jove, what hair! what
a figure!’
“‘I find the husband more interesting,’ said I. ‘Any white woman would
be beautiful if one stood her up against the shadow of the equator.’
“He grunted like a peccary. ‘Her husband?—her proprietor!—it’s gross
flattery to speak of that wreck as her husband. What right has a cadaver
like that to a wife? A widow would be a jolly lot more becoming. What’s
he got to hold her with?’
“‘A yacht, a title, a good mind and a wedding ring,’ said I.
“‘Might hold some women,’ he growled; ‘can’t hold that one,’ and he took
himself off to bed.
“We went aboard the yacht the following night, and I do not think that I
have ever spent a more disagreeable social evening. The Countess was
glorious in the most daring of black décolleté gowns. Her great blue
eyes were gleaming like sapphires, and her hair put one in mind of the
burnished copper one sees when the schooner heels to the trade-wind.
Fancy, Doctor, one of those profuse Californians, abundant as a cluster
of Tokay grapes, thrust close against a yellow-haired atavism of the
Neolithic age like my poor acquaintance Stewart. _Ach!_ he was drunk
before he had finished his sherry; at every sip he tasted the subtle
perfume of her, and the cup she held to him was filled with wine as old
as the race and as deep as the blue of her sapphire eyes. She was
receiving, I fancy, as well as giving. _Ach!_ it was very primitive!
Instead of the yacht and the sparkle of the yellow lamp-light on the
plate and glass there should have been a forest and the pale moonlight
filtering through the boughs of giant hemlocks....
“I looked at the Count, and upon my word, Doctor, I saw that he was
relishing the thing!—more than that, he was enjoying it! Perhaps it was
the interest of the student; perhaps he was absorbing the warmth of
fires which no longer kindled on his own hearth. At any rate, he was
eagerly receptive of this spectacle, repellant to me in its unfitness,
and was drinking it with parted lips, a tinge of color in his hollow
cheeks, a deep glow in his red-brown eyes. There was nothing malicious
in his regard; rather, it was the acme of benevolence. He caught my eye
and smiled as he had done the day before.
“The dinner, which was elaborate, completed, we adjourned to the
quarter-deck, where the Count skilfully drew me into a discussion
regarding racial and tribal peculiarities, and I soon found him
_savant_. Soon, and to-day I know that it was by express design, I
became oblivious to our _milieu_ and harked back to the era when my
science was in its infancy, for although myself but a mere collector of
those rare things in which science properly interests herself, I hold
the greatest respect for the founders of my craft, who were themselves
both scientists and collectors. We discussed the early labors of these
masters, until soon I was soaring in heights of professional exaltation
which made me quite oblivious to the other discussion being carried on
in the shadow by these two savages, whose vigorous young bodies, with
their attendant embryonic psychic impulses, were at a phase so many
thousands of years ahead, or perhaps behind, our own epoch of mental
autocracy. Here was this woman with the beauty, temperament, and
principles, no doubt, of Helen of Troy, and mind enough to go after what
she wanted; Stewart an avatar of Jove himself, the sire of all
profligates, but with mind enough to smirch his classic duality; myself,
all cerebrum, ultra mental and analytic, perhaps because my blood was
just ridding itself of millions of sporulating _plasmodia_; the Count,
who had at some time, I fancy, swung in the orbits of the lot of us. He
certainly had the mind, and he _had_ had the body before he gave it to
his mind to squander, and it seemed to me, as I pulled up suddenly from
some peroration and caught the expression of his eye as he turned his
face to mine in the yellow lamp-light, that he was listening to the
echoes of an early anthem—and found them sweet—even at the cost of his
so-called _honor_!
“I was glad when the time came for us to leave, for I could see that
between the wine and the woman Stewart was fast shedding his restraint.
There was a cut to his voice, a fierce deviltry in the ring of his
laughter, and I have seen men shot for less than the expression of his
eyes. At first it appeared that the Countess had an eye for her husband;
then, seeing nothing but indulgence in his aristocratic face, she had
yielded gradually to the fascinations of the hour, until one could see
that she had quite lost the focus of her conventional perspective. You
see, Doctor, she was not a high-bred woman, so that she was quite
untrammeled by the instincts which come of long generations of culture.
The only thing which held her in check was the fear of jeopardizing her
official position as the wife of an invalid millionaire nobleman, but,
seeing that he found only diversion in her coquetries, she gradually
yielded to the potent attractions beside her, until I do not believe
that she realized how ridiculously naked her emotions had become. It was
evident that Stewart was holding her hand beneath the table, and he was
sitting so close that their knees touched. It was very primordial!—and
all of the while the Count was talking easily and with an expression
which seemed to say: ‘Dear, innocent children—what a pleasing spectacle
is youth and ardor!’
“I was glad when the time came for us to leave, as I am a simple old
bushman, Doctor, and I found the spectacle embarrassing.
“The following day Stewart had the Count and Countess to luncheon, and
after a very well-ordered repast asked if they would enjoy a drive into
the country.
“‘You would enjoy it,’ said the Count to his wife. ‘Myself, I dread the
dust and the heat. Go with Mr. Stewart, if you wish’—his smile was
nothing short of angelic as he said this—‘and I will remain and talk
with Dr. Leyden, if he will permit me.’
“The dark blue eyes of the Countess swept upward, and as they met the
cold gleam in Stewart’s she turned her face from us, but I could see the
crimson creeping to the tip of her ear, partly hid by the mass of her
hair. Stewart nodded indifferently and ordered his pony and chaise.
“When they had gone the Count turned to me. His fine face was serene,
but there was a wistfulness in his lustrous eyes.
“‘What a delightful thing it is to be young, Doctor!’ he remarked. Then,
in the same voice: ‘You were telling me last night about the Dyaks....’
“It was almost dark when they returned. The Countess was very pale and
seemed nervous and irritable, while Stewart was in a state of suppressed
and concentrated fury. I fancy that he had taken too much for granted
and got himself well snubbed. At any rate, his manners were those of a
sulky coal-trimmer, and I was much embarrassed.
“This sort of thing went on for over a week; we visited back and forth.
Stewart’s presence put rather a taboo on the yacht as far as the
garrison was concerned. The Count and I became intimate. Stewart pursued
the Countess with a sort of cold and reckless fury, and while she was
certainly swayed by his dominant force, it was quite evident that he was
not progressing. I guessed that his roughness, while it fascinated her,
at the same time aroused her antagonism. After all, Doctor, I am not
sure but that passion provides its anti-toxine in a temper. I have no
doubt they fought like cats; at any rate the strain began to tell upon
the Countess. One could see that she was growing haggard. Then one fine
day they disappeared!
“I was breakfasting alone when Count Asquin rushed into the room,
weeping and wringing his hands, quite beside himself with grief and
shock.
“‘They have gone!’ he cried. ‘M. Stewart and my wife! They have fled in
one of the pearling yawls!’
“‘I am very sorry for you,’ said I, ‘but I cannot say that I am
surprised.’
“‘He did not seem to hear me; he wrung his hands and the tears ran down
his sallow cheeks.
“‘I am desolated!’ he wailed. ‘Was there ever such ingratitude? But
think of my indulgence!—my consideration!—the unselfishness of my
behavior!’
“‘My dear fellow,’ said I, ‘you are quite incomprehensible! As a man of
the world, could you not see that Stewart was madly in love with the
Countess——’
“‘And she with him!’ he cried. ‘What could have been more evident? But
why this flight? Did she not have everything heart could desire? Has her
single wish been unfulfilled? Only yesterday I bought her a pearl of
Stewart for twenty thousand francs. How could she so deceive me?’ Upon
my word, Doctor, he yelped like a coyote!
“‘And have you lived all of this time,’ I interrupted, quite out of
patience with the old fool, ‘and not discovered that yachts and pearls
and kindness do not count for everything with a beautiful woman like the
Countess when——’
“‘But you do me injustice!’ he protested. ‘Of course, I saw that she
desired M. Stewart for her lover’—he mopped his eyes—‘it was most
natural that she should! One does not retain his youth forever,
Doctor—his voice was deprecating. ‘Stewart is a charming
fellow—handsome, dashing, _libertin_. Few women could resist him. But
since she so much desired him, why in heaven’s name did she not take
him, instead of growing pale and _maigre_ and finally bolting off on a
stinking oyster boat! I ask you, my friend, was not my attitude most
obviously that of _mari complaisant_?’
“Doctor, I got up without a word and lit my big china pipe, and as I
struck the head of the match against the wall I felt tempted to strike
my own head after it. I felt like a fool. The whole thing became so
obvious—should have been so obvious from the very start—and yet, here
these two young savages had run away because it seemed the only thing to
do, when they might just as well have remained and cheered the soul of
the poor old Count, to say nothing of enjoying his hospitality! Here
again was I myself blaming the Count for an infatuated old cuckold—and
he, the only really logical and sensible person in the whole affair,
wailing beside his empty cage!
“Then the humor of the thing struck me and I almost laughed outright. It
was so ridiculous, and such a joke on the runaways, who were cooped up
in a little fifty-foot pearling yawl or stowed away in a Nipa hut in
some little island, when they might have been so comfortable!
“‘Did you ever explain your sentiments regarding this affair to the
Countess?’ I inquired.
“‘Doctor!’ he protested, ‘one cannot be indelicate! Certainly not! Could
she not have inferred it from my behavior?’
“‘I am afraid,’ said I, ‘that her inferences were less flattering. Mine
were—permit me to apologize.’
“He began to yelp again. ‘She was so beautiful!—so interesting—such a
typical American woman—a frank and ignorant young savage! It was a joy
to be with her, Doctor; a joy to watch the primitive workings of her
mind—and her little efforts at deception I found adorable. She was
transparent as a naughty child——’ He began to blubber.
“‘She appears to have possessed certain rudiments of guile,’ I replied.
‘You have taken too much for granted. A Parisienne would have
understood; the ethical situation was too delicate for an American; she
was too narrow-minded to combine adultery and domestic tranquillity.’
“‘They are so crude, these Americans!’ he wailed. ‘So crude!’
“An extraordinary situation, Doctor, and yet reasonable when one pauses
to consider. The Count was highly esthetic; his wife charmed him in
really a very elevated way; he enjoyed her beauty, her society, her
_bonhomie_, no doubt her care and strength, for she was kind-hearted
where her passions were not concerned; he may have leaned upon her
vigorous young vitality. She and the tomb could not be pictured in the
same frame. He appreciated her; wanted her to be happy; was thoroughly
good to her, and did not mean that because she was tied to a broken
invalid she should be deprived of the fullness of life. An archaic and
rather pathetic casuistry, was it not?
“I pondered. ‘They are in a small sail-boat,’ thought I, and glanced at
the map of the archipelago hanging from the wall. ‘They will, of course,
make for Zamboanga, but on the way they are apt to stop at Port
Isabella.’ You know the place, Doctor—in Basilan; a beautiful spot: the
little village, the hot slope of open country rolling gradually upward
to meet the cool forests on the heights; the late sun painting it all
golden and shining back from the towering boles that form the ramparts
of the primeval woods? They were most apt to be in Basilan.
“‘I think we can find them,’ said I. ‘There should be no great
difficulty in coaxing back two naughty children with the sweets you have
to offer.’
“He kissed me on both cheeks; then nothing would do but I must go with
him; a cruise _de luxe_ would set me on my feet, clinch the nail of my
convalescence. He began to plan a touching reconciliation, the little
dinner which would attend this _fête d’amour_, the wines, the touching
speech which he would make, all of which so overcame him that he wept
upon my shoulder.
“Of course, I promised to go with him; one could scarcely do otherwise;
and, indeed, Doctor, I had a real esteem for the poor fellow, who in
many ways had the heart of a child. But the excitement of the whole
affair proved too much for his organically diseased heart, and that
night he nearly died.
“His steward came in to tell me that he feared his master was moribund,
so I got a Spanish surgeon and we worked over him throughout the night.
It was several days before he was out of immediate danger, and then
there came a typhoon, and his captain wished to put to sea to ride it
out. The yacht took the gale like a gull, but altogether it was two
weeks before the Count was fit to proceed on the quest of his errant
wife.
“We left Jolo early in the morning, and when I awoke the next day we
were lying off Port Isabella. I took the gig and went ashore, leaving
the Count taking digitalis and almost in a syncope. I was firm in
refusing to allow him to land, and, to tell the truth, I did not much
expect to find the couple. Having found the local padre, a Mestizo, I
asked after the fugitives.
“‘Yes,’ he said, ‘they were here, but they have gone, blessed be the
name of the Virgin! A pair of devils—with apologies to the Señor if he
should be so unfortunate as to be a friend. Myself, I believe them to be
quite mad. First they would quarrel, then they would kiss—then they
would quarrel again. Never have I seen so many quarrels—nor so much
kissing,’ he added, thoughtfully.
“‘When did they leave?’ I asked.
“‘But three days ago; St. Christopher grant that they do not return! He
was a devil—a white devil, this man—they were both devils.’ He
shuddered. ‘The kissings were growing less and the quarrels more. The
night before they left she came flying to the convent and begged for an
asylum. I was tempted, Señor, for she was very beautiful, like the women
of Paris, where I was educated, and a poor priest grows weary of nothing
but native women—but I thought of this purple-eyed devil and refused her
sanctuary. It was fortunate, for as we were discussing it he came up and
ordered her to return to the house which they were occupying. I do not
know by what powers she cursed him, but it must have been very terrible,
for he seized her by the shoulder and thrashed her with a bamboo until
she howled like a beaten bitch.
