3
It was drawing towards evening on the following day, and Madame Lemaire was quite alone in the inn. Hadj had gone to the village for some more keef, and Lemaire and Bouvier had set out together in the morning for Batna.
So she was quite alone. Her face was bruised and discoloured near the right eye. Her head ached. She felt immensely listless. To-day there was no activity in her misery. It seemed a slow-witted, lethargic thing, undeserving even of respect.
There were no customers. There was nothing to do, absolutely nothing. She went heavily into the arbour, and sank down upon a chair. At first she sat upright. But presently she spread her arms out upon the table, and laid her discoloured face on them, and remained so for a long time.
Any traveller, passing by on the road from the desert, would have thought that she was asleep. But she was not asleep. Nor had she slept all night. It is not easy to sleep after such punishment as she had received.
And no traveller passed by.
The flies, finding that the woman kept quite still, settled upon her face, her hair, her hands, cleaned themselves, stretched their legs and wings, went to and fro busily upon her. She never moved to drive them away.
She was not thinking just then. She was only feeling—feeling how she was alone, feeling that this enormous sun-dried land was about her, stretching away to right and left of her, behind her and before, feeling that in all this enormous, sun-dried land there was nobody who wanted her, nobody thinking of her, nobody coming towards her to take her away into a different life, into a life that she could bear.
All this she was dully feeling.
Perfectly still were the diseased vine-leaves above her head, motionless as she was. On them the insects went to and fro, actively leading their mysterious lives, as the flies went to and fro on her.
For a long time she remained thus. All the white road was empty before her as far as eye could see. No trail of smoke went up by the growing crops beside the distant tents of the Spahis. It seemed as if man had abandoned Africa, leaving only one of God’s creatures there, this woman who leaned across the discoloured table with her bruised face hidden on her arms.
The hour before sunset approached, the miraculous hour of the day, when Africa seems to lift itself towards the light that will soon desert it, as if it could not bear to let the glory go, as if it would not consent to be hidden in the night. Upon the salt mountain the crystals glittered.
The details of the land began to live as they had not lived all day. The wonderful clearness came, in which all things seem filled with supernatural meaning. And, even in the dullness of her misery, habit took hold of Madame Lemaire.
She lifted her head from her arms, and she stared down the long white road. Her gaze travelled. It started from the patch of glaring white before the arbour, and it went away like one who goes to a tryst. It went down the road, and on, and on. It reached the green of the crops. It passed the Spahis’ tents. It moved towards the distant mountains that hid the plains and the palms of Biskra.
The flies buzzed into the air.
Madame Lemaire had got up from her seat. With her hands laid flat upon the table she stared at the thread of white that was the limit of her vision. Then she lifted her hands and curved them, and put them above her eyes to form a shade. And then she moved and came out to the entrance of the arbour.
She had seen a black speck upon the road.
There was dust around it. As so often before she asked herself the question: “Who is it coming towards the inn from the desert?” But to-day she asked herself the question as she had never asked it before, with a sort of violence, with a passionate eagerness, with a leaping expectation. And she stepped right out into the road, as if she would go and meet the traveller, would hasten with stretched-out hands as to some welcome friend.
The sun dropped its burning rays upon her hair, and she realised her folly, took her hands from her eyes, and laughed to herself. Then she went back to the arbour and stood by the table waiting. Slowly—very slowly it seemed to Madame Lemaire—the black speck grew larger on the white. But there was very much dust to-day, and always the misty cloud was round it, stirred up by—was it a camel’s padding feet, or the hoofs of a horse, or—? She could not tell yet, but soon she would be able to tell.
Now it was approaching the watered land, was not far from the Spahis’ tents. And a great fear came upon her that it might turn aside to them, that it might be perhaps a Spahi riding home from his patrol of the desert. She felt that she could not bear to be alone any longer; that if she could not see and speak to someone before sunset she must go mad.
The traveller passed before the Spahis’ camp without turning aside; and now the dust was less, and Madame Lemaire could see that it was a Nomad mounted on a camel.
With a smothered exclamation she hurried into the inn. A sudden resolve possessed her. She would prepare a couscous. And then, if the Nomad desired to pass on without entering the inn, she would detain him.
She would offer him a couscous for nothing, only she must have company. Whoever the stranger was, however poor, however filthy, ragged, hideous, or even terrible, he must stay a while at the inn, distract her thoughts for an instant.
Without that she would go mad.
Quickly she began her preparations. There was time. He could not be here for twenty minutes yet, and the meal for a couscous was all ready. She had only to——
She moved frantically about the kitchen.
Twenty minutes later she heard the peevish roar of a camel from the road, and ran out to meet the Nomad, carrying the couscous. As she came into the arbour she noticed that it was already dark outside.
The night had fallen suddenly.
That night, as Lemaire and Bouvier were nearing the inn, riding slowly upon their mules, they heard before them in the darkness the angry snarling of a camel.
Almost immediately it died away.
“Madame has company,” said Bouvier. “There’s a customer at the Retour du Desert.”
“Some damned Arab!” said Lemaire. “Come for a coffee or a couscous. Much good that’ll do us!”
They rode on in silence. When they reached the inn, the road before it was empty.
“Mai foi,” said Bouvier. “Nobody here! The camel was getting up, then, and Madame is alone again.”
“Marie!” called Lemaire. “Marie! The absinthe!”
There was no reply.
“Marie! Nom d’un chien! Marie! The absinthe! Marie!”
He let his heavy body down from the mule.
“Where the devil is she? Marie! Marie!”
He went into the arbour, stumbled over something, and uttered a curse.
In reply to it there was a shrill and prolonged howl from the court.
“What is it? What’s the dog up to?” said Bouvier, whipping out his revolver and following Lemaire. “The table knocked over! What’s up? D’you think there’s anything wrong?”
The Kabyle dog howled again, slunk into the arbour from the court, and pressed itself against Lemaire’s legs. He gave it a kick in the ribs that sent it yelping into the night.
“Marie! Marie!”
There was the anger of alarm in his voice now; but no one answered his call.
Walking furtively, the two men passed through the doorway into the kitchen. Lemaire struck a match, lit a candle, took it in his hand, and they searched the inn, and the court, then returned to the arbour. In the arbour, close to the overturned table, they found a broken bowl, with a couscous scattered over the earth beside it. Several vine-leaves were trodden into the ground near by.
“Someone’s been here,” said Lemaire, staring at Bouvier in the candlelight, which flickered in his angry and distressed eyes. “Someone’s been. She was bringing him a couscous. See here!”
He pointed with his foot.
Bouvier laughed uneasily.
“Perhaps,” he said—“perhaps it was the Devil come for her. You remember! She said last night, if he came, she’d go with him.”
The candle dropped from Lemaire’s shaking hand.
“Damn you! Why d’you talk like that?” he exclaimed furiously. “She must be somewhere about. Let’s have an absinthe. Perhaps she’s gone to the village.”
They had an absinthe and searched once more.
Presently Hadj, who was half mad with keef, joined them. The rumour of what was going forward had got about in the village; and other Arabs glided noiselessly through the night to share in the absinthe and the quest, for that night Lemaire forgot to lock up the bottle.
But the hostess of the inn at El-Kelf has not been seen again.
THE CRUCIFIXION OF THE OUTCAST
By W. B. YEATS
From The Secret Rose, by W. B. Yeats. Copyright, 1914, by the Macmillan Company.
A man, with thin brown hair and a pale face, half ran, half walked along the road that wound from the south to the Town of the Shelly River. Many called him Cumhal, the son of Cormac, and many called him the Swift, Wild Horse; and he was a gleeman, and he wore a short parti-coloured doublet, and had pointed shoes, and a bulging wallet. Also he was of the blood of the Ernaans, and his birth-place was the Field of Gold; but his eating and sleeping places were the four provinces of Eri, and his abiding place was not upon the ridge of the earth. His eyes strayed from the Abbey tower of the White Friars and the town battlements to a row of crosses which stood out against the sky upon a hill a little to the eastward of the town, and he clenched his fist, and shook it at the crosses. He knew they were not empty, for the birds were fluttering about them; and he thought, how, as like as not, just such another vagabond as himself was hanged on one of them; and he muttered; “If it were hanging or bow-stringing, or stoning or beheading, it would be bad enough. But to have the birds pecking your eyes and the wolves eating your feet! I would that the red wind of the Druids had withered in his cradle the soldier of Dathi, who brought the tree of death out of barbarous lands, or that the lightning, when it smote Dathi at the foot of the mountain, had smitten him also, or that his grave had been dug by the green-haired and green-toothed merrows deep at the roots of the deep sea.”