“‘I have no doubt it did her a world of good,’ I answered. In fact,
Doctor, this was the most cheering intelligence which I had received. I
began to believe that the Providence which had ordered these things was
not unwise.
“‘The Señor is correct,’ replied the priest, gravely, ‘for when I passed
the house on the way to mass they were on the verandah, and she was
crouching at his feet, with her head upon his knee. There is nothing
like a bamboo shoot for a bad-tempered woman, no matter how beautiful,’
he added, thoughtfully.
“I returned to the schooner and told the Count I thought that we would
find them in Zamboanga; I told him also of the discipline which his wife
was under. He looked pensive.
“‘Perhaps it will do her no harm,’ said he. ‘She is strong as a young
donkey, and it may be well for her to lick the paint off her toy.’
“You see, Doctor, he did not love this woman in any sense, conjugal or
paternal. He was grieved at her loss, as one might be at the loss of a
pretty and interesting pet—a Persian cat—and he was determined to get
her back, no matter how large the reward he was compelled to offer. When
he got her he might confine, but not punish her. Stewart really was far
the more practical of the two.
“Early the following morning we reached Zamboanga, and hardly had the
anchor splashed when a boat from the shore shot alongside, and, to my
utter amazement whom should I see in the stern but Stewart himself.
“The Count, who was below, sent word asking him to descend, which he
did, with a curt salutation to me. He was a blackguard of direct
methods, was Stewart, employing the weight of his vitality to project
his purpose and driving it to the mark with sheer physical force; with
him logic filled the place of imagination.
“He entered that cabin and confronted the outraged husband precisely as
if their relative situations had been reversed—certainly a cool hand,
utterly fearless and indifferent to possible redress.
“The Count regarded him mildly. I was amazed at his composure.
“‘I suppose you are looking for your wife,’ said Stewart, bluntly.
“‘Monsieur is correct,’ replied the Count, politely, but I saw a shadow
cross his face. It was evident that his sensitive nature found the
other’s manner offensive.
“‘Then I’ll fetch her back,’ said Stewart. ‘She won’t come without.’
“‘I am pained,’ murmured the Count, gently, but I could see the pupils
of his reddish-brown eyes dilate. One could not conceive of the man in a
rage; yet he looked quietly dangerous. ‘Is it that the Countess fears my
anger—my reproaches?’ His grizzled eyebrows were lifted in concern.
“Stewart gave a laugh of such coarse brutality that one longed to kick
him.
“‘No,’ he said, contemptuously, ‘hardly! I fancy she’s taken a bit of a
liking to me.’ There was no braggadocio mixed with his brutality,
Doctor; in fact, he colored as he said this and seemed embarrassed. I
believe that he was telling the truth.
“‘In that case,’ replied the Count, thoughtfully, and his face resumed
its former expression of indulgence, ‘why do you not return with her?’
He leaned back in his chair, brought the tips of his fingers together,
rested his chin on the indices and looked cordially at Stewart, who was
staring at him in angry bewilderment. ‘You have been acting under a
misconception, Mr. Stewart. I find you agreeable; you have done much to
relieve my _ennui_; besides this, you appear to be necessary to the
contentment of Madame the Countess.’ He was putting Stewart with the
servants, you see, Doctor, or lower. ‘Go fetch the Countess,’ he
continued, briskly, ‘and we will forget this folly; we will take our
dear friend Dr. Leyden to Singapore. If it is that you cannot afford to
lose the time from your affairs, I will make you my secretary at a
salary of your own choosing.’
“Stewart for the moment was stricken dumb, too utterly amazed to speak;
then the blood came pouring into his florid face and his eyes narrowed
to mere slits—and then I grieve to say that all of his blackguardism
came ripping out. He cursed the Count, the Countess, the schooner,
himself; in fact, he gave such an exhibition of savage and unbridled
rage as I have never seen before but once. You see, Doctor, the man was
sufficiently intelligent to appreciate that he was several very
undesirable things—a scoundrel, an ass, and an object, as it appeared to
him, of such utter contempt to this French nobleman as to be quite
beneath his resentment—and he felt that when a man’s behavior crawled
beneath the contempt of a Frenchman he was quite a way down! As Stewart
read it, and I wonder to this day if he was right, he represented a toy
to be purchased for the amusement of a pet—a sort of sub-plaything.
“As all of this struck Stewart in a sort of final, knockout insult he
leaped up so suddenly as to capsize his chair and rushed from the cabin,
a stream of curses standing out behind him like the tail of a comet.
“I glanced at the Count to see how he had stood the shock of the
interview, and, would you believe it, Doctor, his face wore the flush of
actual health and there was an entirely new glow in the depths of his
lustrous eyes. His valet was standing at his elbow, and he leaned back
and said a quick word, which I did not catch. The man slipped into the
pantry and I heard him skipping up the ladder to the deck.
“The Count looked at me. ‘The _canaille_!’ he said. ‘I knew that he was
theoretically a scoundrel, but I did not suspect that he was the
low-bred pig which he has proved himself. He once told me that his
father was a lord; if so, his mother must have been a fish-wife!... Ah!’
“I sprang to my feet, for there came from above the sounds of a most
terrific struggle, the impact of wicked blows, hoarse bellows of rage;
then there was a crash, followed by silence, save for labored
breathings.
“‘Sit down, Doctor, I beg of you!’ exclaimed the Count, and there was a
note of apology in his voice. ‘It has seemed best to me to detain this
fellow until we are able to obtain custody of the Countess. A deplorable
state of affairs’—he spread both hands palm downward in front of
him—‘but what is one to do? Have I not offered this young man every
courtesy—every hospitality? Yet you have heard his insults. Evidently he
came aboard because he was anxious to be rid of the Countess.’ (It is my
private belief, Doctor, that the scoundrel had some design of selling
her back to her husband.) ‘He has taxed my forbearance excessively——’
“‘What shall you do with him?’ I inquired.
“He shrugged his shoulders and made a wave of the hand. ‘I do not
know—that is immaterial; the important thing is to secure my wife. Is it
too much to ask you to go in and look for her, my dear Doctor?’
“I went in, of course, but in the meantime she had learned that Stewart
had gone off to the schooner, and, fearing violence for him at the hands
of her husband, she had gone out herself. When I returned the situation
was interesting. Madame was confined to her room in a state of frantic
and screaming defiance; Stewart was double-ironed in the lazarette, and,
although I did not see him again, I learned afterwards that he had not
been over gently handled by the sailors, and the Count was sipping
absinthe in the saloon and listening to the ravings of his wife with an
expression of amused indulgence.
“‘But listen to her, Doctor,’ he observed, gently stroking his gray
imperial. ‘Primitive woman howling for her mate; Eve, haled back from
outer darkness, screaming to Adam, whose admittance is denied. My faith!
she is more beautiful than ever—although,’ and his brow clouded,
‘bearing the marks of ill usage.’ He arose and began to slowly pace the
beam of the saloon; his scholarly face seamed in thought, the lustre
gone from his eyes. It was evident that he was thinking deeply. From the
other side of the after bulkhead came the short, angry sobs of the
Countess. He listened for an instant, and at the sound of a sudden
little snarl of rage he slowly shook his head and smiled.
“‘Interesting, Doctor, is it not? It would be beautiful in a way,
primevally beautiful—an idyll of the callow world when the rocks were
jagged like molten lead thrown into water, the vegetation chiefly
fungoid, and it was necessary to clip the wings of one’s horned cattle.
But for the man—he is a late, mongrel, low-grade production, with merely
a few primitive impulses.’ He paused to ponder. Madame’s sobs continued
rhythmically, broken now and then by a little _‘gr’r’r’_—pure rage—the
sounds which babies make when too angry to scream.
“‘Oh, these children—it is hard to know what course to take.’ The Count
turned to me in his perplexity. ‘As far as this man is concerned, I
suppose that the best thing would be to give him a good flogging and let
him go—eh, Doctor?’
“‘A flogging!’ I echoed, with a sort of horror.
“‘Why not? He is not a gentleman. He has endangered my life, which I
forgive; he has seduced my wife, for which I make due allowance; he has
insulted me to my face, for which I do not bear malice; but—he is
_canaille_, which makes it impossible for him to do all of these things
which one might forgive in a gentleman. He uses the wrong sort of
profanity; he chastises his mistress with his fists instead of his wit;
he forgets his dignity before my servants; when disarmed he disgorged a
_knife_—and he an Englishman! _Br’r’rgh!_ he is a nauseous animal. Let
him have a few lashes and be set ashore.’
“Perhaps I was wrong, Doctor, but I could not forget the rascal’s care
of me when I was ill. I told the Count flatly that I would not permit
it, and when he proved obstinate told him outright that to flog Stewart
he would first have to use violence towards me. He broke down and wept
at the bare suggestion of this, commemorated my treatment and care of
him when he was ill, and then embraced me and swore that he loved me
like a brother, and in the same breath gave orders that Stewart be
immediately set ashore, with no further ill-treatment.
“Stewart was accordingly landed and went his way in peace. The Countess
got over her fit of temper in about an hour, ate a hearty dinner, drank
several glasses of champagne, cheered up, and when I retired she was
sitting on the arm of her husband’s chair and, assured of his
unqualified forgiveness, was _relating her adventure_, while he chuckled
to himself like a mischievous schoolboy.
“The savage was back on the reservation; glad to be there; fed,
forgiven, petted and quite content to be good—until the next time.”
------------------------------------------------------------------------
TWO GENTLEMEN
“LOOK at that cat, Doctor,” said Leyden, “but do not let her see that
you are looking. There!—did you see the beast crouch, and glance at us,
and then begin to wash its face?”
I glanced at the ship’s cat—an interesting beast, as are most ship’s
cats, either because one has more time to study their actions, or
because a limited sphere develops the animal’s ingenuity. Some one had
brought aboard a _tulu-pial_ bird and hung its cage over the hand
steering-gear, where the pineapples are strung out to ripen. The cat had
lost no time in locating the bird and was busy measuring distances when
we interrupted.
“That cat,” said Leyden, “would be typified by a sneak-thief among men.
Do you know, Doctor, I believe that domestic animals, like men, have
their grades of honesty. Have you not seen a finely bred dog of high
courage subdue an animal impulse which he feels to be degrading?”
I _had_ observed this thing, but, seeing that the subject had suggested
something to Leyden’s mind, I merely nodded. Few men had looked as
deeply into the nature of all things made as had this keen-sensed Teuton
collector, who seemed equally at home in any part of the civilized or
savage world. He had at times played the same quiet, modest part in the
founding of empires as in the advancement of science; his friends were
to be found from the palm tree to the palace, and I fear that a great
many of his enemies were dead.
“I had once an occasion to watch a striking case of _noblesse oblige_ in
an animal,” Leyden continued. “I would not tell the story if it were a
simple animal yarn, as such tales are, as a rule, tiresome and
untruthful. This story concerns people, principally, but as those upon
whom it reflects discreditably are dead—with certain others—there is no
reason why it should not be told.
“This was a good many years ago, Doctor, when the steamer transportation
in the Pacific was less efficient than to-day. I had engaged passage
from ‘Frisco to Samoa on a schooner which was owned and captained by the
son of one of those early blackguards who used to land their crews upon
an island full of harmless cannibals, show them the way of civilization,
demonstrate the wickedness of their present lives, and then go off and
leave them to infect each other with constitutional disease in the place
of eating one another. I hope there is an interesting corner of hell
reserved for all such! Our captain, whose name was Deshay, was the
frequent handsome outcrop of a vicious sire; his father had eloped with
his mother, who was the half-caste wife of a missionary in the Marquesas
and one of the most beautiful women I ever saw. Later, Deshay, senior,
had made a good bit of money in the island trade, sent his son to
England to be educated, and while the boy was there the parents had been
lost in a typhoon.
“When I went down to the schooner on the morning of her sailing date I
found aboard her a young man of very pleasing appearance, who introduced
himself as Claud Dillingham and told me that we were to be shipmates.
“‘You are related to Claud Dillingham, the owner of the Great Bear
Mine?’ I asked. This Dillingham was a Virginia gentleman, who had made a
great fortune in mining claims, and was at that time the richest man on
‘the Slope.’
“‘I am his son,’ said he; and as he was speaking, a magnificent
bloodhound walked from behind the house, his fine, velvety head raised,
the delicate nostrils twitching and the dreamy, half-closed eyes
reinforcing the more potent sense of smell.
“‘What a magnificent animal!’ said I.
“‘Yes,’ he answered. ‘I am taking him with me; he is so intelligent that
he soon accustoms himself to new surroundings; besides, he would die if
I left him behind.’
“I remarked that I had heard of dogs being devoted to their masters to
that extent. There was no skepticism in my voice, but he was so
sensitive that he flushed like a girl.
“‘I speak from experience,’ said he, quickly. ‘I once left him for a
fortnight and then had to return, as they wrote me that he had not eaten
since I left. When I got back he was as thin as a coyote. I always took
him with me after that.’
“We talked together for a little while, and it did not take me long to
discover that the master was as thoroughbred as the hound; in fact, he
impressed one as a trifle too finely bred—_in_bred, possibly. He was
_too_ delicately charming—six feet in height, gracefully and slenderly
built, very fair, with the pure complexion and blue eyes of a very
pretty girl. I almost laughed when he presently confided in me that he
was taking the voyage in the hope of overcoming the liquor habit. I
suspected that there was a girl in the case—that Claud was in love and
had conceived that he was in danger of becoming addicted to the vice
because he sometimes drank a glass of beer when in college.
“As we were chatting together the hound walked suddenly to me and raised
his handsome head as if inviting a caress.
“‘That is unusual,’ said Claud. ‘His reception of people is often
embarrassing. He will not go near Captain Deshay. He is too polite to
growl; he simply gets out of the way, but he can’t keep his hair from
bristling a little.’
“I asked Claud presently if he had met the mate, and he said that he had
not, that he had not even seen him, which I thought rather singular.
Claud told me that we had another fellow-passenger, a Professor Lentz, a
scientist, not a mere collector like myself. He added that Professor
Lentz was below, engaged in storing a wagon-load of instruments for
recording everything from a falling star to his last bottle of beer. A
little while later I met him, and he proved to be a genial, if somewhat
secretive, old crank, who apparently had some complex theory regarding
ocean currents which he was afraid that some of us might try to steal.
“Captain Deshay came aboard at noon, and with him came a squat, heavily
bearded individual, who proved to be the mate. Deshay himself was a
well-educated man, of very finished manners and strikingly handsome in a
rather animal way. The casual observer would have described his face as
strong, but it was not—it was well-featured; but he had a lumpish jaw,
which is different from a masterful jaw, and his eyes were petulant
rather than determined. His manner was inclined to be loud,
authoritative and with a coarse _bonhomie_ always repellant to me. The
most assertive thing about him was a big voice, and a big voice is
scarcely ever associated with cold-blooded courage; it belongs to the
blustering, bullying kind.
“It was at once evident to me that Deshay was very nervous about
something; we were anchored half a mile out, and I noticed that he
frequently scanned the water-front while getting under way. His crew
appeared to be the scrapings of the wharves, a sulky-looking lot of
ragamuffins, but Deshay seemed to have them well in hand.
“As the weather had been cold and raw, we three passengers went below,
and as soon as we got under way Deshay left the deck to his mate and
joined us. He called at once for spirits and the steward brought
whiskey. I noticed an expression of surprised resentment in Claud’s face
at this proceeding; it appears that Deshay had given him to understand
that he did not drink himself and that he did not expect any other
passengers, and therefore he might never be subjected to temptation. I
was not aware of this at the time; nevertheless, I knew that there was a
struggle going on. You are aware, Doctor, of the faculty possessed by
certain people of placing themselves in a condition receptive to the
more potent impulses of another; it is an inherent faculty, but can by
training be developed to an amazing extent—a faculty with which women
are more generously endowed than men, but in most cases a woman
possessing this will depend upon it to the exclusion of logic; more than
that, she abuses it, overworks it, lazily attempts to make it do the
work of her mind to a point where it is no longer accurate, hence a
negative benefit. A diplomat must possess it; the best diplomats develop
it, just as a great musician of rich natural talent must develop this by
years of arduous practice; perhaps an explorer or collector like myself
may possess it even most of all, because he must be a trained observer,
which enables him to buttress the psychic and the mental with a precise
faculty for grasping subtle physical signs.
“Therefore, Doctor, in the brief moment in which the whiskey was brought
I knew that Claud felt himself to be tricked, and I was curious to see
what he would do about it, because, in spite of his effeminacy, my
instinct told me that he was not weak. The whiskey was set upon the
table. Lentz helped himself; I did likewise, and as I did so I heard
Claud’s feet scuffle a trifle on the rug, and knew that his impulse was
to arise and leave the table. I knew that he was staring indignantly at
Deshay; there was a reflection of this look in the lurking gleam of
contempt in Deshay’s dark eyes and the sardonic lines at the corners of
his mouth, and when he spoke, in the pleasantest voice which one can
conceive, the words and the expression which accompanied them was the
drop in excess needed to crystallize the solution of my dislike and
distrust of Deshay.
“‘Oh, come, Dillingham,’ said he, lightly, ‘we all know that you’re on a
swear-off, but just a glass for _bon voyage_ will do you no harm. Once
we’re under way you can settle down to a life of undiluted virtue—say
_when_.’
“He reached across the table, decanter in hand, and began to pour the
liquor slowly into Claud’s glass, while I with difficulty repressed an
inclination to knock the vessel out of his hand—not that I laid much
importance on Claud’s breaking his resolution, but because he was in
danger of breaking it not through his _own will_, and I knew that if he
sagged at this moment he would have an up-hill fight to get back his own
while aboard that schooner, and the agonizing part of it all to me was
that Deshay was _not_ a strong character; he was a pine post painted to
look like granite, and Claud had not enough knowledge of men to
recognize the paint.
“‘No, thank you, Captain,’ said Claud, in a voice of such weak
determination that it positively brought the blood to my face. ‘I’m off
for good,’ he said, and threw the inflection on the wrong words, as a
man will when trying to show a determination which is lacking in him.
“‘Of course you are,’ said Deshay, in a big, good-humored voice which
seemed to jar the glasses, ‘but the swear-off starts with the voyage,
and a voyage out of ‘Frisco is not begun until you get through the
Golden Gate. Come, now, matey, just one to bring us fair winds.’ One
cannot describe the large persuasion of his tone.
“‘Really, I’d rather not,’ replied Claud, with a school-boy squirm. It
was a beastly spectacle, Doctor—an immoral spectacle; had Deshay been
overcoming the scruples of a woman it would have been less offensive,
because such an act is prompted by animal impulse, whereas this was
purely Satanic—the violation of an unproved entity. I was strongly
tempted to interfere, but many years of contact with all sorts of people
have so confirmed me in the habit of minding my own business that very
often I do not interfere when perhaps I should.
“‘Oh, nonsense,’ said Deshay, and there was in his full voice the
slightest hint of the imperative, and his eyes, as they fixed themselves
on Claud, were insolently authoritative. If he had looked at me in that
way I should have planted my fist in his face; with Claud I think that
it was less lack of will than the obedience of a hyper-sensitive mind to
a dominant suggestion. At any rate, Deshay poured out some Scotch and
added some water, and Claud raised the glass, drained it, then sprang
suddenly to his feet and left the saloon, nor did I see him again until
dinner-time, and, Doctor, I knew that from that moment this brute
Deshay, whom I correctly estimated as a creature of animal cunning,
utter lack of principle and an amazing effrontery substituting strength,
had one of his coarse, clumsy paws on the gold bags of Claud Dillingham,
senior, and, barring accident, would squeeze out many a yellow coin
before he allowed the son to escape from his clutches. Do not
misunderstand me, Doctor; this free-booter was simply after gold.
“The following morning I happened to be talking with Deshay, for at sea
dislike of a shipmate is no reason for not getting what entertainment
there is in him, and while we were talking Claud came up and requested a
few words with him.
“‘Anything personal?’ I asked. Claud hesitated for a moment, apparently
embarrassed.
“‘Oh, no,’ said he, and went on, stammering like a school-boy who had
forgotten his recitation. ‘You see, Doctor Leyden,’ said he, ‘when I
engaged my passage I was afraid that I might be seasick, so I made an
arrangement with Captain Deshay by which he was to drop me at Honolulu
if I wished it. He—he—told me that there were to be no other
passengers.’”
“‘But you are not seasick, are you?’ said I.
“‘No,’ he answered, ‘but I am—I am—I am _home_sick.’ Upon my word, he
gulped like a little girl the first day in school and his blue eyes
filled with tears; he could not have been under twenty years of age.
“‘I do not think that you have dealt quite fairly with me, Captain,’
said he, in a voice which he tried to make cold and assertive, but would
have been only contemptible if one had not been sorry for him—and then
as he looked at our faces and saw scant sympathy in either, he crumbled.
“‘To tell the truth, Captain,’ he continued, with a rather nervous
laugh, ‘I’m afraid that I’ve lost my nerve; I’m sick of the voyage
already and want to get back home. Of course, I’ll defray any additional
expense due to taking you out of your course,’ he concluded, with a sort
of shy eagerness.
“‘Oh, come, old fellow,’ said Deshay, coaxingly, and clapped him on the
shoulder. ‘The first twenty-four hours——’
“‘Look out for your dog!’ I cried suddenly, for as Deshay’s hand fell
upon Claud’s shoulder I had happened to glance at Dixie. The dog was
standing quietly enough at his master’s heel, and at Deshay’s action had
made none of the usual canine expressions of displeasure, and it was
this absence which made him so alarming, for as I glanced at his great,
dark, intelligent eye it seemed filled with such a smouldering,
slumbering intensity of hate that it gave me a positive start. The fine,
silky hair was not even ruffled, there was not the slightest twitch to
the velvet lips, but I could see that every muscle of the beautifully
moulded body was tense as our weather shrouds and there was a fine
quiver to the strong flanks. Have you ever, Doctor, closely watched a
woman who is married to a man she hates, loathes, despises, as her
husband enters the room? Perhaps he is a plausible brute who only shows
the cloven hoof after he has shot the bolt of her bedroom door; no one
else may guess it unless one watches the wife. The dilatation of the
pupil, the faintest quiver of the nostrils, the little shiver—Dixie had
all of these, but, as Claud had said, he was too self-contained, too
much of a gentleman, to further reveal his emotions.
“I could see Claud shrivel at Deshay’s familiarity. One guessed that he
longed to throw off the man’s hand, which still clutched his shoulder
good-humoredly, but he was too sensitive, too fearful of giving offense,
not through any liking for the man, but because it seemed _gauche_,
boorish, and would fill the air with a sort of rough impulse, shocking
to his fine sensitiveness. No doubt he had suffered at times from
rebuffs to his own timid advances, and had not enough knowledge of the
world and men to keep from putting a coarse, thick-skinned brute like
Deshay in his own class of emotions.
“His class—_ach!_ the nervous sensibilities of those two were about as
similar as those of a Kentucky thoroughbred and a Galapagos turtle!
There are some men who can never get it through their heads that the
only way to hurt another man’s feelings is with a club.
“When I spoke, Claud glanced down at Dixie, and he saw the danger in the
animal’s eyes, to which Deshay was quite blind.
“‘Dixie!’ said Claud, reprovingly; that was all, but Dixie understood
and his beautiful head dropped contritely.
“‘Oh, Dixie’s all right,’ said Deshay, carelessly, and, will you believe
it, he swung down and took the dog’s two forepaws, raised him up on his
hind legs, while he pulled his ears playfully, and, taking the sensitive
muzzle in his coarse hand, shook it back and forth! _Ach!_ I have never
been so overcome with admiration for the self-control of any living
creature as I was for its amazing exhibition by that bloodhound! One saw
him shudder, half close his eyes, as if in a disgust too deep for any
expression. I really believe, Doctor, that the dog and master were at
the psychological instant of Deshay’s caress possessed of precisely the
same emotions. Do you know, I believe that the hound accepted the human
animal’s familiarity less through discipline than a high-minded sense of
courtesy which forbade his rejecting overtures which had the semblance
of good will, for at first Deshay actually liked Dixie, and was unable
to see that the dog had loathed him from the start.
“Deshay turned to Claud. ‘There’s a good chap,’ he said; ‘you don’t mind
sticking it out to Samoa, do you, now?’
“‘I’m sorry,’ began Claud.
“‘Oh, come,’ said Deshay, and again there was in his voice that
imperative note which had struck me so unpleasantly the day before. ‘You
can’t tell yet whether you’re going to like the cruise or not; you will
begin to enjoy it in a couple of days—you know you will.’ He fastened
his lustrous eyes fixedly on the seraphic blue ones of the boy. ‘You
know you will like it—don’t you, now?’ There was in his voice a
peremptory assertion.
“‘Perhaps you are right,’ said Claud, and looked over the rail.
“‘Of course I am right,’ said Deshay, loudly, and clapped him on the
shoulder again. ‘Now, let’s have a drink to show there’s no hard
feeling. Steward!’ he bellowed down the companionway.
“‘But, look here, Captain,’ said Claud, feebly, ‘you seem to forget that
I’ve given up drinking.’
“‘Not a bit of it,’ said Deshay, ‘but there’s a big difference between a
man’s giving up drinking and a man’s never taking a drink. If you only
drink at my suggestion you’ll never come to any harm. Will you join us,
Leyden?’
“‘No, thanks,’ I answered.
“‘Oh, yes, you will,’ said Deshay, in his large way.
“I shrugged my shoulders and, turning on my heel, walked aft. To tell
the truth, Doctor, although I am a mild-mannered man who will make a
very great detour to avoid a quarrel, I think that just at that
moment——”
Eight bells were struck forward, and Leyden paused to hold the stump of
his cigar to the dial of the taffrail-log.
“A little more than ten,” he muttered; “that schooner did better for
days on end!” He drummed softly with his fingers until I grew irritated
at his abstraction, which emotion he perceived, for he flicked the stump
of his cigar into the wake and resumed.