While he spoke, he shivered from head to foot, and the sweat came out upon his face, and he knew not why, for he had looked upon many crosses. He passed over two hills and under the battlemented gate, and then round by a left-hand way to the door of the Abbey. It was studded with great nails, and when he knocked at it, he roused the lay brother who was the porter, and of him he asked a place in the guest-house. Then the lay brother took a glowing turf on a shovel, and led the way to a big and naked outhouse strewn with dirty rushes: and lighted a rush-candle fixed between two of the stones of the wall, and set the glowing turf upon the hearth and gave him two unlighted sods and a wisp of straw, and showed him a blanket hanging from a nail, and a shelf with a loaf of bread and a jug of water, and a tub in a far corner. Then the lay brother left him and went back to his place by the door. And Cumhal the son of Cormac began to blow upon the glowing turf, that he might light the two sods and the wisp of straw; but his blowing profited him nothing, for the sods and the straw were damp. So he took off his pointed shoes, and drew the tub out of the corner with the thought of washing the dust of the highway from his feet; but the water was so dirty that he could not see the bottom. He was very hungry, for he had not eaten all that day; so he did not waste much anger upon the tub, but took up the black loaf, and bit into it, and then spat out the bite, for the bread was hard and mouldy. Still he did not give way to his wrath, for he had not drunken these many hours; having a hope of heath beer or wine at his day’s end, he had left the brooks untasted, to make his supper the more delightful. Now he put the jug to his lips, but he flung it from him straightway, for the water was bitter and ill-smelling. Then he gave the jug a kick, so that it broke against the opposite wall, and he took down the blanket to wrap it about him for the night. But no sooner did he touch it than it was alive with skipping fleas. At this, beside himself with anger, he rushed to the door of the guest-house, but the lay brother, being well accustomed to such outcries, had locked it on the outside; so Cumhal emptied the tub and began to beat the door with it, till the lay brother came to the door, and asked what ailed him, and why he woke him out of sleep. “What ails me!” shouted Cumhal, “are not the sods as wet as the sands of the Three Headlands? and are not the fleas in the blanket as many as the waves of the sea and as lively? and is not the bread as hard as the heart of a lay brother who has forgotten God? and is not the water in the jug as bitter and as ill-smelling as his soul? and is not the foot-water the colour that shall be upon him when he has been charred in the Undying Fires?” The lay brother saw that the lock was fast, and went back to his niche, for he was too sleepy to talk with comfort. And Cumhal went on beating at the door, and presently he heard the lay brother’s foot once more, and cried out at him, “O cowardly and tyrannous race of friars, persecutors of the bard and the gleeman, haters of life and joy! O race that does not draw the sword and tell the truth! O race that melts the bones of the people with cowardice and with deceit!”
“Gleeman,” said the lay brother, “I also make rhymes; I make many while I sit in my niche by the door, and I sorrow to hear the bards railing upon the friars. Brother, I would sleep, and therefore I make known to you that it is the head of the monastery, our gracious Coarb, who orders all things concerning the lodging of travellers.”
“You may sleep,” said Cumhal, “I will sing a bard’s curse on the Coarb.” And he set the tub outside down under the window, and stood upon it, and began to sing in a very loud voice. The singing awoke the Coarb, so that he sat up in bed and blew a silver whistle until the lay brother came to him. “I cannot get a wink of sleep with that noise,” said the Coarb. “What is happening?”
“It is a gleeman,” said the lay brother, “who complains of the sods, of the bread, of the water in the jug, of the foot-water, and of the blanket. And now he is singing a bard’s curse upon you, O brother Coarb, and upon your father and your mother, and your grandfather and your grandmother, and upon all your relations.”
“Is he cursing in rhyme?”
“He is cursing in rhyme, and with two assonances in every line of his curse.”
The Coarb pulled his night-cap off and crumpled it in his hands, and the circular brown patch of hair in the middle of his bald head looked like an island in the midst of a pond, for in Connaught they had not yet abandoned the ancient tonsure for the style then coming into use. “If we do not somewhat,” he said, “he will teach his curses to the children in the street, and the girls spinning at the doors, and to the robbers on the mountain of Gulben.”
“Shall I go then,” said the other, “and give him dry sods, a fresh loaf, clean water in a jug, clean foot-water, and a new blanket, and make him swear by the blessed St. Benignus, and by the sun and moon, that no bond be lacking, not to tell his rhymes to the children in the street, and the girls spinning at the doors, and the robbers on the mountain of Gulben?”
“Neither our blessed Patron nor the sun and the moon would avail at all,” said the Coarb: “for to-morrow or the next day the mood to curse would come upon him, or a pride in those rhymes would move him, and he would teach his lines to the children, and the girls, and the robbers. Or else he would tell another of his craft how he fared in the guest-house, and he in his turn would begin to curse, and my name would wither. For learn there is no steadfastness of purpose upon the roads, but only under roofs, and between four walls. Therefore I bid you go and awaken Brother Kevin, Brother Dove, Brother Little Wolf, Brother Bald Patrick, Brother Bald Brandon, Brother James and Brother Peter. And they shall take the man, and bind him with ropes, and dip him in the river that he may cease to sing. And in the morning, lest this but make him curse the louder, we will crucify him.”
“The crosses are all full,” said the lay brother.
“Then we must make another cross. If we do not make an end of him another will, for who can eat and sleep in peace while men like him are going about the world? Ill should we stand before blessed St. Benignus, and sour would be his face when he comes to judge us at the Last Day, were we to spare an enemy of his when we had him under our thumb! Brother, the bards and the gleemen are an evil race, ever cursing and ever stirring up the people, and immoral and immoderate in all things, and heathen in their hearts, always longing after the Son of Lir, and Angus, and Bridget, and the Dagda, and Dana the Mother, and all the false gods of the old days; always making poems in praise of those kings and queens of the demons, Finvaragh of the Hill in the Plain, and Red Aodh of the Hill of the Shee, and Cleena of the Wave, and Eiveen of the Grey Rock, and him they call Don of the Vats of the Sea; and railing against God and Christ and the blessed Saints.” While he was speaking he crossed himself, and when he had finished he drew the night-cap over his ears, to shut out the noise, and closed his eyes, and composed himself to sleep.
The lay brother found Brother Kevin, Brother Dove, Brother Little Wolf, Brother Bald Patrick, Brother Bald Brandon, Brother James and Brother Peter sitting up in bed, and he made them get up. Then they bound Cumhal, and they dragged him to the river, and they dipped him in at the place which was afterwards called Buckley’s Ford.
“Gleeman,” said the lay brother, as they led him back to the guest-house, “why do you ever use the wit which God has given you to make blasphemous and immoral tales and verses? For such is the way of your craft. I have, indeed, many such tales and verses well nigh by rote, and so I know that I speak true! And why do you praise with rhyme those demons, Finvaragh, Red Aodh, Cleena, Eiveen and Don? I, too, am a man of great wit and learning, but I ever glorify our gracious Coarb, and Benignus our Patron, and the princes of the province. My soul is decent and orderly, but yours is like the wind among the salley gardens. I said what I could for you, being also a man of many thoughts, but who could help such a one as you?”
“My soul, friend,” answered the gleeman, “is indeed like the wind, and it blows me to and fro, and up and down, and puts many things into my mind and out of my mind, and therefore am I called the Swift, Wild Horse.” And he spoke no more that night, for his teeth were chattering with the cold.
The Coarb and the friars came to him in the morning, and bade him get ready to be crucified, and led him out of the guest-house. And while he still stood upon the step a flock of great grass-barnacles passed high above him with clanking cries. He lifted his arms to them and said, “O great grass-barnacles, tarry a little, and mayhap my soul will travel with you to the waste places of the shore and to the ungovernable sea!” At the gate a crowd of beggars gathered about them, being come there to beg from any traveller or pilgrim who might have spent the night in the guest-house. The Coarb and the friars led the gleeman to a place in the woods at some distance, where many straight young trees were growing, and they made him cut one down and fashion it to the right length, while the beggars stood round them in a ring, talking and gesticulating. The Coarb then bade him cut off another and shorter piece of wood, and nail it upon the first. So there was his cross for him; and they put it upon his shoulder, for his crucifixion was to be on the top of the hill where the others were. A half-mile on the way he asked them to stop and see him juggle for them: for he knew, he said, all the tricks of Angus the Subtle-Hearted. The old friars were for pressing on, but the young friars would see him: so he did many wonders for them, even to the drawing of live frogs out of his ears. But after a while they turned on him, and said his tricks were dull and a shade unholy, and set the cross on his shoulders again. Another half-mile on the way, and he asked them to stop and hear him jest for them, for he knew, he said, all the jests of Conan the Bald, upon whose back a sheep’s wool grew. And the young friars, when they had heard his merry tales, again bade him take up his cross, for it ill became them to listen to such follies. Another half-mile on the way, he asked them to stop and hear him sing the story of White-Breasted Deirdre, and how she endured many sorrows, and how the sons of Usna died to serve her. And the young friars were mad to hear him, but when he had ended, they grew angry, and beat him for waking forgotten longings in their hearts. So they set the cross upon his back, and hurried him to the hill.
When he was come to the top, they took the cross from him, and began to dig a hole to stand it in, while the beggars gathered round, and talked among themselves. “I ask a favour before I die,” says Cumhal.
“We will grant you no more delays,” says the Coarb.
“I ask no more delays, for I have drawn the sword, and told the truth, and lived my vision and am content.”
“Would you then confess?”
“By sun and moon, not I; I ask but to be let eat the food I carry in my wallet. I carry food in my wallet whenever I go upon a journey, but I do not taste of it unless I am well-nigh starved. I have not eaten now these two days.”
“You may eat, then,” says the Coarb, and he turned to help the friars dig the hole.
The gleeman took a loaf and some strips of cold fried bacon out of his wallet and laid them upon the ground. “I will give a tithe to the poor,” says he, and he cut a tenth part from the loaf and the bacon. “Who among you is the poorest?” And thereupon was a great clamour, for the beggars began the history of their sorrows and their poverty, and their yellow faces swayed like the Shelly River when the floods have filled it with water from the bogs.
He listened for a little, and, says he, “I am myself the poorest, for I have travelled the bare road, and by the glittering footsteps of the sea; and the tattered doublet of parti-coloured cloth upon my back, and the torn pointed shoes upon my feet have ever irked me, because of the towered city full of noble raiment which was in my heart. And I have been the more alone upon the roads and by the sea, because I heard in my heart the rustling of the rose-bordered dress of her who is more subtle than Angus, the Subtle-Hearted, and more full of the beauty of laughter than Conan the Bald, and more full of the wisdom of tears than White-Breasted Deirdre, and more lovely than a bursting dawn to them that are lost in the darkness. Therefore, I award the tithe to myself; but yet, because I am done with all things, I give it unto you.”
So he flung the bread and the strips of bacon among the beggars, and they fought with many cries until the last scrap was eaten. But meanwhile the friars nailed the gleeman to his cross, and set it upright in the hole, and shovelled the earth in at the foot, and trampled it level and hard. So then they went away, but the beggars stared on, sitting round the cross. But when the sun was sinking, they also got up to go, for the air was getting chilly. And as soon as they had gone a little way, the wolves, who had been showing themselves on the edge of a neighbouring coppice, came nearer, and the birds wheeled closer and closer. “Stay, outcasts, yet a little while,” the crucified one called in a weak voice to the beggars, “and keep the beasts and the birds from me.” But the beggars were angry because he had called them outcasts, so they threw stones and mud at him, and went their way. Then the wolves gathered at the foot of the cross, and the birds lighted all at once upon his head and arms and shoulders, and began to peck at him, and the wolves began to eat his feet. “Outcasts,” he moaned, “have you also turned against the outcast?”
THE DRUMS OF KAIRWAN
By the Marquess CURZON OF KEDLESTON
From Tales of Travel, by The Marquess Curzon of Kedleston. Copyright, 1923, by George H. Doran Company.
When the appointed hour arrived, I presented myself at the mosque, which is situated outside the city walls of Kairwan, not far from the Bab-el-Djuluddin, or Tanners’ Gate. Passing through an open courtyard into the main building, I was received with a dignified salaam by the sheik, who forthwith led me to a platform or divan at the upper end of the central space. This was surmounted by a ribbed and white-washed dome, and was separated from two side aisles by rows of marble columns with battered capitals, dating from the Empire of Rome. Between the arches of the roof small and feeble lamps—mere lighted wicks floating on dingy oil in cups of coloured glass—ostrich eggs, and gilt balls were suspended from wooden beams. From the cupola in the centre hung a dilapidated chandelier in which flickered a few miserable candles. In one of the side aisles a plastered tomb was visible behind an iron lattice. The mise en scène was unprepossessing and squalid.
My attention was next turned to the dramatis personae. Upon the floor in the centre beneath the dome sat the musicians, ten or a dozen in number, cross-legged, the chief presiding upon a stool at the head of the circle. I observed no instrument save the darabookah, or earthen drum, and a number of tambours, the skins of which, stretched tightly across the frames, gave forth, when struck sharply by the fingers, a hollow and resonant note. The rest of the orchestra was occupied by the chorus. So far no actors were visible. The remainder of the floor, both under the dome and in the aisles, was thickly covered with seated and motionless figures, presenting in the fitful light a weird and fantastic picture. In all there must have been over a hundred persons, all males, in the mosque.
Presently the sheik gave the signal for commencement, and in a moment burst forth the melancholy chant of the Arab voices and the ceaseless droning of the drums. The song was not what we should call singing, but a plaintive and quavering wail, pursued in a certain cadence, now falling to a moan, now terminating in a shriek, but always pitiful, piercing and inexpressibly sad. The tambours, which were struck like the keyboard of a piano, by the outstretched fingers of the hand, and, occasionally, when a louder note was required, by the thumb, kept up a monotonous refrain in the background. From time to time, at moments of greater stress, they were brandished high in the air and beaten with all the force of fingers and thumb combined. Then the noise was imperious and deafening.
Among the singers, one grizzled and bearded veteran, with a strident and nasal intonation, surpassed his fellows. He observed the time with grotesque reflections of his body; his eyes were fixed and shone with religious zeal.
The chant proceeded, and the figures of the singers, as they became more and more excited, rocked to and fro. More people poured in at the doorway, and the building was now quite full. I began to wonder whether the musicians were also to be the performers, or when the latter would make their appearance.
Suddenly a line of four or five Arabs formed itself in front of the entrance on the far side of the orchestra, and exactly opposite the bench on which I was sitting. They joined hands, the right of each clasped in the left of his neighbour, and began a lurching, swaying motion with their bodies and feet. At first they appeared simply to be marking time, first with one foot and then with the other; but the movement was gradually communicated to every member of their bodies; and from the crown of the head to the soles of the feet they were presently keeping time with the music in convulsive jerks and leaps and undulations, the music itself being regulated by the untiring orchestra of the drums.
This mysterious row of bobbing figures seemed to exercise an irresistible fascination over the spectators. Every moment one or other of these left his place to join its ranks. They pushed their way into the middle, severing the chain for an instant, or joined themselves on to the ends. The older men appeared to have a right to the centre, the boys and children—for there were youngsters present not more than seven or eight years old—were on the wings. Thus the line ever lengthened; originally it consisted of three or four, presently it was ten or twelve, anon it was twenty-five or thirty, and before the self-torturings commenced there were as many as forty human figures stretching right across the building, and all rocking backwards and forwards in grim and ungraceful unison, Even the spectators who kept their places could not resist the contagion; as they sat there they unconsciously kept time with their heads and shoulders, and one child swung his little head this way and that with a fury that threatened to separate it from his body.
Meanwhile, the music had been growing in intensity, the orchestra sharing the excitement, which they communicated. The drummers beat their tambours with redoubled force, lifting them high above their heads and occasionally, at some extreme pitch, tossing them aloft and catching them again as they fell. Sometimes in the exaltation of frenzy they started spasmodically to their feet and then sank back into their original position. But ever and without a pause continued the insistent accompaniment of the drums.