“Doctor, have you ever witnessed the spectacle of a strong will and high
courage becoming completely and utterly dominated, less through lack of
strength than excess of imagination, by a creature of far inferior
qualities, but overwhelming impudence? These are the conditions which
often give the bully his amazing autocracy; his victims are
auto-hypnotized by the sheer impudence of his assertions, until some day
the bubble is pricked by an individual more practical and less
imaginative and the reign of terror is at an end. In a week’s time
Deshay had Claud, and Dixie, too, for that matter, as entirely cowed and
subjugated as if he had broken their spirits with a cat-o’-nine-tails,
and the harrowing part of it was that, in spite of their high degree of
sensitiveness, neither the dog nor the master were weak. I had studied
Claud and felt his underlying force; he was of that high-bred, nervous
type, vacillating in little things, but, deeper, of the resistance of
chilled steel; like the bulkheads in the ward-room of a battle-ship,
white and gold on the surface, but able to stand the pressure of
hundreds of tons. If the petty aggressions of Deshay had all been
combined into a solid weight, requiring a forceful resistance, he could
no more have held Claud than he could have held a handful of guncotton
detonated in his clenched fist; that is, he could not have done so at
first, and his animal cunning told him this, so that he began by
accustoming his victim to yield in minor matters until he had given him
the _yielding habit_; but as I watched the whole thing I was convinced
that Deshay was too crude a production and too lacking in finesse to
continue his course successfully, and I awaited the denouement with
interest. Deshay had already shown his lack of cleverness by not taking
the trouble to conceal the aversion that he had come to feel for Dixie,
and the silent hate of the dog for him was a thing as extraordinary to
contemplate as the animal’s marvellous dignity and self-control. Deshay
had come to openly maltreat him, but not as yet in Claud’s presence; he
maltreated him once in mine, and _only_ once, for I said a few words to
him, at which he stared into my eyes and first blustered and then
laughed and then went out with a sizzle—and we understood one another
perfectly. On this occasion he had kicked the dog across the deck
because the poor brute had placed both paws on the polished teak rail in
a longing effort to discover land, and the dog had neither yelped nor
growled nor become abject; he had simply walked away, albeit with a
slight limp, but without the drooping tail and other signs of canine
dejection. Perhaps you have seen a gentleman, Doctor, a fearless man,
avoid a quarrel thrust upon him by a low fellow, and avoid it quietly
and without loss of dignity. This was Dixie’s behavior.
“We were not a pleasant party on that schooner. I had come to detest
Deshay, and he knew it; Lentz would no longer speak to him; the old
fellow simply grunted when Deshay addressed him, as if he considered the
captain a swine and able to understand the language. Claud did not hate
him; he simply _loathed_ him, and yet was dominated by him, and the same
was true of Dixie. The air was heavily pregnant with possibilities, and,
Doctor, when the denouement finally arrived it was as funny as the grin
on the face of a corpse. Who do you suppose it was that pulled out the
boat-plug? Why, none other than that black-browed humorist of a mate,
who was, it seems, a murderer escaped from the Santa Clara county jail,
and who had paid Deshay a good price for his billet.
“We were down in the neighborhood of Christmas Island, when we cut in
close to some other little island; to this day I don’t know what it was.
Our course would trim it close, so at Deshay’s suggestion we hove to and
he and Lentz and Claud, Dixie and myself went in with two sailors to
pull the boat. Possibly it was his plan to get Lentz and me ashore and
leave us there, but he never had the chance, for no sooner had we struck
the beach than Mister Mate up with his headsails, up stick and away!
“I must have a bizarre sense of humor, for I will confess that I dropped
in a heap on the sand and laughed until the tears came. It was such a
tremendous joke on the lot of us—especially upon Deshay.
“Deshay was like a crazy man; he tore up and down the beach and shook
his fists and raved until his face was blue. He was an edifying sight,
and we white people sat in a little row in our proscenium box and
admired the exhibition. You see, he was three-quarters white, and that
gave him imagination; but the other quarter, which should have been
self-control, was Kanaka, and that knocked up the pawls and let his line
run off the reel, so to speak.
“We were really badly off, Doctor; the island was very small and offered
no food that we could see. There was a small cluster of dwarfed palms,
and they bore a few immature nuts; aside from these trees there was no
shelter. We had not even a boat-sail. Fortunately there was water on
this island—brackish, but potable.
“Deshay pulled himself together after a while, but he was savage and
morose. I managed to get out of him the pleasing news that the next
island was over one hundred miles distant, and probably no better than
the one which we were on. Fancy our condition, Doctor!—our utter lack of
everything but bad feeling. All of us, including the two sailors who had
pulled the boat, hated Deshay; Deshay returned the sentiment; the two
sailors, with their mates, had from the first been insolent to Claud, of
whom they said rough things owing to his subjugation by Deshay; and on
this, as well as from personal causes, both Lentz and I had more than
once fallen foul of them. Within the last fortnight the tedium of the
voyage had begun to tell upon Lentz, and the old fellow had grown
peevish and sulky; both of us had incurred Deshay’s dislike by having
very little to say to him. Conceive, then, the delights of the first few
days of hardship with such a company.
“It was, I believe, the morning of the third day that I was awakened by
hearing Deshay cry out: ‘Where’s that cursed dog?’ I rolled over and saw
that he held in his hand one of the heavy oak stretchers of the boat and
was looking savagely about him. Near by sat Claud, his face in his
hands.
“Deshay snarled out: ‘Where’s that dog, you droolin’ baby?’
“Claud mumbled something, without looking up, and then I heard him say:
‘We haven’t come to that—_yet_,’ and he said it with a groan, and I
could see his face working painfully.
‘Deshay walked toward him, talking as he went. He said: ‘You’ll see if
we haven’t when I find the cur, you chicken-livered little milksop!’ and
at that moment there came from up the beach a musical bay which tolled
out like a church-bell and died lingeringly away, to be drowned in the
crash of the breakers; again this mournful note welled forth, rising
like the voice of a bell-buoy above the roar of the surf, and this time
it ended in a series of short, excited barks—such a bark as a hound
gives when he has ‘treed.’
“Claud sprang to his feet. ‘He’s found something!’ he cried, and began
to run down the beach. Deshay and I followed, and soon we came upon
Dixie, who was very carefully uncovering a nest of new-laid turtle’s
eggs.
“Deshay was for eating his fill then and there, but this I would not
permit, so we gathered them up and carried them back to the others,
where we proceeded to divide them.
“‘Give Dixie his share,’ said I to Deshay, who had undertaken the
division.
“‘Give Dixie nothin’,’ he snarled back at me. And then he added: ‘Why,
you Dutch fat-head, d’ye think I’m goin’ to give good food to a dog?’
“He had carelessly dropped the boat-stretcher beside him, and before he
could lay down the eggs it was in my hand. There is an etiquette,
Doctor, to be observed even upon a desert island, and if Lentz had not
grasped the other end of the stick I fancy that Dixie could have had
Deshay’s share.
“‘Ve must not qvarrel,’ said Lentz; ‘ve haf troobles enough alretty. Der
hound found der eggs; gif him von or two.’
“Deshay growled, but I had frightened him, and he did as he was told,
giving Dixie two of the eggs. The dog ate one of them, the other he
carried to Claud; I saw Claud give it to Deshay.
“For ten days this thing went on. Every day or two Dixie would find a
nest of eggs, but at the end of that time he could find no more, and
after two days of hunger Deshay, backed by one of the sailors, demanded
that he be killed. We were all fairly weak by this time, Deshay being
perhaps the strongest, because Claud had shared his own and the hound’s
food with him in the hope of prolonging the dog’s life. In spite of this
the lad held up wonderfully, sustained by his marvellous nervous
vitality.
“‘It seems to me that Dixie has earned his right to live,’ said Claud,
the tears streaming from his eyes. ‘He has already fed us for ten days;
but if you all demand that he—be killed—I will not oppose it!’ He buried
his face in his hands.
“‘Guess you won’t!’ growled Deshay. ‘We _do_ demand it——’
“‘Speak for yourself, you mongrel swine!’ said I, and added that I would
starve before I would kill the hound or eat him, either. You see,
Doctor, to my way of thinking Dixie had purchased the human right to die
decently, like the brave, unselfish gentleman he was. Besides, he had
the cleanest soul of any, save, perhaps, his master. What right had we
to prolong our lives at the cost of his? Lentz felt this.
“‘I von’t eat him,’ he said; ‘he is vort more as me.’
“‘Ah, what’s the use o’ killin’ ’im?’ said one of the sailors, a hard
specimen whom Deshay had picked up on the ‘Barbary Coast.’ ‘Dawg ‘r no
dawg, we’re all goin’ up the flue. The quicker the sooner, say I.’
“‘The other sailor agreed with Deshay, who pulled out his knife and
sidled toward the hound. If my strength had been equal to it I would
have opposed him, but a touch of fever on top of other hardships had
left me as weak as a kitten. However, it was unnecessary.
“And then, Doctor, there began a strange and savage spectacle. Dixie was
by this time a hide-wrapped skeleton, yet his strength seemed in no way
impaired. He was asleep by his master’s side, but at the stealthy
approach of Deshay he seemed to slide away—as one drags a rug across a
floor. Deshay continued to approach—at an angle—craftily, and still the
hound slid away in that peculiar manner, his lustrous brown eyes
fastened on the man in an agony of doubt and dread, which seemed to
partly paralyze his movements. Deshay began to wheedle, to whine, to
talk ‘baby-talk’ of the ‘nice-doggy’ type, and he actually hid the knife
as he might if about to murder a man instead of a dog! Such a spectacle,
my friend! this gaunt, savage, bloodshot, hairy, human animal, far more
of a beast in all effect than the sad-eyed dog who had for days
prolonged his worthless life—this bloodthirsty, _literally_ bloodthirsty
human hyena, crazed at feeling his wretched life slipping through his
weakening grip, slinking along that beach in the bright, dewy morning,
talking baby talk to the hound—making a disgusting exhibition of his
craven soul, when he might have been waiting for death with the dignity
of a gentleman!
“Still he slunk—and the dog slunk before him, his hair bristling less in
fear than disgust, certainly not in anger, for of this emotion there was
no trace in the quiver of a lip, the echo of a growl, nor in the gleam
of the beautiful, lustrous eyes. Rather it was a sense of deepest
shame—a shame for his master’s race!
“And then the brute in the man tore through the thin envelope; he
screamed like a cat and threw himself at the dog, only to sprawl his
length on the sand. He sprang to his feet and ran braying at the animal,
who fled down the beach as silently and with the even interval of the
man’s own sinister shadow, until Deshay, his strength utterly gone, fell
face downward on the sand, screaming obscenities. _Ach!_ never have I
seen a thing more disgusting.
“‘Dixie will take care of himself,’ said I to Claud. ‘He will not be
caught napping.’
“From that time, Doctor, there began a series of psychological phenomena
of which I was more appreciative afterwards. Up to the moment of this
shocking outburst of Deshay, Claud had been in all ways subservient, but
as he looked upon the contour of this man’s naked soul and saw its
hideously dwarfed deformity I observed a peculiar expression on his
face. I think that he was feeling Deshay’s shame as if it had been his
own—not through any charity, but through sympathy, which is such an
entirely different thing. You see, Doctor, Claud was one of those
hyper-sensitized natures which reflects an emotion as a still lake
reflects its bank: you know the type—that which will listen to a poorly
given address with a sense of deepest personal responsibility toward the
speaker, or will see some person in a conspicuous place make a fool of
himself and fairly writhe with shame—as Dixie had done. And do you know,
I think that for the time the sentiments of master and dog toward Deshay
were identical; the natures of the two were very similar; and I can say
no better thing of Claud than this. They were two gentlemen, Doctor,
gentlemen by birth and breed and associations, and they possessed the
natural instincts which result from generations of these things.
“Left to himself at just that moment, Claud would, I believe, have
attempted to condone Deshay’s behavior and to go to the rescue of his
strangled decency, but it seemed to me that the psychological moment had
arrived for placing matters in their due proportion. You see, Doctor, I
had about concluded that we were all going to die, and I disliked the
idea of letting Claud die without the opportunity of redeeming such
manhood as he might possess, and with this in mind I reached out and
dragged the veil rather roughly from his eyes.
“‘And to think,’ said I, ‘that yonder object should be your master—you,
a gentleman and a white man!’
“Claud leaped as if I had lashed him across the face.
“‘What!’ he cried. ‘What—what—what’s that you say?’
“‘It seems to me to be plain enough,’ said I. ‘Haven’t you kow-towed and
groveled and beat your forehead before that thing, and broken your
promise to stop drinking—to whomever you made that promise—for fear of
that Kanaka thug out there?’
“Claud stared at me—stared like a baby—with his mouth and his big blue
eyes wide open, and while he stared what little blood was left in his
wasted body found its way up into his face; at last, it seemed to me, he
was ashamed on _his own account_. While he was staring at me Deshay came
up.
“‘Call your cur,’ he growled. I was vexed that he interfered just when
he did, as Claud in his weakened state had not yet assimilated the
pre-digested idea which I had fed him. I was scarcely normal at the
time, Doctor; to my mind, the whole thing mattered very little; it was
like one of those nightmares in which one is sub-consciously aware that
it is really only a dream and acts with delightful disregard of
consequences. I thought of dying as one thinks of waking up, and before
waking up I wanted to see Claud kill Deshay. I knew that he could kill
him if he wanted to, for all of us had passed the physical limits and
were living upon our mentalities, and Claud’s being so much more virile
than Deshay’s, he was just that much more alive; yet Deshay was too
stupid to discover this, although I think that he must have felt it in a
way.