And now the oscillating line in front of the doorway for the first time found utterance. As they leaped high on one foot, alternately kicking out the other, as their heads wagged to and fro and their bodies quivered with the muscular strain, they cried aloud in praise of Allah. La ilaha ill Allah! (There is no God but Allah)—this was the untiring burden of their strain. And then came Ya Allah! (O God), and sometimes Ya Kahhar! (O avenging God), Ya Hakk! (O just God), while each burst of clamorous appeal culminated in an awful shout of Ya Hoo! (O Him).
The rapidity and vehemence of their gesticulations was now appalling; their heads swung backwards and forwards till their foreheads almost touched their breasts, and their scalps smote against their backs. Sweat poured from their faces; they panted for breath; and the exclamations burst from their mouths in a thick and stertorous murmur. Suddenly, and without warning, the first phase of the zikr ceased, and the actors stood gasping, shaking, and dripping with perspiration.
After a few seconds’ respite the performance recommenced, and shortly waxed more furious than ever. The worshippers seemed to be gifted with an almost superhuman strength and energy. As they flung themselves to and fro, at one moment their upturned faces gleamed with a sickly polish under the flickering lamps, at the next their turbaned heads all but brushed the floor. Their eyes started from the sockets; the muscles on their necks and the veins on their foreheads stood out like knotted cords. One old man fell out of the ranks, breathless, spent, and foaming. His place was taken by another, and the tumultuous orgy went on.
Presently, as the ecstasy approached its height and the fully initiated became melboos or possessed, they broke from the stereotyped litany into domoniacal grinning and ferocious and bestial cries. These writhing and contorted objects were no longer rational human beings, but savage animals, caged brutes howling madly in the delirium of hunger or of pain. They growled like bears, they barked like jackals, they roared like lions, they laughed like hyænas; and ever and anon from the seething rank rose a diabolical shriek, like the scream of a dying horse, or the yell of a tortured fiend. And steadily the while in the background resounded the implacable reverberation of the drums.
The climax was now reached; the requisite pitch of cataleptic inebriation had been obtained, and the rites of Aissa were about to begin. From the crowd at the door a wild figure broke forth, tore off his upper clothing till he was naked to the waist, and, throwing away his fez, bared a head close-shaven save for one long and dishevelled lock that, springing from the scalp, fell over his forehead like some grisly and funereal plume. A long knife, somewhat resembling a cutlass, was handed to him by the sheik, who had risen to his feet, and who directed the phenomena that ensued. Waving it wildly above his head and protruding the forepart of his figure, the fanatic brought it down blow after blow against his bared stomach, and drew it savagely to and fro against the unprotected skin. There showed the marks of a long and livid weal, but no blood spurted from the gash. In the intervals between the strokes he ran swiftly from one side to the other of the open space, taking long stealthy strides like a panther about to spring, and seemingly so powerless over his own movements that he knocked blindly up against those who stood in his way, nearly upsetting them with the violence of the collision.
The prowess or the piety of this ardent devotee proved extraordinarily contagious. First one and then another of his brethren caught the afflatus and followed his example. In a few moments every part of the mosque was the scene of some novel and horrible rite of self-mutilation, performed by a fresh aspirant to the favour of Allah. Some of these feats did not rise above the level of the curious but explicable performances which are sometimes seen upon English stages; e.g., of the men who swallow swords, and carry enormous weights suspended from their jaws; achievements which are in no sense a trick or a deception, but are to be attributed to abnormal physical powers or structure developed by long and often perilous practice. In the Aissaiouian counterpart of these displays there was nothing specially remarkable, but there were others less commonplace and more difficult of explanation.
At length, several long iron spits or prongs were produced and distributed; these formidable implements were about two and a half feet in length and sharply pointed, and they terminated at the handle in a circular wooden knob about the size of a large orange. There was great competition for these instruments of torture, which were used as follows: Poising one in the air, an Aissioui would suddenly force the point into the flesh of his own shoulder in front just below the shoulder blade. Thus transfixed, and holding the weapon aloft, he strode swiftly up and down. Suddenly, at a signal, he fell on his knees, still forcing the point into his body, and keeping the wooden head uppermost. Then there started up another disciple armed with a big wooden mallet, and he, after a few preliminary taps, rising high on tip-toe with uplifted weapon would, with an ear-splitting yell, bring it down with all his force upon the wooden knob, driving the point home through the shoulder of his comrade. Blow succeeded blow, the victim wincing beneath the stroke, but uttering no sound, and fixing his eyes with a look of ineffable delight upon his torturer, till the point was driven right through the shoulder and projected at the back. Then the patient marched backwards and forwards with the air and the gait of a conquering hero. At one moment there were four of these semi-naked maniacs within a yard of my feet, transfixed and trembling, but beatified and triumphant. Amid the cries and the swelter, there never ceased for one second the sullen and menacing vociferation of the drums.
Another man seized an iron skewer, and, placing the point within his open jaws, forced it steadily through his cheek until it protruded a couple of inches on the outside. He barked savagely like a dog, and foamed at the lips.
Others, afflicted with exquisite spasms of hunger, knelt down before the chief, whimpering like children for food, and turning upon him imploring glances from their glazed and bloodshot eyes. His control over his following was supreme. Some he gratified, others he forbade. At a touch from him, they were silent and relaxed into quiescence. One maddened wretch who, fancying himself some wild beast, plunged to and fro, roaring horribly, and biting and tearing with his teeth at whomever he met, was advancing, as I thought, with somewhat truculent intent in my direction, when he was arrested by his superior and sent back, cringing and cowed.
For those whose ravenous appetites he was content to humour the most singular repast was prepared. A plate was brought in, covered with huge jagged pieces of broken glass, as thick as a shattered soda-water bottle. With greedy chuckles and gurglings of delight, one of the hungry ones dashed at it, crammed a handful into his mouth, and crunched it up as though it were some exquisite dainty, a fellow-disciple calmly stroking the exterior of his throat, with intent, I suppose, to lubricate the descent of the unwonted morsels. A little child held up a snake or a sand-worm by the tail, placing the head between his teeth, and gulped it gleefully down. Several acolytes came in, carrying a big stem of the prickly pear, or fico d’India, whose leaves are as thick as a one-inch plank, and are armed with huge projecting thorns. This was ambrosia to the starving saints. They rushed at it with passionate emulation, tearing at the solid slabs with their teeth, and gnawing and munching the coarse fibers, regardless of the thorns which pierced their tongues and cheeks as they swallowed them down.
The most singular feature of all, and the one that almost defies belief, though it is none the less true, was this—that in no case did one drop of blood emerge from scar, or gash, or wound. This fact I observed most carefully, the mokaddem standing at my side, and each patient in turn coming to him when his self-imposed torture had been accomplished, and the cataleptic frenzy had spent its force. It was the chief who cunningly withdrew the blade from cheek or shoulder or body, rubbing over the spot what appeared to me to be the saliva of his own mouth; then he whispered an absolution in the ear of the disciple, and kissed him on the forehead, whereupon the patient, but a moment before writhing in maniacal transports, retired tranquilly and took his seat upon the floor. He seemed none the worse for his recent paroxysm, and the wound was marked only by a livid blotch or a hectic flush.
This was the scene that for more than an hour went on without pause or intermission before my eyes. The building might have been tenanted by the Harpies or Laestrygones of Homer, or by some inhuman monsters of legendary myth. Amid the dust and sweat and insufferable heat the naked bodies of the actors shone with a ghastly pallor and exhaled a sickening smell. The atmosphere reeked with heavy and intoxicating fumes. Above the despairing chant of the singers rang the frenzied yells of the possessed, the shrieks of the hammerer, and the inarticulate cries, the snarling and growling, the bellowing and miauling of the self-imagined beasts. And ever behind and through all re-echoed the perpetual and pitiless imprecation of the drums.
As I witnessed the disgusting spectacle and listened to the pandemonium of sounds, my head swam, my eyes became dim, my senses reeled, and I believed that in a few moments I must have fainted, had not one of my friends touched me on the shoulder, and, whispering that the mokaddem was desirous that I should leave, escorted me hurriedly to the door. As I walked back to my quarters, and long after through the still night, the beat of the tambours continued, and I heard the distant hum of voices, broken at intervals by an isolated and piercing cry. Perhaps yet further and more revolting orgies were celebrated after I had left. I had not seen, as other travellers have done, the chewing and swallowing of red-hot cinders,[1] or the harmless handling and walking upon live coals. I had been spared that which others have described as the climax of the gluttonous debauch, viz., the introduction of a live sheep, which then and there is savagely torn to pieces and devoured raw by these unnatural banqueters. But I had seen enough, and as I sank to sleep my agitated fancy pursued a thousand avenues of thought, confounding in one grim medley all the carnivorous horrors of fact and fable and fiction. Loud above the din and discord the tale of the false prophets of Carmel, awakened by the train of association, rang in my ears, till I seemed to hear intoned with remorseless repetition the words: “They cried aloud and cut themselves after their manner with knives and lancets, till the blood gushed out upon them”; and in the ever-receding distance of dreamland, faint and yet fainter, there throbbed the inexorable and unfaltering delirium of the drums.
| [1] | For an account of this exploit, vide Lane’s Modern Egyptians, cap. xxv.; and compare the description of Richardson, the famous fire-eater, in Evelyn’s Memoirs for October 8, 1672. |
A LIFE—A BOWL OF RICE
By L. DE BRA
Bow Sam stood in the doorway by his sugar-cane stand and watched with narrowed eyes an old man who shuffled uncertainly down the alley towards him.
“Hoo la ma!” cried Bow Sam, in surprised Cantonese as the old man drew near. “Hello, there! I scarcely knew you, venerable Fa’ng!”
Fa’ng, the hatchetman, straightened his bent shoulders and looked up. There was a gleam in his deep bronze eyes that was hardly in keeping with his withered frame.
“Hoo la ma, Bow Sam,” he said, his voice strangely deep and vibrant.
“You have grown very thin,” remarked Bow Sam with friendly interest.
“Hi low; that is true. But why carry around flesh that is not food?”
The sugar-cane vendor eyed the other shrewdly. What was the gossip he had heard concerning Fa’ng, the famous old hatchetman? Was it not that the old man was always hungry? Yes, that was it! Fa’ng, whose long knife and swift arm had been the most feared thing in all Chinatown, was starving—too proud to beg, too honest to steal.
“You have eaten well, venerable Fa’ng?” The inquiry was in a casual tone, respectful.
“Aih, I have eaten well,” replied the old hatchetman, averting his face.
“How unfortunate for me! I have not yet eaten my rice; for when one must dine alone, one goes slowly to table. Is it not written that a bowl of rice shared is doubly enjoyed? Would you not at least have a cup of tea while I eat my mean fare?”
“I shall be honoured to sip tea with you, estimable Bow Sam,” replied the hatchetman with poorly disguised eagerness.
“Then condescend to enter my poor house! Ah, one does not often have the pleasure of your company in these days!”
Bow Sam preceded his guest to the wretched hovel that was the sugar-cane vendor’s only home. There he quickly removed all trace of the bowl of rice he had eaten but a moment before.
“Will you take this poor stool, venerable Fa’ng?” said Bow, setting out the only stool he possessed, and placing it so that the hatchetman’s back would be to the stove.
Wearily, Fa’ng sat down. Bow put out two small cups, each worn and badly chipped, and filled them with hot tea. Then, while the hatchetman sipped his tea, Bow uncovered the rice kettle. There was but one bowl of rice left. Bow Sam had intended to keep it for his evening meal; for until he sold some sugar-cane, he had no way of obtaining more food.
Behind Fa’ng’s back, Bow took two rice bowls and set them on the stove. One bowl he heaped full for the hatchetman. In the other he put an upturned tea bowl and sprinkled over it his last few grains of rice.
“Let us give thanks to the gods of the kitchen that we have food and teeth and appetite,” chuckled Bow Sam, seating himself on a sugar-cane box opposite Fa’ng.
“Well spoken,” returned the old hatchetman, quickly filling his mouth with the nourishing rice. “Aih, there is much in life to make one content.”
With his chop-sticks Bow Sam deftly took up a few grains of rice, taking care lest he uncover the upturned tea bowl. He was deeply grateful that he had a few teeth left, that he quite often had enough rice, and sometimes had meat as often as once a month; but to hear the proud old hatchetman express such sentiments on an empty stomach filled him with admiration.
“What a virtue to be content with one’s lot!” he exclaimed, refilling the hatchetman’s tea bowl. “Yet the younger generation are always fretting because they think they have not enough; while, as anyone knows, they have much more than we who first came to this land of the white foreign devil.”
“They are young,” spoke Fa’ng, nodding his head slowly. “For us the days have fled, the years have not tarried. And we have learned that if one has but a bowl of rice for food and a bent arm for pillow, one can be content.”
“Haie! How can you speak so softly of the younger generation when it is they who have robbed you of your livelihood? I know the gossip. You, the most famous killer in Chinatown, find yourself cast out like a worn-out broom by these young upstarts who have no respect for their elders. Is it not true?”
With his left hand the old hatchetman made an eloquent gesture, peculiarly Chinese, much as one quickly throws open a fan.
“Of what value are words, my friend? They cannot change that which is changeless. A word cannot temper the wind, nor a phrase procure food for a hungry stomach.”
“Nevertheless, I do not like such things,” persisted Sam. “I love the old ways. You were an honourable and fearless killer. When you were hired to slay one’s enemy you went boldly to your victim and told him your business. Then, swiftly, even before the doomed one could open his lips, you struck—cleaned your blade and walked your way.
“The modern killers!” Bow Sam spewed the words out as one does sour rice. “They are too cowardly to use the knife. They hide on roofs, fire on their victims, then throw away their guns and flee like thieves. Aih, what have we come to in these days!
“It was but yesterday after mid-day rice that I had speech with Gar Ling, a gunman of the Sin Wah tong. He stopped to buy sugar-cane, and I told him that had I the money I would hire him. There is one of the younger generation, the pock-marked son of Quong, the dealer in jade, who has greatly wronged me and my honourable family name, and my distinguished ancestors. As you very well know, one cannot soil one’s own hands with the blood of vengeance. Moreover, I have no weapon, not even a dull cleaver. Neither can I afford to hire a fighting man.
“I was telling all this to Gar Ling,” went on Bow, straining the last drop of tea into Fa’ng’s bowl, “and he told me he would settle my quarrel, but it would cost one thousand dollars. When I told him I had not even a thousand copper cash, he became angry and abusive. As he walked his way, quickly, like a foreign devil, he spat in my direction and called me an unspeakable name.”
“Ts, ts! You should have wrung his neck. Repeat to me his unspeakable words.”
“He said,” cried Bow Sam, his face twisted in fury, “that I am the son of a turtle!”
“Aih-yah! How insulting! As anyone knows, in all our language there is no epithet more vile!”
“That is true. But what is even worse, I did not remember until after he had gone that he had not paid me for the piece of sugar-cane. Such is the way of the younger generation; and we, who have been long in the land, can do nothing.”
“Yet it is by such things that one learns the lesson of enduring tranquillity,” remarked Fa’ng, smacking his lips and moving back from the table.
For about the time, then, that it takes one to make nine bows before the household gods, neither man made speech. Then Fa’ng arose.
“An excellent bowl of rice, my good friend.”
“Aih, it shames me to have to give you such mean fare.”
“And the tea was most fragrant.”
“Ts, it was only the cheapest Black Dragon.”
The two old men went to the door.
“Ho hang la,” said the hatchetman.
“Ho hang la,” echoed the sugar-cane vendor. “I hope you have a safe walk.”
Fa’ng, the hatchetman, made his way down the alley to the rear entrance of a pawnshop. There he spoke a few words with the proprietor.
“I know you are honest, old man,” said the pawnbroker. “But instead of bringing it back, I hope, for your own sake, you will be able to pay what you owe me.”
Then from a safe he took a knife with long, slender blade and a handle of ebony in which had been carved an unbelievable number of notches. Fa’ng took the knife, handling it as one does an object of precious memories, concealed it beneath his tattered blouse, and went his way.
Near the entrance of a gambling house in Canton Alley the old hatchetman met the pock-marked son of Quong, the dealer in jade.
“For the wrong you have done Bow Sam, his family name, and his distinguished ancestors,” said Fa’ng quietly; and before the other could open his lips the long blade was through his heart.
In front of a cigar store in Shanghai Place, Fa’ng found Gar Ling, the gunman. “I have business of moment with you, Gar Ling,” said the hatchetman. “Come.”