“‘Call your cur!’ he repeated, but this time there was a change in his
tone. It reminded me of the voice in which Claud had attempted to assert
_him_self upon that first day aboard the schooner, but in Deshay’s case
this irresolution was on _his own_ account; subjective, you see—not
objective, like Claud’s.
“I noticed this and began to laugh, and Deshay looked at me sheepishly.
It was not a pleasant laugh; one feels sorry, Doctor, for a man who
sacrifices his self-respect for the sake of some one else, but one
laughs as I did at the man who does so for himself. This was the
proportion between Claud and Deshay, and, although I found it amusing, I
was nevertheless grievously disappointed when I saw that Deshay was
subtle enough to feel his side of the see-saw go down—for, as I have
said, I wanted to see Claud kill him before _any_ of us died.
“As it was, Claud simply ignored his demands—and that was a little step
toward preponderance. You see, Doctor, the two were dying men; we were
all dying men. Deshay’s investment was ultra-physical, and consequently
low; Claud’s was psychical, and although he might not last any longer,
or as long, for that matter, he was _all there_ as long as he _did_
last; he was either alive or dead, not half-alive, like Deshay—and as
the springs of our lives ran low Deshay’s grew muddy, while Claud’s was
still clear and cold.
“The following morning Dixie again discovered a nest of eggs. I do not
wish to tax your credulity, Doctor, and yet I will ask you to believe
that so nearly approached the types of these two gentlemen that the
sensibilities predominant in Claud obtained in Dixie to an extent where
he, too, felt the fall of Deshay, and when he had found the eggs and we
starving wretches shambled up to the cache, Dixie, the fine,
thoroughbred, peace-loving aristocrat, stood over his find with bared
fangs and flashing eyes and allowed all to approach but Deshay.
“Yet gentlemen do not press these things, these matters of authority, as
do your ruffians who have cut a high card in the shuffle of Fate—they
accept them as a matter of course—and so neither Claud nor Dixie
emphasized this occult change of balance, and as the days passed Deshay,
crass fool that he was, lost sight of the fact that he had been
relegated with any other dejecta. He would thrust in with surliness
rather than ugliness, according to the nature of the low-grade,
overthrown bully; but Claud and Dixie ignored him, his two sailors
grinned at him, old Lentz blinked at him, and I, the mean average of the
lot, laughed at him and explained carefully to him in how very many
different sorts of ways he was a fool, neglecting to help him out. This
was quite safe, for, although my own mentality is of a fairly low grade,
it was still in excess of Deshay’s, and this fact gave me the whip hand.
I did not tell him too much, as I still cherished hopes of seeing him
killed.
“There came another season of starvation in this epoch of famine and
none of us had anything to eat, and it was at this time that Deshay
began a systematic stalking of Dixie, who was still a peace-lover and
preferred, when nothing of greater value than his own life was at stake,
to get out of the way. The dog slept always at his master’s side, and,
although the nights were cool to men starved and shelterless, Claud
would never draw near the fire, because he wished to avoid the
propinquity of Deshay. More than once I had awakened from my light,
fitful, fever sleep to see this sneaking wretch creeping stealthily on
hands and knees toward the sleeping animal, but with invariable
result—Dixie would slip silently away and Deshay would return to the
fire, cursing savagely. Often through the day one would see him slyly
maneuvering to get within reach of his prey; and as our starvation
proceeded, this desire fastened upon his famished brain with the force
of an insistent idea, until I really believe that he was impelled less
by his hunger than through a sort of dementia. At times he would awake
with a sharp cry, spring to his feet and rush at Dixie, who would lope
away before him, when Deshay would fall into a paroxysm of rage. At
these times Claud would turn away with a shiver of disgust, Lentz would
blink rapidly, the two sailors would lie upon their empty bellies and
snigger, while I would laugh.
“Yet all of this time Deshay had been encroaching little by little upon
Claud’s liberty, for, you see, Doctor, he was one of those unimaginative
animals who require a clubbing at certain intervals as a sort of tonic
treatment. Claud had utterly ignored him; he had rubbed against the rest
of us in little ways and found himself of baser metal, but Claud, like
Dixie, had only avoided him, and this avoidance he continued to
misinterpret until his confidence returned.
“It was after one of his frantic attempts to catch Dixie that he sought
to force the issue. He turned suddenly and strode to where Claud was
lying on the sand, and at the sight of his face the lad struggled to his
feet—while I sat and waited, for something seemed to tell me that the
time had come, and I felt no fear of the result.
“‘Call your dog, you putty-face!’ snarled Deshay. ‘Call your dog!’—he
thrust out his matted jaw; ‘call him up where I can get my hands on
him!’ said he. He had put away his knife and gripped the stretcher.
‘Call him up, d’ye hear, or I’ll spatter your fool brains all over the
shop!’
“It was here that he struck the steel beneath the fresco. Claud looked
him over, carefully, coolly, and, although their faces were almost in
contact, from such an infinite distance—and then he spoke, in a voice
which matched his look, and at the chill of it Deshay drew back.
“Claud half turned and pointed to the cluster of palms. ‘Go over there,’
said he, very quietly, ‘and see if you cannot die a little more decently
than you have lived.’ Words fail to express the icy dignity of his tone.
‘It is the only thing left for you,’ he continued, and leaned slightly
toward Deshay, looking intently into his face, and at something in the
look Deshay drew back with a shiver. ‘There is death in your eyes,’ said
Claud; ‘I think that you are going to die this very day’—and then the
bolt fell.
“Deshay, terrified, panic-struck at some quality of the cold voice and
the words and the chill light of the eyes, staggered and threw up one
arm as if to ward a blow. There was no suspicion of a threat in the
gesture—no intent—but Dixie, crouching at his master’s side, read it
differently. Before Deshay’s arm began to descend the hound had sprung.
There was the shock of contact, gurgling noises, convulsive forms
heaving upon the sand, the guttering sounds of—of—the _abattoir_! I saw
the snout of the hound twisted sideways, the nose pushed comically
upwards, the full mouth in a grotesque grin. Ah, what is more terrible,
Doctor, than to see something in human guise worried and throttled by
something in the guise of a brute beast?”
Leyden walked to the rail, drummed upon it with his fingers and spat
several times into the sea. One guessed that he felt with the hound.
“Dixie sprang back,” he continued, his face still from me; “he sprang
back and stood panting, _salivating_—as a dog does when for the first
and only time in his life he commits the error of picking up a toad.
Dixie was a starving animal—you understand, Doctor—and his mouth was
full of blood, but he did not want _that_ blood—that human blood—nor did
he want a human life, to save _his own_. He backed away, then leaned far
forward—as far as he could without stepping nearer, and his delicate
nostrils twitched at his work—where his hold had been.
“Soon he turned and walked slowly down to the water, waded out and swam
seaward, until all that I could see was the brown speck of his head just
entering the outer line of surf; and then he disappeared, and it seemed
to me that there were other specks about in the water; but I did not see
much of anything for a while. I heard Claud laughing as if to kill
himself, and apparently he did, for the natives who found me said that
he was dead and one of the sailors was dead. The other sailor, Lentz and
myself hung on—the sailor because he took advantage of what Dixie _would
not do_; Lentz, because his pulse was slow, like a tortoise, and, like a
camel, he was able to live for a while on his reserve adipose; and I,
because the fever had banked my fires so low that no food was required.
Besides, I am tough, and—will you please tell me, Doctor, what in the
devil ever possessed me to tell such a villainous story? That cat?
_Ach!_—yes—_p’st!_—scat, you beast!”
I walked over and put a “sheep-shank” in the lanyard on the cage of the
_tulu-pial_ bird, and then the cat was unable to reach it.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
THE BAMBOULA
FROM the deck of the ship the night seemed split into three zones of
darkness: the vague water, with its elusive surface sheen; the heavier
murk of the land, which was not black, but a deep tone of color
impalpable from lack of light; then the sky, which was all that was
left, and rested prone upon the other two, with no intermediary
separation.
I leaned on the rail and tried to pick out the features of the land; a
pale band of beach crept out of the opacity, and it seemed to me that I
could see dark splotches where the _compèche_ was piled. Now and then a
light would spark out and disappear, in many cases its swinging motion
proving it to be a torch carried in some black fist. A thin land breeze
had sprung up, and it brought off the scent of the damp earth, whiffs of
wood smoke, and now and then the heavy fragrance of the stephanotis.
Deeper in the gloom tossing hills threw their rough shoulders against
the opaque sky.
Suddenly, from a shadowy recess in the black land there arose the steady
beat of a drum—a pulsing, cavernous sound, measured in rhythmic time,
neither loud nor fast; a patient sound, yet a note impalpable in
quality, insistent and seeming like the throbbing heart-beat of the
savage island sleeping under the black mantle of the night.
There came an alert step on the deck behind me, and a throaty voice,
with the hint of a German accent, remarked at my shoulder:
“The bamboula!”
It was Dr. Leyden who spoke—a shipmate whom I had met the day we both
went aboard at Demerara. He had just come down the Essequibo, after
three months’ orchid-hunting in the bush; an interesting man, who was by
profession what one might call a “market-naturalist.” By that I mean
that he was one of these not ultra-scientific collectors who can tell a
rare specimen when they see it and who do the outdoor work of the
“closet naturalist,” in whose place they get the fever, and to whom they
are ready to sell fame at so much per bone, or bug, or plant. He had
been everywhere, barring the populous communities, and was at home with
all primitive peoples. “No, Doctor,” he said to me one day, “I speak
very few languages, no more than nine or ten, but I am acquainted with a
great many dialects!” He could acquire an ordinary savage dialect in
about a month.
“What is it?” said I, in answer to his remark. “A dance?”
“Perhaps—it sounds like it. There are but few lights yonder in the
village and there are torches moving on the mountain-side. Wait—let us
see.”
Just below us a shore-boat was hanging to the staging at the foot of the
accommodation ladder, waiting, no doubt, to take some visitors ashore.
Leyden called down to them in Créole, asking if there was to be a dance
that night. One of the men replied somewhat sulkily that there was not.
“A minute,” said Leyden, turning to me. He slipped below, and directly I
heard what appeared to be the voice of a Haytian stevedore coming from
one of the freight-ports. A boatman in the bow replied guardedly, and
for a few minutes there was a conversation in low tones. Soon it ceased,
and Leyden rejoined me.
“There is to be a dance,” said he, “but it is a small affair.”
“Was that you talking from below?” I asked.
“Yes. I stood back in the shadow, and the fellow thought that he was
speaking with one of the black gang. They do not like to discuss the
bamboula with _leblancs_.”
“Your imitation was extraordinary. If I had not suspected what you were
up to I could have sworn that it was one of the Haytian boatmen talking.
You must have lived in this country.”
“It was but three months, and that several years ago. I came here to
catch snails. There was an experience—a thing odd and uneven. It is
possible that you would be interested—listen!” He held up one hand.
From out of the illusive velvety depths that marked the contours of the
tumbling hills came monotonously the “tom-tom-tom-tom-tom-tom-tom,” now
rising with the puff of the land breeze, waning slightly, yet unvarying
as the swing of a pendulum. With it came the night smells of flowers
drenched in dew and the mouldy reek of the tropic woods.
“Smell it!” said Leyden. He leaned both elbows on the rail and dropped
the butt of his cigar into the black water, where it drowned with a
spiteful little hiss. “The ‘bamboula’—the smell of the trees and the
stephanotis—_ach_, how it seems as if it were last night! That bamboula,
with its tom-tom-tom! First it is quaint, then it is a nuisance, then
irritating, then fascinating, and last of all it maddens. To think that
such a people should have learned the secret of repeated concussions on
a single group of brain-cells——”
“You have heard it before?” I interrupted, for I knew all of this he was
telling me and wanted his story.
“Yes. It was when I was here five years ago looking for snails. I was
crossing on a French boat, and the second day out I met the Doctor and
Madame Fouchère. He was a Haytian, a _marabout_, an Adonis carved out of
jet, for you know that breed are of a type magnificent and hold their
fineness of skin and feature far into advanced age. He was an
intelligent man, highly educated and skilled in his profession. I
learned afterwards that he was the left-handed son of a former President
by a _marabout_ woman—one of the usual cases of _placage_ of those high
in official circles. Fouchère had been educated in France, and after
talking with him for a while one forgot that he was black; yet I will
confess to a sense of shock when he presented me to Madame.
“She might easily have passed for pure French. I fancy that I was the
only person aboard who could see the outcrop of African—or, to be
polite, Haytian. She was charming in manner and appearance, inclined to
be fair, with blue eyes and that dusky blonde hair which will defy any
pedigree. Her face was pretty, rather piquant, and her figure _svelte_
and full of grace. Altogether she was most attractive and not lacking in
a certain _chic_, but there was a furtive expression about her eyes like
that which I have noticed in the eyes of a trained lioness.
“I talked with the Fouchères many times during the voyage, and learned
that since their marriage they had lived in Paris and were returning to
Hayti for the first time. Madame, it appeared, although Haytian by
birth, had been sent to a convent school in France when a mere child and
had not visited her native country since then.