Gar Ling hesitated. He stood in great fear of the old killer, yet he dared not show that fear before his young friends. So with his left hand he gave a peculiar signal. A boy standing near with a basket of lichee nuts on his arm turned quickly and followed the two men down the alley. Drawing near his employer, the boy held up the basket as though soliciting the gunman to buy. Gar’s hand darted swiftly into the basket, beneath the lichee nuts, and came out with a heavy automatic pistol which he quickly concealed beneath his blouse.
The old hatchetman knew all the tricks of the young gunman, but he pretended he had not seen. As they turned a dark corner, he paused.
“For the insulting words you spoke to Bow Sam,” he said calmly, and the long blade glided between the gunman’s ribs.
As Fa’ng drew the steel away, Gar Ling staggered, fired once, then collapsed.
Bow Sam stood in the doorway by his sugar-cane stand and watched with narrowed eyes an old man who shuffled uncertainly down the alley toward him.
“Hoo la ma!” he cried, as the old man drew near. “I did not expect to see you again so soon.”
The old hatchetman did not raise his head nor reply. Staggering, he crossed the threshold and fell on his face on the littered floor.
With a throaty cry Bow Sam slammed the door shut. He bent over Fa’ng.
“This knife,” said the hatchetman; “take it—to Wong the pawnbroker. Tell him—all. Worth—more—than I owe.”
“But what’s——”
“For the wrong that the pock-marked one did you, for the insult Gar Ling spoke to you, I slew them,” said Fa’ng, with sudden strength. “My debt is paid. Tsau kom lok.”
“Haie! You did that! Why did you do that? I could never pay you! And look! Aih-yah, oh, how piteous! You are dying!”
With awkward fingers, the vendor of sugar-cane tried to staunch the flow of blood where Gar Ling’s bullet had struck with deadly effect.
“Pay me?” breathed Fa’ng the hatchetman. “Did you—not—feed me? Can one—put a value—on food—when the stomach—is empty? Aih, what—matters it? A life,”—his eyelids fluttered and closed—“a life—a bowl of rice....”
HODGE
By ELINOR MORDAUNT
People are accustomed to think of Somerset as a country of deep, bosky bays, sunny coves, woods, moorlands, but Hemerton was in itself sufficient to blur this bland illusion. It lay a mile and a half back from the sea, counting it all full tide; at low tide the sly, smooth waters, unbroken by a single rock, slipped away for another mile or more across a dreary ooze of black mud.
The village lay pasted flat upon the marsh, with no trees worthy of the name in sight: a few twisted black-thorn bushes, a few split willows, one wreck of a giant blighted ash in the Rectory gardens, and that was all.
For months on end the place swam in vapours. There were wonderful effects of sunrise and sunset, veils of crimson and gold, of every shade of blue and purple. At times the grey sea-lavender was like silver, the wet, black mud gleaming like dark opals; while at high summer there was purple willow-strife spilled thick along the ditches, giving the strange place a transitory air of warm-blooded life; but for the most part it was all as aloof and detached as a sleep-walker.
The birds fitted the place as a verger fits his quiet and dusky church: herons and waders of all kinds; wild-crying curlew; and here and there a hawk, hanging motionless high overhead.
There were scarcely fifty houses in Hemerton, and these were all alike, flat and brown and grey; where there had been plaster it was flaked and ashen. The very church stooped, as though shamed to a sort of poor-relation pose by the immense indifference of the mist-veiled sky—the drooping lids on a scornful face—for even at midday, in mid-summer, the heavens were never quite clear, quite blue, but still veiled and apart.
The Rectory was a two-storied building, low at that, and patched with damp: small, with a narrow-chested air, tiny windows, a thin, grudging doorway, blistered paint, which gave it a leprous air; and just that one tree, with its pale, curled leaves in summer, its jangling keys in winter.
It was amazing to find that any creature so warmly vital as the Rector’s daughter, Rhoda Fane, had been begotten, born, reared in such a place; spent her entire life there, apart from two years of school at Clifton, and six months in Brussels, cut short by her mother’s death.
She was like a beech wood in September: ruddy, crisp, fragrant. Her hair, dark-brown, with copper lights, was so springing with life that it seemed more inclined to grow up than hang down; her face was almost round, her wide, brown eyes frank and eager. She was as good as any man with her leaping-pole: broad-shouldered, deep-breasted, with a soft, deep contralto voice.
Her only brother, Hector, was four years younger than herself. Funds had run low, drained away by their mother’s illness, before it was time for him to go to school; he was too delicate for the second-best, roughing it among lads of a lower class, and so he was kept at home, taught by his father: a thin trickle of distilled classics and wavering mathematics; a good deal of history, no geography.
He, in startling contrast to his sister, was a true child of the marshes: thin light hair, vellum-white, peaked face, pale grey eyes beneath an overhanging brow, large, transparent ears: narrow-chested, long-armed, stooping, so that he seemed almost a hunchback.
In all ways he was the shadow of Rhoda, followed her everywhere; and as there is no shadow without the sun, so it seemed that he could scarcely have existed apart from her. Small as he already was, he almost puled himself out of life while she was away at school; and after a bare week from home she would get back to find him with the best part of his substance peeled from him, white as a willow-wand.
Different as these two were, they were passionately attached to each other. The Rector was a kind father when he drew himself out of the morass of melancholy and disillusion into which he had fallen since his wife died, wilting away with damp and discontent, and sheer loathing of the soil in which it had been his misfortune to plant her. But still, at the best, he was a parent, and so apart, while there were no neighbours, no playfellows.
Once or twice Rhoda’s school-friends came to stay at the Rectory, and for the first day or so it seemed delightful to talk of dress, of a gayer world, possible lovers. But after a very little while they began to pall on her: they understood nothing of what was her one absorbing interest—the natural life of the place in which she lived: were discontented, disdainful of the marshland, hated the mud, feared the fogs, shivered in the damp.
Anyhow, the brother and sister were sufficient to each other, for they shared a never-failing, or even diminishing, interest—and what more can any two people wish for?—a passionate absorption in, a minute knowledge of, the wild life of the marshland; its legends and folklore; its habits and calls; the mating seasons and manners of the birds; the place and habit of every wild flower; the way of the wind with the sky, and all its portents; the changing seasons, seemingly so uneven from year to year, and yet working out so much the same in the end.
They could not have said how they first came to hear of the Forest: they had always talked of it. To Hector, at least, it was so vivid that he seemed to have actually struggled through its immense depths, swung in its hanging creepers, smelt its sickly-sweet orchids, breathed its hot, damp air—so far real to both alike that they would find themselves saying, “Do you remember?” in speaking of paths that they had never traversed.
Provisionally they had fixed their Forest at the Miocene Period. Or, rather, this is what it came to: the boy ceasing to protest against the winged monsters, the rhinoceros, the long-jawed mastodon which fascinated the girl’s imagination; though there was one impassioned scene when he flamed out over his clear remembrance of a sabre-toothed tiger, putting all those others—stupid, hulking brutes!—out of court by many thousands of years.
“They couldn’t have been there, couldn’t—not with us and with ‘It’—I saw it, I tell you—I tell you I saw it!” His pale face flamed, his eyes were as bright as steel. “The mastodon! That’s nothing—nothing! But the sabre-toothed tiger—I tell you I saw it. What are you grinning at now?—in our Forest—ours, mind you!—I saw it!”
“Oh, indeed, indeed!” Suddenly, because the day was so hot, because they were bored, because she was unwittingly impressed, as always, by her brother’s heat of conviction, Rhoda’s serene temper was gone. “And did you see yourself? and what were you doing there, may I ask—you! Silly infant, don’t you know that there weren’t any men then? Phew! Everyone knows that—everyone. You and your old tiger!”
There was mockery in her laugh as she took him by the lapels of his coat; shook him.
Then, next moment when he turned aside, sullen and pale, his brows in a pent-house above his eyes, she was filled with contrition. The rotten, thundery day had set her all on edge; it was a shame to tease him like this; and, after all, how often had she herself remembered back? Though there was a difference, and she knew it, a sense of fantasy, pretending; while Hector was as jealous of every detail of their Forest as a long-banished exile over every cherished memory of his own land.
Though, of course, there were no men contemporary with that wretched tiger: he knew that; he must know.
Lolling under their one tree, in the steamy, early afternoon, she coaxed him back to the subject, and was beaten upon it, as the half-hearted always are.
He was so amazingly clear about the whole thing.... Why, it might have happened yesterday!