“The day after our arrival in New York we sailed for Hayti by the Dutch
mail. By this time I had grown to know them quite well. A very decent
fellow, Fouchère; different from the average educated Haytian—but, then,
he was of quite a higher type. On parting at Port-au-Prince he made me
promise to visit them before I left the island.”
Leyden paused and shifted his position, leaning back against an awning
stanchion and hooking the fingers of one hand over the bolt-rope above
his head. The night had darkened, for a heavy cloud-bank had drifted
across to shroud that part of the sky where the late moon would rise. It
welded to itself the dim, broken outline of the mountain-tops and gave
to the sable contour of the land the sinister aspect of looming almost
to the zenith—and all the while from somewhere just beneath the surface
came the hollow, rhythmic beat of the bamboula.
“Enough to drive one _loi_,” muttered Leyden.
I heard a rustling from the shore-boat lying at the staging. The crew
were softly picking up their oars.
“They are getting restless, those fellows below. They cannot stand it
long, this night and that noise. Ho! they are shoving off without their
fares.” He leaned over the rail and hailed the boatman in Créole.
“_Ou ça v’aller?_” he called, with a trace of irony. They paid no
attention.
“_Attention, mon cher! Ou ça v’aller?_” he called, peremptorily.
“_Ca ou dit!_” growled one of the men, sulkily.
“_Côté bamboula la?_” called Leyden. They began to row again, without
answering, but it seemed to me that I caught a mutter which sounded like
“_nère vous écrasse!_”
Leyden chuckled. “Like master, like man in this savage country,” he
remarked, absently. “But I was telling you about Fouchère. When I had
got my snails and a beetle or two I remembered my promise to Fouchère
and looked him up. He had a nice place, for Hayti, up at La Coupe. I
sent word that I was coming the day before, and one of his servants came
down the mountain on horseback with a note from Madame expressing
herself as charmed. I went up the following forenoon. You know what the
journey is from Port-au-Prince to La Coupe: six miles of steady upward
strain by two emaciated, dying ponies, along a road which the rains have
made the dry bed of a torrential cataract; a half-wrecked surrey
fastened together with ropes, two of the wheels on the wrong side
before, the bush turning in the hub of one of them and screaming like a
soul in torment; bad sights and bad smells at every hand, and all about
you scenery which seems almost as divine as the Garden of Paradise.
“When finally I arrived, feeling like the pea in a tin whistle, the
Fouchères were awaiting me; and when Madame led me through the house to
the verandah in the rear, whence one got the full magnificence of the
view of the green valley stretching away to Port-au-Prince, the
sparkling blue of the bay, the vivid green of the mountains rising
behind Bisoton, and far in the distance the cloud-capped island of
Gonave, I felt amply repaid for the sun and the dust and other trials of
the trip up.
“Our _dejeuner_ was very good, though, like even the best in Hayti,
falling just a little short of being clean, and later in the day Dr.
Fouchère ordered his ponies saddled, and we rode higher up the mountain
to a point whence we were able to enjoy a magnificent view of the bay on
one side and the big lakes which form part of the geographical boundary
between Hayti and Santo Domingo on the other.
“We dined at six, for the Haytians retire early when they retire at all.
After dinner, as we sat upon the verandah with our cigars, I became
conscious of a certain lack of repose on the part of both my host and
hostess. Madame was obviously making an effort to be at ease, yet all of
the time it seemed to me that she was under a certain tension; alert,
expectant and a little restive—as one listens for a summons—or fears
that perhaps it may have passed unobserved. Dr. Fouchère was also
_distrait_, and several times I noticed that he turned his head sharply
to one side, as if striving to catch some hidden sound.
“It was such a night as this—dark, still, partly clouded, but with stars
and a late moon. At times there would be a flare of lightning in the
south, but the five o’clock shower had come and gone and there would be
no more rain. I was narrating an experience in Java, and they appeared
to be interested; then, as I talked on, there came pulsing up from the
valley beneath the slow, measured beat of a bamboula.
“I heard a rustle from the _chaise-longue_ occupied by Madame; the dull
glow at the end of Dr. Fouchère’s cigar blazed suddenly bright, then
died away again.
“I went on with my story, but all of the time that wretched drum was
sounding its even, tireless beat, and, although a good way off, there
was something insistent about the noise which refused to be ignored. As
I talked on, it began to set a time for my speech, and I found myself
unconsciously trying to adjust it to my words, or, more properly, to
adjust my words to _it_. Some people have a more distinct perception of
time and rhythm, just as some have a keener musical ear, and I have
both. The result was that before long I began to get a bit confused,
missed the point of my anecdote and finished lamely and with some anger.
“‘Will that fellow never finish beating that drum?’ I demanded
impatiently of my host. Of course, I had heard such instruments before
during my sojourn in the country, and had often noticed the children
thumping them in the daytime, so that the sound had no especial
significance for me.
“The lighted end of Dr. Fouchère’s cigar suddenly glowed again, then he
remarked: ‘I am afraid that noise will go on all night, Dr. Leyden. I
understand that the peasants are having one of their dances to-night.’
He slightly emphasized the word peasants.
“‘The bamboula?’ I asked, curiously, for, of course, I knew of the rites
attendant upon voodoo worship, although I had never witnessed them.
“‘Yes,’ he answered; ‘one of my servants told me this evening that there
was to be a dance to-night. This relic of paganism is one of the curses
of our country, Dr. Leyden. Although we whites have done our best to
discountenance it, it still persists.’
“Unlike most Haytians of the better class, who pretend to a black
aristocracy socially superior to the white, Dr. Fouchère always referred
to himself as white, although a blacker man never walked in the full
blaze of the equatorial sun. No doubt this was due to his prolonged
residence among the white race.
“‘Is the affair, then, as bad as it is painted?’ I inquired, for I had
heard some very somber stories of the bamboula.
“He hesitated for an instant, and in the pause my ear caught the click
of Madame’s little slipper tapping the floor to the time of the distant
drum.
“‘It is primitive,’ replied my host. ‘A virile people do not forget in a
day the customs of centuries.’ He paused again, and, as before, I heard
the click-click of Madame’s slipper marking the beat of the drum.
“‘Perhaps Dr. Leyden is fatigued and would wish to retire,’ she
suggested. ‘One rises early——’
“‘Indeed,’ I protested, ‘I am accustomed to sleep but little, but pray
do not let me keep you and Dr. Fouchère from your repose.’ To tell the
truth, the thought of lying on a bed and counting the strokes of that
infernal drum was terrifying to me.
“There was another brief pause, but in the interval I heard Fouchère’s
fingers softly tapping the rail in concert with the drum and the slipper
of Madame.”
Leyden paused and stared into the viscid water beneath. The land breeze
was fanning steadily now; the regular pulses of sound had swelled in
volume, but the interval was unchanged.
He continued, without looking up. “‘_Derrière mornes, gagner mornes_,’
as the Haytian proverb has it,” he sighed. “But I did not guess what was
behind their solicitude for my comfort. Fouchère politely denied any
wish to retire, and Madame said that she would wait a little longer
before asking to be excused.
“‘Come, we will smoke a fresh cigar,’ said Fouchère, presently. He
clapped his hands, but no servant appeared.
“‘The rascals are all out,’ he said, apologetically. ‘If you will pardon
me, I will go myself.’
“I turned to Madame. ‘Do you not find some of these customs rather
terrifying?’ I asked; ‘and this country, with its glaring sunlight and
impenetrable shade, its rank, exuberant, primordial peoples——’ I heard
her give a short gasp in her throat; then she turned to me, bringing her
white face, with its delicate features and great, luminous eyes, close
to mine.
“‘They _live_!’ she answered, in a low, fierce voice. ‘They _live_, and
_feel_, and their blood runs——’
“She sank back, and at this moment Dr. Fouchère returned and offered me
a cigar, which I took thankfully, for I wanted to drown the sensual
smell of plant and fern wafted from the woods beneath and the maddening
odor of the stephanotis growing in the garden at our feet. If he had
offered me strong drink, cognac, absinthe, or even opium, I might have
taken it, too, for there was something in the darkness of the night that
blinded the reason and voices in the soft air and scent-laden breeze
that called insidiously to the senses; and all the while droned on the
amphorous note of the drum, though now it seemed to come from the
inside, impelling one to fervid action.
“‘Those fools will dance and drink and revel to-night,’ growled
Fouchère, ‘and to-morrow there will not be one in the village fit to
stand upon his feet.’
“‘Then,’ said I, with an attempt at jocularity, ‘they may seek your
professional advice.’
“‘No,’ he muttered, ‘they will go to the _papa-loi_—the priest—the
arch-devil——’
“There was a swift rustle, and Madame had leapt to her feet and was
pacing the verandah with clinging, cat-like steps. I arose.
“‘I am fatigued from sitting still,’ she explained, with a light but
nervous laugh. ‘See, the moon is rising.’
“I glanced toward the east and saw a dull yellow glow before which the
low stars paled. Madame permitted herself another turn of the verandah,
and as she passed the banded shaft of light which smote through the
jalousies from the illuminated room I noticed that her slim fingers were
closing and opening as if she were in pain. Her light footsteps fell in
unison with the beat of the bamboula.
“My host and I talked on different things, and still Madame paced back
and forth, and every time she passed the barred zone of light I saw the
white fingers writhing in and out, and at times clutching the light
fabric of her skirt in a grip that left it creased and seamed—and still
the drum beat on and on. Fouchère’s manner of speech had changed; his
statements were short and arbitrary, as if challenging contradiction;
his chair had come down to all four legs, and he sat bolt upright,
tense, together, as if prepared to spring upward at a bound. As the
light over the mountain glowed brighter I could see the silhouette of
his straight back against the sky, as straight and cleanly cut as one of
the posts of the verandah.
“Soon Madame paused in her promenade, and, walking to the rail, gazed at
the glowing light in the sky, and as she stood, the drum, partially
drowned before by her light step and the swish of her skirts, welled out
resonantly. I glanced at her curiously. It was still too dark to
distinguish her features, but a naturalist, or, more properly, perhaps,
a collector, can see things to which better eyes than his are blind, and
it seemed to me that I caught a swift quiver as it flashed across her
mobile face. Suddenly she turned.
“‘I think that I shall beg to be excused,’ she said, in a low voice.
‘The heat of the day has fatigued me, and the night air is cool and
promises refreshing sleep. Would not Monsieur wish also to retire?’
“Dr. Fouchère arose as if to show me to my room. I had no desire to go
to bed, for I did not think I could sleep; but, following the line of
least resistance, I went.
“Lying on my bed, with that old and jaundiced moon peering through the
window and the whole earth wrapped in the stillness of utter space, the
bamboula, which had never ceased, seemed pounding at the portals of my
brain. Have you ever, after a day of almost superhuman physical
exertion—say a long march through the jungle carrying a double pack—lain
too tired to sleep and listened to your overtaxed heart pounding its
pulse against your ear-drums? No? Well, it is hard to say what else that
drum was like. It appeared, too, to have grown louder, although the time
continued to be exactly the same.
“Before long I dozed a little, but the drum beat on, weaving weird and
distorted pictures. I saw the stark, whirling figures glistening
ebony-red in the lurid firelight, the outer circle of fantastic shadows
gyrating in a wider arc; the flash of flames between the circling
shapes—others partly hidden—watching from the black hollows between the
buttressed boles of the trees. The old, old rites—bursting out in this
civilized era like embryonic cells in the adult—cancer-cells—you
understand, Doctor. Later on, the sickly yellow moon, high in the
zenith, its pale light quenching that of the dying embers of the fire
and waning itself before the dawn. The things it looked down upon—the
heaving figures of the devotees—and all about the pure, sweet peace of
the tropic night!
“‘Tom-tom-tom-tom-tom-tom-tom-tom,’ went the drum, and then I awoke with
a shiver and began to dress. I stepped to the window for added light,
and other noises than those of the drum welled up from the valley
beneath. Air was stirring, and it blew through my jalousies and filled
the room with the smell of the stephanotis.
“Quietly as a cat I slipped down the stairs and out into the night. Not
a sound, not a flicker of light came from any of the little houses in
the village. I followed the road down the mountain for a way, and then,
as I am a tracker and the moon was well up, I found a path which others
had taken since the dew. It skirted the hill, then dipped abruptly into
the jungle.
“It was easy to guess its course, for with my bushman’s education I saw
that many persons had traveled that trail since sunset. Down it went,
twisting and turning, this way and that; but all the time the beat of
the drum, though muffled by the heavy foliage, was growing nearer and
nearer.
“It was dark in the jungle, but the moon was up, and there were open
spaces here and there. The smell of the smoke—and another smell—were in
the air, and I was growing wary and looking for sentries, when my eye
was caught by something white hanging to a thorn. I loosed it and held
it in a moon-ray—and recognized a fragment of the gown worn that night
by Madame Fouchère.”
Leyden stopped speaking, then began to hum a little German doggerel.
Down below the visitors were saying good-night, and I could hear the men
kissing each other on their thick lips. “_Ah, mon cher!_” they kept
saying. “_Oh—oh, mon cher!—Oh, m’cher!_” Then there would be a rattle of
very good Parisian French, because the better classes pride themselves
upon their elegance of speech.
“And then?” said I, presently, to Dr. Leyden. He threw out his hands
with a Teutonic gesture of disgust.
“_Ach!_—then I went back, of course. I found a muddy spot in the open,
just to make sure, and I saw that Fouchère had passed also. He wore the
latest French boots—Madame was still in her high-heeled French slippers
at twenty francs the pair.”
He turned to me with a languid air. “One does not spy upon one’s host
and hostess during their religious devotions, you know. You understand,
Doctor. Those things are not quite—shall we say dignified? Besides—by
the way, have you a cigar, or shall I ring? Ah, thanks! As I was about
to say, the thing had lost its—its glamour. Madame was too nearly white.
It was the primitive element that had so strongly appealed to me—not the
hyper-æsthetic. One need not go to Hayti for that. Fouchère belonged at
the party, perhaps—but Madame....
“No, I went back, and the sound of a bamboula has never since been able
to strike a sympathetic chord in me—but I detest the odor of the
stephanotis.”
------------------------------------------------------------------------
INTO THE DARK
“TO-NIGHT, Doctor,” said Leyden one evening as we went on deck, “let us
forswear the exchange of blood-curdling yarns. Let us be sociable and
play poker with my Czechian friend, Rosenthal, and Mr. Mallock.”
I agreed and we went into the _rook kamer_, where the others presently
joined us. We played for perhaps an hour; I do not remember just how the
game stood when we were interrupted by a tragic incident.
From somewhere beneath us there came a sudden muffled roar; the little
vessel quivered as though struck by a shell; an instant of silence, then
up from below there came a scream so wild and hoarse and laden with
fearful human anguish that we all leaped to our feet. Shouts, yells,
orders in half a dozen tongues rose in a clamorous medley; but through
them all as a bugle rings out on the firing-line there rose again that
wild, wide-throated scream of intolerable physical pain.
I knew the sound. I had heard it several times. The latest was in San
Francisco on one of the big United States transports when a stevedore
had up-ended a crate of primers which had exploded and filled the man’s
body with splinters so that he looked like a porcupine. Leyden had heard
it also, as the first glance at his face told me, and from his
expression I saw that he had guessed the present cause; but there was no
time to inquire, for the screams now followed each other in quick
succession and were approaching, and such screams! Opposite me
Rosenthal, who had thrown down his hand at the beginning of the play and
was about to take a swallow of his Rhine wine, paused, the glass half
way to his lips, and hardened, world-worn adventurer that the Jew was,
he positively looked sickened at the sound.
And then the clamor reached our deck, but forward, and we turned as one
man and stepped out of the _rook kamer_. Abreast of the steam
steering-gear there was a confused mass of yelling, gyrating figures,
and from these we saw emerge a single one who with outspread arms and
wide fingers came lurching toward us, and as he ran he screamed.
The bulk of my professional work has been of an emergency character, so
that even as the man approached I was framing a diagnosis, and before he
had reached the part of the deck where we stood, it was made. The jar of
the explosion, the screams of appalling pain, and now, swiftly as he
approached, the suffocating fumes of ammonia had preceded him, and I
knew on the instant that there had been an explosion of the ice-making
machine and that the victim was one who had bathed in the liquid fire
set loose. Then as he bore down upon us, followed by the clamoring crowd
who sought to restrain him for his good, something of the spirit of the
hunted animal fastened on the poor frenzied intellect and he sprang for
the rail.
“_Ach_, no!” muttered Leyden in my ear, and at the same instant leaped
like a cat; one of his powerful, nervous hands closed on the man’s naked
shoulder and the next moment the poor wretch was on his back, pawing the
air, groping at his livid face, while his screams smote back the crowd
of the curious.
“Quick, Doctor!” said Leyden, and the words wedged in his throat as the
pungent fumes gripped his trachea. He tried again to speak, but by that
time I had seized Rosenthal’s bottle of Rhine wine from the table and
had begun to pour it over the man’s face. Of course, there are better
things than Rhine wine with which to neutralize stronger ammonia, but
that was the nearest at hand and haste was requisite.
Presently the ship’s doctor arrived with dilute acetic acid; by that
time Leyden and I were both nearly asphyxiated and the man was in a
syncope, poor fellow! He saw light again, but never outline.
Our game was abandoned. Leyden and I strolled aft to our favorite place
by the hand steering-gear, where Leyden puffed at his porcelain pipe in
silence for so long a time that I began to think that he would hold to
the resolution made early in the evening and not tell the story which
hung on the edge of his mind.
“_Ach!_” he exclaimed suddenly, and taking the pipe from his mouth,
tapped the horn mouth-piece against the awning stanchion. “_Ach!_ One
would almost think that God might spare a man two such spectacles as
that which we have just witnessed. I am accustomed to seeing men killed,
Doctor; also to seeing men suffer within reasonable limits, but I
protest against casually witnessing torture....
“It was not so long ago, Doctor,” he resumed presently, “I was going out
to Java via Singapore, and the first night out, while chatting with the
chief engineer, who was an old friend of mine, his second came to the
door to report on something concerning the engines. I did not notice
what he said, for the moment he stepped into the blaze of the
incandescent lights I set my memory at work to place him.
“This second engineer was, I think, Doctor, the most strikingly
beautiful man I have ever seen. Really, the poor fellow was so handsome
that he was almost disagreeably conspicuous, because one felt that no
matter how great the effort, his deeper personality would never be able
to hold the pace set by his physical appearance. I will not try to
describe him; figure to yourself a powerful frame of athletic
perfection, the face of a very masculine archangel, broad forehead,
blazing sapphire eyes, with rather dark lashes, although his hair was
yellow, a wide mouth of singularly winning expression and a jaw which
was aristocratically masterful. He said but half a dozen words, and then
at a nod from the chief, went out, but brief as was my glimpse of him I
was no less impressed by his striking beauty than by the fact that I had
known some of his breed.
“‘Who is that fellow?’ I asked of old Burton, the chief.
“‘Dalton, my second,’ said he; ‘a good looking lad, is he not?’
“‘Extremely,’ I answered; ‘is he as good as he looks?’
“‘Aye, and the more credit to him for that, to my mind,’ said Burton,
and went on, ‘D’ye know, Doctor Leyden, the Almighty puts an awful
strain on the moral construction of a man when he models him on the
lines of yon lad! And the boy knows it and is not too proud to shun the
danger. You’ll scarce lay eyes on him between here and Singapore.’
“‘Is he shy of his good looks?’ I asked.
“‘Less that than proper-minded. If ever a man was built to carry an
overload of women’s fancies, ’tis this same Dalton. They can see nothing
else when the poor lad’s about, not that he seems to notice it.’
“‘Is he a good man professionally?’ I inquired.
“‘He is all of that and more,’ answered Burton, and was going on to tell
me that, although off duty at that moment, Dalton was hard at work
superintending some repairs on the ice-machine when he was interrupted
... just as we were a few moments ago.”
“No!” I cried involuntarily, as Leyden paused; “not that!”
“Yes, Doctor ... the sequence of events was almost identical: the same
explosion ... the same sensation as of being hit by a shell ... the same
instant’s pause followed by cries, one louder than the others, and the
same stampede for the deck, the air, freedom from torture and
suffocation; but in Dalton’s case no one was quick-witted enough to
think of Rhine wine or vinegar, and we had to hold him until the doctor
came.... _Ach!_...
“It seemed a long time, Doctor, especially as the man’s strength was so
great that after his first mad rush his mind grappled with the situation
and he lay without a moan, without a struggle. I assisted the surgeon in
the little that it was possible to do for the poor fellow, and it was
while we were bathing his face that I solved the problem of his
identity. For many years, Doctor, I have, whenever in England, made a
tour of inspection of several large estates where I occupy a rather
unique position of consulting horticulturist. To these patrons I
sometimes ship from different parts of the world bulbs or plants or
seeds or specimens in which I judge they will be interested. It was
while on one of these visits, some of which have become more of a social
than professional character, that I met Dalton, which, of course, was
not his name. He was then at school, a charming boy, an only son and the
heir to one of the oldest titles and most magnificent estates in
England.
“This discovery did not come to me with any shock of surprise, for
England is unlike America, where one often sees the thoroughbred working
with his hands, and I had suspected that his was either some youthful
tragedy or the baton sinister.
“Dalton lay quite still while the surgeon dressed and bandaged his face;
then, as the last pin was being inserted, he said in a steady voice:
“‘How about my eyes, Doctor?’
“We’ll hope for the best, old chap,’ said this doctor, and I saw
Dalton’s mouth, the only feature in sight, set with the rigidity of a
death-mask. His chest filled deeply and he swallowed once or twice, and
when he spoke again his voice was dry but quite firm.
“‘You think the chances are against me, don’t you, Doctor?’ he said
quietly. The surgeon looked doubtfully at me and I nodded.
“‘Your case is like this, Dalton,’ said he, ‘if the caustic action of
the ammonia has not burned through the conjunctiva and into the cornea
the prognosis is good; otherwise it is bad—but I don’t anticipate total
blindness.’
“‘How soon will you be able to tell with certainty?’ asked Dalton,
calmly.
“‘Probably when I dress your eyes to-morrow,’ said the Doctor, adding,
‘at the worst, you will never be in the dark....’
“‘I know....’ Dalton’s voice was very low, very quiet; ... ‘you mean
that I will live behind ground glass....’
“The firm mouth stiffened and the triangular space which it occupied
beneath the bandages grew suddenly white. At a sign from the doctor we
picked him up and carried him to his berth and left him there to fight
his fight alone.
“That night I sat late with Burton and the pious old chief had a sharp
tussle to remain within the bounds of Christian submission as we
discussed the accident. I soon discovered that he knew more of Dalton
than he cared to tell, but I asked no questions. When I left him at
eleven o’clock I passed the open door of Dalton’s room, and as I did so
I was conscious of one of those long, deep, shuddering inspirations
which scarcely carry sound and seem wrung less from the body than the
tortured soul.
“‘Are you in pain?’ I whispered, for I did not wish to wake him if he
should be asleep.
“‘In torture, Doctor Leyden,’ came the low answer; ‘but it is not of the
flesh.’
“This was the first indication that I was known to him. I slipped into
the room and went to the head of his bunk.
“‘May I sit with you?’ I asked.
“‘Thanks ... you know me, of course?’
“‘Yes,’ said I. I dropped on the locker beside him, and for several
moments neither of us spoke.
“‘What do _you_ think of my chances of losing my sight, Doctor?’ he
asked presently.
“‘I think,’ said I, ‘that your sight will be impaired, but not entirely
destroyed. One eye appears to have been less injured than the other.’
“‘Do you think that I will be able to do my work?’ he asked quickly.
“‘Perhaps ... it is impossible to tell, my dear boy, until
to-morrow—very likely not for several days.’
“Again I felt that shuddering sigh which was less a sound than an
impression.
“‘It is not for myself that I am afraid, Doctor Leyden,’ he said in a
few moments. ‘There is some one else ... other people....” My word! One
could see his very heart squirming in the grip of his feudal pride.
“‘Tell me all about it, my boy,’ said I. ‘Life has shown me many of her
poisons ... and their antidotes; perhaps I can help you.’
“‘Thank you, Doctor,’ said he, and went on to tell me his story.
Briefly, he had several years before committed the indiscretion of
running off with another man’s wife; not long afterward the husband had
died and Dalton had married the woman. His father had cut him off
without a penny, but through a friend he had got a billet as engineer,
for which his technical education had fitted him, and had in time risen
solely through his merits. The wife and their two children were living
in Singapore.
“There were qualities in the romance, Doctor, which raised it to a plane
higher than most similar affairs. Ten years of poverty had brought them
no regrets, and this alone seemed to me sufficient to warrant the breach
of etiquette; then, the former husband was a rake, or, what is far
worse, an ex-rake. Also, the love of this man and woman had grown and
deepened and gathered volume until, and this I gathered from what Dalton
did _not_ tell me, the love itself contained in him had raised the
nature of this man to a sublime height, where it would almost seem that
he had undergone an apotheosis; this perfect love which had begun so
imperfectly had matured this creature, who was the result of generations
of highly bred and highly cultured ancestors, until the man was an
Olympian, Doctor, a demi-god, or I am no judge of men.
“Before long I left him, soothed as much as might be, and promising to
sleep. When I visited him the following day he was calm, and one read
only in the lines of the firm and beautiful mouth which cut the
triangular space between the bandages, ‘_I wait_.’”
Leyden’s voice grew muffled.
“My word! I couldn’t stand it, Doctor, for very long; it was worse than
the accident itself. I sneaked off into Burton’s room, and there the
surgeon found me an hour later lying on the old man’s bunk, for he was
below at the time, and holding a capsized book in front of my face.
There was a simplicity about this doctor which appealed to me.
“‘Oh, hell!’ said he, and dropped into Burton’s desk chair and buried
his face in his hands, and there he sat until presently the chief came
in. From behind my book I could feel the grizzled old fellow looking
from one to the other of us, and presently he gave a husky and inquiring
grunt.
“‘Blind,’ said the doctor, ... stone blind,’ and with that old Burton
kicked shut the door which opened on the boiler-room, and the three of
us began to snivel in the shamefaced way characteristic of certain
emotional members of the Anglo-Saxon race. I think Burton prayed a
little, for he was inclined to be theosophical.
“‘Does he know?’ asked Burton, presently.
“‘No,’ muttered the doctor, ... I ... I put him off....’