He had been up in the trees, slinking along—not the hunting man, but the hunted—watchful, furtive; a picker-up of what other beasts had slain and taken their fill of: more watchful than usual because he had already come across a carcass left by the long-toothed terror, all the blood sucked out of it. Swinging from bough to bough by his hands—which, even when he stood upright, as upright as possible, dangled far below his knees—he had actually seen it; seen its gleaming tusks, its shining eyes; seen it, and fled, wild with terror.
Was it likely that he could ever forget it? “It and its beastly teeth!” he added; then fell silent, brooding; while even Rhoda was awed to silence.
It was that very evening that they found their Forest, or, rather, a part of it. They had gone over to the shore meaning to bathe, but for once their memories were at fault; and they found that the tide was out, a mere rim of molten lead on the far edge of the horizon.
They were both tired, but they could not rest. They cut inland for a bit, then out again; crossing the mudflats until the mud oozed above their boots and drove them back again.
They must have wandered about a long time, for the light—although it did not actually go—became illusive; the air freshened with that salty scent which tells of a flowing tide.
Hector insisted that they ought to wait until it was full in, and have their bath by moonlight; but, as Rhoda pointed out, that would mean no supper, dawdling about for hours. After some time they compromised: they would go out and meet the tide; see what it was like.
Almost at the water’s edge they found It—their Forest.
There it was, buried like a fly in amber: twisted trunks and boughs, matted creepers, all ash-grey and black.
How far it stretched up and down the shore they could not have said, the time was too short, the sea too near for any exploration; but not far, they thought, or they must have discovered it before. “Nothing more than a fold out of the world, squeezed up to the surface”; that was what they agreed upon.
They divided and ran in opposite directions—“Just to try and find out,” as Rhoda said. But after a few yards, a couple of dozen, maybe, they called back to each other that they had lost it.
The darkness gathering, the water almost to their feet; they were bitterly disappointed, but anyhow there was to-morrow, many “to-morrows.”
All that evening they talked of nothing else. “It’s been there for thousands and tens of thousands of years! It will be there to-morrow,” they said.
It was towards two o’clock in the morning that Hector, restless with excitement and fear, padded into his sister’s room; found her sleeping—stupidly sleeping—with the moonlight full upon her, and shook her awake; unreasonably angry, as wakeful people always are with the sleepers.
“Suppose we never find it again! Oh, Rhoda, suppose we never find it again!”
“Find what?”
“The Forest, you idiot!—our Forest.”
“Hector, don’t be silly. Go back to bed; you’ll get cold. Of course we’ll find it.”
“Why of course? I’ve been thinking and thinking and thinking. There wasn’t a tree or bush or landmark of any sort: we had pottered about all over the shop: supposing we’ve lost it for ever? Oh, supposing, Rhoda, Rhoda! What sillies we were! Why didn’t we stay there, camp opposite it until the tide went out? I feel it in my bones—we’ll never find it again—never—never—never! There might have been skulls, all sorts of things—long teeth—tigers’ teeth! And now we’ve lost it. It’s no good talking—we’ve lost it; I know we’ve lost it—after all these years! After thousands and thousands and thousands of years of remembering!”
The boy’s forehead was glistening with sweat; the tears were running down his face, white as bone in the moonlight. Rhoda drew him into her bed, comforted him as best she could, very sleepy, and unperturbed—for, of course, they would find it. How could they help finding it? And after a while he fell asleep, still moaning and crying, searching for a lost path through his dreams.
He was right in his foreboding. They did not find it. Perhaps the tide had been out further than usual: they had walked further than they thought; they had dreamt the whole thing; the light had deceived them—impossible to say.
At first, in the broad light of day, even Hector was incredulous of their misfortune. Then, as the completeness of their loss grew upon them, they became desperate—possessed by that terrible restlessness of the searcher after lost things. Day after day they would come back from the sea worn out, utterly hopeless; declaring that here was the end of the whole thing; sick at the very thought of the secret mud, the long black shore.
They gave it up. They would never go near “the rotten thing” again.
Then, a few hours later, the thought of the freshly-receding tide began to work like madness in their veins, and they would be out and away.
It was easier for Rhoda; for she was of those who “sleep o’ nights”; easier until she found that her brother slipped off on moonlight nights while she slumbered: coming back at all hours, haggard and worn to fainting-point.
He stooped more than ever: his brow was more overhung, furrowed with horizontal lines. Sometimes, furious with herself for her sleepiness, Rhoda would awake, jump out of bed and run to the window in the fresh dawn, to see the boy dragging himself home, old as the ages, his hands hanging loose to his knees.
At last the breaking-point came. He was very ill: after a long convalescence, money was collected from numerous relations, family treasures were sold, and he was sent away to school.
He came back for his holidays a changed creature, talking of footer, then of cricket; of boys and masters; of school—school—school—nothing but school; blunt and practical.
But all this was at the front of him, deliberately displayed in the shop-windows.
At the back of him, buried out of sight, there was still the visionary rememberer. Rhoda, who loved him, realised this.
At first she did not dare to speak of the Forest. Then, trying to get at something of the old Hector, she pressed the point; pressed it and pressed it. It was she now who kept on with that eternal, “Don’t you remember?”
The worst of the whole thing was that he did not even pretend to forget. He did worse—he laughed. And in her own pain she now realised how often and how deeply she must have hurt him.
“Oh, that rot! What silly idiots we were! Such rot!”
And yet, at the back of him, at the back of his too-direct gaze, his laughter, there was something. Oh, yes, there was something. She was certain of that.
Deep, deep, hidden away at the back of him, at the back of that most imperturbable of all reserves, a boy’s reserve, he remembered, felt as he had always felt. He shut her out of it, that was all: her—Rhoda.
At the end of a year they ceased to talk of the Forest; all those far-back things dropped away from their intercourse. To outward seeming their love for the countryside, their strange, unyouthful interest in geology, the age-buried world, seemed a thing of the past.
Hector had a bicycle now: he was often away for hours at a time. He never even spoke of where he had been, what he had been doing. It was always: “Nowhere in particular; nothing in particular.”
Then, two years later, upon just such a breathless mid-summer day, he burst in upon his sister, his face crimson with excitement.
“I’ve found it! I never gave up—never for a moment! I pretended—I thought you thought it rot—were drawing me on—but it’s there. We were right. It’s there—there! Quick! quick! Now the tide’s just almost full out.... Oh, by Jingo! to think I’ve found it! Rhoda, hurry up—quick!” He was dancing with impatience.
“I can ride the bike—you on the step,” breathed Rhoda, and snatched up a hat.
They flew. The village shot past them: the flat country swirled like a top. At last they came to a place where there was a tiny rag of torn handkerchief tied to a stick stuck upright in the ground. Here they left the road, laid the bicycle in a dry ditch, and cut away across the marsh; guided by more signals—scraps of cambric, then paper; towards the end, one every ten yards or less, until Rhoda wondered how in the world had the boy curbed himself to such care!
Then—there it was.
They stepped it: just on fifty yards long, indefinitely wide, running out into little bays, here and there tailing off so that it was impossible to discover any definite edge, sinking away out of sight like a dream.
The sun was blazing hot and the top of the mud dry. In places they went down upon their hands and knees, peering; but really one saw most standing a little way off, with one’s head bent, eyeing it sideways.
It was in this way that Rhoda found It—Him!
“Look—look! Oh, I say—there’s something.... A thing—an animal! No—no—a—a——”
“Sabre-toothed tiger!” The boy’s wild shriek of triumph showed how he had hugged that old conjecture.
He came running, but until he got his head at exactly the same slant as hers he could see nothing, and was furiously petulant.
“Idiot! Silly fool!—nothing but a bough. You——” A lucky angle, and, “Oh, I say, by Jove! I’ve got it now! A man—a man!”
“A monkey—a great ape; there were no men, then, with ‘It.’” There, it seemed, she conceded him his tiger. “A little nearer—now again, there!”
They crept towards it. It was clear enough at a little distance; but nearer, what with the blazing sun and the queer incandescent lights on the mud, they found difficulty in exactly placing it. At last they had it, found themselves immediately over it; were able, kneeling side by side, to gaze down at the strange, age-old figure, lying huddled together, face forward.
It was not more than a couple of feet down; the semitransparent mud must have been silting over it for years and years: silted away again through centuries. And all for them—just for them. What a thought!
Hector raced off for his bicycle, and so on to the nearest cottage to borrow a spade.