“‘You put him off!’ I snapped. ‘Do you mean to say that you have any
hope?’
“‘There’s none to have,’ he answered a bit sulkily; ‘the cornea might
just as well have been seared with a Paquelin....’
“‘And yet you put him off!’ I snarled, ‘and add the hell of uncertainty
to the agony he’s got to suffer anyway when he hears the truth!’
“‘Go in and tell him yourself then,’ grumbled this doctor.
“‘I will,’ said I, and flung open the door and went out. I found Dalton
lying on his bunk, his face swathed in fresh bandages, his straight
mouth sphinx-like.
“‘Dalton,’ said I, roughly, ‘the doctor has just told me that you are
blind.’
“‘Has he?’ said Dalton, calmly. ‘The poor chap lacked the nerve to tell
me, and I don’t know that I blame him much. Beastly thing, that, to have
to tell a chap that he’s blind.’
“I began to choke up again, Doctor. I had been purposely rough,
commonplace, and I had expected and in fact half wished an hysterical
outburst. As it was, the situation was infinitely more difficult. For
several minutes Dalton did not speak.
“‘Would you like me to stay with you?’ I asked, ‘or shall I get out?’
“The bandaged head rolled toward me and the fine mouth curved in a smile
which showed the white, even teeth.
“‘Don’t stay, Doctor; it is horribly depressing for you and I am so busy
thinking that I don’t notice being alone. Come in and see me to-night,
if you like.’
“I left him then and went aft on the other side of the ship from
Burton’s room, and as I went I looked my hardest at the blue water and
the blue sky and the bright-work and the bright faces of the children
scampering up and down the deck ... and then a mist came before my eyes
and my vision was as Dalton’s would be, ‘behind ground glass.’
“That night I went to him again. He greeted me quietly as I came in.
“‘Doctor Leyden,’ said he, ‘it is a terrible thing to be blind, is it
not?’
“I did not answer.
“‘But it is not a terrible thing to die. We none of us fear to face
death; most of us enjoy a bit of a tussle with the grim old man.’
“I had expected this and waited for him to go on.
“‘To myself,’ said Dalton, ‘I consider that I am dead, practically
dead.’ He was silent for a few minutes and then said, ‘Do you not
consider, Doctor Leyden, that we have all of us a certain claim upon
each other as fellow-men?’
“‘Undoubtedly,’ I answered.
“‘I am glad that you feel as I do,’ said he composedly, ‘because my
claim upon _you_, Doctor Leyden, is that you go to my father and tell
him of my death and its cause and make him support my family as they
should be supported. He must make my oldest boy his heir. Will you do
this for me? There is no desperate hurry; within a year will be time
enough.’
“‘Yes,’ said I, ‘I will do it.’
“He was silent for many minutes and then he turned to me, and again his
flashing smile illumined the triangular open space.
“‘And now as to details,’ said he. ‘You would not try to prevent me if I
were to get out of my bunk and get over the rail, would you, Doctor
Leyden?’
“‘No,’ I answered. ‘I would not try to prevent you.’
“There was another silence, and then he said in a low voice:
“‘Don’t you think that it would be easier ... for her?’
“‘No,’ I said, ‘I don’t.’
“‘But living I can only be a weight, a drag.’
“‘Her little children are that,’ said I.
“‘But don’t you see,’ he cried, ‘how different it is? They will grow
up....’ His voice rose in key.
“‘They will grow up and need her less,’ said I; ‘it is while they are
drags, weights, that they give her the greatest joy.’
“‘Don’t,’ he groaned, ‘... don’t you see, man, that my mind was at rest
about it; that I was cheerful, happy, when it was only a matter of
dying, ... and now that you are taking that away, think of the horror of
what’s left....’ His mouth writhed.
“‘You are the chief sufferer,’ said I. ‘My sympathy is for you. I did
not mean to destroy your faith in the ethics of this thing. Personally,
for your _own_ good, I would advise you to get overboard, and if you
wish I will lead you to the rail. I have been truthfully answering the
questions which you asked me concerning your wife....’
“We were both silent for many minutes.”
“‘I begin to see it now, I begin to see it ... you are right....’ And
then, Doctor, as he looked down the long, dark, narrow corridor
stretching away into the years of obscurity before him the shadow fell
across his soul and I left him writhing beneath the weight of his doom.”
Leyden paused and turned his pale, classic face toward the liquid
darkness of the star-flecked sky. “... See all of those planets,
Doctor,” he mused, “and think of what the sight of just one of them
would mean to a blind man ... a single break in the utter obliteration
of a sense ... a pin-prick in the curtain.... I once witnessed an
operation which restored to a blind man the perception of light alone
... no vision, only light ... and he would place his hands over his eyes
and then take them away and laugh with the joy of a heart too full for
utterance. Think of the myriad things we see which go to waste! My word,
it makes one wish to treasure the image of each passing object....”
“And now, Doctor, I will tell you the rest, and then you shall tell me
if I was a fool to answer him so truthfully; in my own mind I have never
been quite sure.
“Three days saw the end of his period of frantic and agonized
depression, for his stoicism and self-control abandoned him as soon as I
removed the balm of a voluntary death. In this time he would see none of
us; would eat because he had determined to live; but one could see that
a word of comfort, of sympathy, would be infuriating. Next came a week
of apathy while the wound was granulating ... inside and out. What is
it, Doctor, which regulates the duration of violent pain when its cause
still persists? In the case of this newly blinded man, with his high
vitality and potent perceptions, one could not conceive of such a thing
as reconciliation, nor did it arrive as such....”
“The first inkling I had of the change was while we were going down the
Red Sea. I had gone to pay my usual afternoon visit; one of the mess
boys was coming from Dalton’s room, and as he stepped into the corridor
I heard Dalton’s voice say peevishly:
“‘Be sure to get it well done and plenty of gravy ... do you hear,
plenty of gravy.’
“_Ach!_ For no reason the words shocked me more than when he had told me
of his wish to die! Plenty of gravy...! What could it matter to a man
newly blind if his gravy were of gall and wormwood? What _could_ it
matter?”
“Dalton had before this time recovered from the physical effects of the
shock; the epidermis of his face had not been deeply burned; the danger
to his eyes was due to the fact that the irritation of the caustic had
involuntarily forced him to hold the lids shut, thus causing the stuff
to burn the more deeply. His face had been blistered as it might from
any burn and the new skin had formed beneath, and at this time the
bandages were off and the only evidence of the accident was in the
pellucid film drawn across his pupils. He wore dark glasses to prevent
the irritant action of the light.
“It was a few days later that I received another shock. The chief and I
were standing by the railing talking when, glancing forward, I saw the
doctor come around the corner of the deck-house leading Dalton by the
hand. Burton caught sight of them as soon as I, and happening to glance
at him, I saw an odd expression cross his face; it was not alone the
shadow of pain and compassion, which would have been natural—there was
something puzzled in the look, something studious, contemplative. The
doctor led Dalton to a wicker _chaise-longue_ and left him there. The
face of the blind man was turned in our direction, but our voices failed
to reach him above the swash alongside.
“‘Poor lad!’ said Burton, in a low voice. ‘He were better dead, Doctor.
I ... I ... I did not think to see him abide by it....’ There was a
vague disappointment in the old man’s voice which irritated me.
“‘I agree with you that he would be better off himself if he were dead,’
I answered curtly, ‘but there are others than himself to consider.’
“Burton shook his head.
“‘’Twould be better for him if he were dead,’ he answered; ‘he can no
longer contribute to their support; and as far as sentiment is
concerned, why, do you not see, Doctor——’
“‘Do I not see what?’ I asked testily, the more so because I saw very
well, and I felt that it was my work.
“‘That he is no longer the same man,’ said Burton. ‘Look at the face of
him as he turns it this way. Do you think that dark glasses could ever
make that change?’
“Once again, Doctor, there ran through me the little chill which I had
felt on hearing Dalton emphasize the detail of his dinner. Burton was
right; he no longer was the same man, and as I realized this and was
able to look with clear sight far into his future I felt for the moment
as if I had tampered with the man’s soul. We are what we are by virtue
of our senses, Doctor, for it is through them that we give and receive
and translate and modify and perform the various functions and evolve
the phenomena, the sum of which is known as life. Of these senses sight
is perhaps the one through which we receive the most and must keep on
receiving, to fulfil the constant demand of the dependencies of this
sense, and just as the nature of a man is rounded and made fuller and
finer and greater by that which he sees, so must it shrivel and wane
when this tributary of the soul is cut off.
“It is, of course, unnecessary to state that Dalton was an object of the
most supreme compassion to the passengers, and where he had at first
shunned their expressions of sympathy I noticed that as the days wore on
he first endured, then courted them. His face, too, had changed; the
fine, sensitive lines about the mouth and eyes were gradually erased; he
began to put on flesh; his appetite was better than before the accident;
his demeanor grew to be gentle and passive. I have seen women read to
him by the hour and finally close the book and steal away in tears, but
do you know, Doctor, that while my compassion was as great as ever, the
change in the man had cooled my sympathy. I grew to be sorry for him
only with my head.”
“Burton understood. He said to me one day,’’Tis a rough thing, Doctor
Leyden, that I cannot take yon poor lad’s hurt more to heart, but ’tis
not as if ’twas Dalton himself in such trouble. Honestly, Doctor, I
believe that part of the man I loved was killed in him with the loss of
his sight....’ He glanced narrowly down the deck to where Dalton was
talking earnestly with one of the women passengers. ‘Look now ... one
cannot imagine Dalton so pouring out his soul to a stranger, for the lad
was always shut within himself with a double water-tight bulkhead!’
“‘He told me this morning,’ said I, ‘that the passengers were taking up
a collection for him.’
“‘Did he, now? ... but there! ... why not for a poor fellow with a wife
and children, struck blind in the performance of his duty? Only ...
only....’
“‘Only it is not like Dalton,’ said I, harshly.
“‘No, Doctor. Belike it is the humbleness of soul which comes to those
whom the Lord deeply chastens, ... and it is a balm, Doctor, ... a
balm....’
“When the ship reached Singapore I offered to conduct Dalton to his
home. It was a sweet spot on one of the charming little islands a short
row from the mainland; a bungalow half hidden in the foliage, a
diminutive jetty with a dozen steps leading into the dark green shadows.
As our sampan drew near I saw a woman with a toddling child on either
side step from this plushy background and descend the steps. Seeing me,
a white man and a stranger, she paused at the head of the toy jetty, but
as Dalton, wearing his dark glasses, began to fumble at the ladder with
no hail, no word of greeting, she slipped her hands from those of the
children and ran forward swiftly.
‘Hugh! ...’ she cried. ‘... Hugh!’
“‘One minute, girlie,’ answered Dalton. His voice was full, cheerful, a
_fat_ voice, Doctor, and a trifle flat in _timbre_, and as it reached
the ears of the woman I saw her stop as one might stop who runs to meet
a bullet full in the chest.
“‘Hugh!’ she cried again, and as she was by this time close at hand, I
spoke.
“‘He has met with an accident to his eyes ...,’ I began ... and then
looked away, but not in time to miss the expression of her face as she
cast her eyes first at her husband, then at me, ... and I knew that I
had fetched home a stranger to fill a husband’s place.”
Leyden paused and stared moodily at the bowl of his china pipe. “There
is a good deal in sacred literature, as well as in the laws of each
land, Doctor, concerning the impropriety of interfering with the
duration of a man’s life; is there anything regarding the sin of
interfering with his death ...? because there ought to be! It cannot be
pleasing to God to prolong an existence which He has culled in part....”
“Six months later I returned that way on my journey home from Java. I
took a sampan and was sculled across to the little island, and there in
front of the bungalow I found Dalton sitting beneath the high shade of
the royal palms. He had grown heavy; the last lines had left his face,
which was now smooth as that of a child. I noticed as his hands rested
on the arms of the chair that the thumbs had thickened, yet his other
senses had begun to do the mechanical work of his lacking sight.”
“‘Is that you, Leyden?’ he asked, in a full, flat, heavy voice, the
voice which suggested a fat throat. His two children were playing about
his chair; all three were munching a confection of sugar and chopped
cocoanut.
“‘Yes,’ he said, in answer to my question. ‘We are doing nicely. Ah,
Leyden, each cloud has its silver lining....’ His wife joined us at this
point and a glance at her face showed me the change. I had never known
it otherwise, yet the change was evident. ‘... I wrote to the earl ...’
continued Dalton—his voice grew slightly peevish—‘ ... and while he was
not above hurting the feelings of a poor blind man ...’—the fat voice
grew querulous—‘ ... he was generous ... very generous ...’—a complacent
note crept in.
“I glanced at the woman and a shiver ran down my back. ‘I am glad ...’ I
managed to mutter, ‘... very glad....’ She glanced at me warningly and
laid her finger on her lips, then nodded toward the landing. I shook his
hand, which was sticky from the sweet-meats.
“‘Good-bye ... I have barely time ...’ I mumbled and followed the woman
toward my boat.”
THE END
------------------------------------------------------------------------
● Transcriber’s Notes:
○ Missing or obscured punctuation was corrected.
○ Unbalanced quotation marks were left as the author intended.
○ Typographical errors were silently corrected.
○ Inconsistent spelling and hyphenation were made consistent only
when a predominant form was found in this book.
○ Text in italics is enclosed by underscores (_italics_).
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