The mental picture of the “man” and the sabre-toothed tiger met and clashed in his brain. If he was so certain of the man he must concede the tiger, given in to Rhoda and her later period. Unless—unless.... Suddenly he clapped his hands to his ears as though someone were shouting: his eyes closed, shutting out sight and sound. There was a tiger, he remembered—of course he remembered! And if he were there, others were there also—not one tiger, not one man, but tigers and men; both, both!
By the time he got back to where he had left his sister, the water was above her knees, the tide racing inwards.
They were not going to be done this time, however.
It was five o’clock in the afternoon, and their father was away from home. Rhoda went back and ordered the household with as much sobriety as possible; collected a supply of food and a couple of blankets—they had camped out before and there was nothing so very amazing in their behaviour—then returned to the shore, the shrine.
Hector was sitting at the edge of the water, staring fixedly, white as a sheet.
Rhoda collected driftwood and built a fire; almost fed him, for he took nothing but what was put into his hand.
“It will still be there, even if we go to sleep,” she said; then, “Anyhow, we’ll watch turn and turn about.”
But it was all of no use. The boy might lie down in his turn, but he still faced the sea with steady, staring eyes.
Soon after three he woke his sister, shaking her in a frenzy of impatience. Oh, these sleepers!
“Sleeping! Sleeping! You great stupid, you! I never! I.... Just look at the tide—only look!”
The tide was pretty far out, the whole world a mist of pinkish-grey. Step by step they followed the retreating lap of water.
By six o’clock they had the heavy body out, and were dragging it across the rapidly-drying mud.
It was not as big as Hector: five-foot-one at the most, but almost incredibly heavy, with immense rounded shoulders.
By the time they reached the true shore they were done, and flung themselves down, panting, exhausted. But they could not rest. A few minutes more and they were up again, turning the creature over, rubbing the mud away from the hairy body with bunches of grass; parting the long, matted locks which hung over its lowering face, with the overhung brow, flat nose, almost non-existent chin. The eyes were shut, but oddly unsunken: it smelt of marsh slime, of decayed vegetation, but nothing more.
Hector poked forward a finger to see if he could push up one eyelid, and drew back sharply.
“Why—hang it all—the thing’s warm!”
“No wonder, with this sun. I’m dripping from head to foot. Hector, we must go home. Matty will tell; there’ll be the eyes of a row.”
For all her insistence it was another hour before Rhoda could get her brother away. Again and again he met the returning tide with her hat, bringing it back full of water; washing their find from head to foot, combing its matted hair with a clipped fragment of driftwood. But at last they dragged it to a dry dyke, covered it with dry yellow grass, and were off, Rhoda on the step this time, Hector draped limply over the handle of the bicycle.
He slept like a dead thing for the best part of that day. But soon after three they were away again: no use for Rhoda to raise objections; the unrest of an intense excitement was in her bones as in his, and he knew it.
It had been a cloudless day, the veil of mist fainter than usual, the sky bluer.
As they left the bicycle and cut across the rough foreshore the sun beat down upon them with an almost unbearable fierceness. There was a shimmer like a mirage across the marshes: the sea was the colour of burnt steel.
They dog-trotted half the way, arguing as they ran; Hector, still fixed, pivoting upon his sabre-toothed tiger, and yet insistent that this was a man—a real man—contemporary with it: the first absolute proof of human existence anterior to the First Glacial age.
“An ape—a sort of ape—nearish to a man, but—well, look at his hair.” She’d give him his tiger, but not his man.
“By Gad, you’d grow hair, running wild as he did—a man——”
“Hector, what rot! Why, anyone—anyone could see—” She thought of her father, the smooth curate, the rubicund farmers.... A man!
“Well, stick to it—stick to it! But I bet you anything—anything....”
Hector’s words were jerked out of him as he padded on:
“We’ll get hundreds and hundreds of pounds for him! Travel—see the world—go to Java, where that other chap—what’s his name—was found. Why, he’s older than the Heidelberg Johnny—a thousand thousand times great-grandfather to that Pitcairn thing—older—older—oh, older than any!”
Panting, stumbling, half-blind with exhaustion, the boy was still a good six yards in front of his sister as he reached the dry dyke where they had left their treasure.
Rhoda saw him stand for a moment, staring, then spin round as though he had been shot, throwing up his arms with a hoarse scream.
By the time she had her own arms about him, he could only point, trembling from head to foot.
There was nothing there! Torn grass where they had pulled it to rub down their find; the very shape of the body distinct upon the sandy, sparsely-covered soil; the stick with the pennant of blue ribbon which Rhoda had taken from her hat to mark the spot.... Nothing more, nothing whatever.
Up and down the girl ran, circling like a plover, her head bent. It must be somewhere, it must—it must!
She glanced at her brother, who stood as though turned to stone: this was the sort of thing which sent people mad, killed them—to be so frightfully disappointed, and yet to stand still, to say nothing.
She caught at his arm and faced him, the tears streaming down her cheeks.
“Oh, my dear, my dear—” she began, then broke off, staring beyond him.
“Why ... why—Hector—I say—” Her voice broke to a whisper: she had a feeling as though she must be taking part in some mad dream. Quite inconsequently the thought of Balaam came to her. How did Balaam feel when the ass spoke to him? As she did—with eye more amazed than any ears could ever be.
“Hector—look.... It—It....”
As her brother still stood speechless, with bent head and ashen face, she dropped to silence: too terrified of It, of her plainly deluded self, of everything on earth, to say more....
One simply could not trust one’s own eyes; that’s what it came to.
Her legs were trembling; she could feel her knees touching each other, cold and clammy.
It would have been impossible to say a word, even if she had dared to reveal her own insanity; she could only pluck the lapels of her brother’s coat, running her dry tongue along her lips.
Something in her unusual silence must have stirred through the boy’s own misery, for after a moment or so he looked up, at first dimly, as though scarcely recognising her. Then—slowly realising her intent glance fixed on something beyond his own shoulder, he turned—and saw.
Twenty yards or more off, on a mound of coarse grass and sand just above the high-tide mark, “It” was sitting, its long arms wound round its knees, staring out to sea.
For a moment or so they hung, open-mouthed, wide-eyed.
For the life of her, Rhoda could not have moved a step nearer. The creature’s heavy shoulders were rounded, its head thrust forward. Silhouetted against sea and sky, white in contrast to its darkness, it had the aloofness of incredible age; drawn apart, almost sanctified by its immeasurable remoteness, its detachment from all that meant life to the men and women of the twentieth century: the web of fancied necessities, trivial possessions, absorptions.
“There was no sea—of course, there was no sea anywhere near here then!” The boy’s whisper opened an incalculable panorama of world-wide change.
There had been no sea here then; no Bristol Channel, no Irish Sea. Valley and river, that was all!
This alien being who had lived, and more than half-died, in this very spot, was gazing at something altogether strange: a vast, uneasy sheet of water with but one visible bank; no golden-brown lights, no shadows, no reflections: a strange, restless and indifferent god.
“Well—anyhow.... Oh, blazes! here goes! if—” Young Fane broke off with a decision that cut his doubts, and moved forward.
In a moment the creature was alert, its head flung sideways and up, sniffing the air like a dog.
It half turned, as though to run; then, as the boy stopped short, it paused.
“Rhoda—get the grub—go quietly—don’t run.... Bread-and-butter—anything!”
They had flung down the frail with the bottle of milk, cake, bread-and-butter that they had brought with them—enough for tea and supper—heedless in their despair. Rhoda moved a step or two away, picked up a packet, unfolded it and thrust the food into her brother’s hand—cake, a propitiation!
The strange figure, upright—and yet not upright as it is counted in these days—remained stationary; there was one quick turn of the head following her, then the poise of it showed eyes immovably fixed upon the male.
Hector moved forward very slowly, one smooth step after another. Rhoda had seen him like that with wild birds and rabbits. He wore an old suit of shrunken flannels, faded to a yellowish-grey, which blurred him into the landscape. Far enough off to catch his outline against the molten glare of the sea, she noted that his shoulders were almost as bent as those of that Other.... Other what?—man?—ape? The speculation zigzagged to and fro like lightning through her mind. She could scarcely breathe for anxiety.
As the boy drew quite near to the dull, brownish figure it jerked its head uneasily aside—she knew what Hector’s eyes were like, a steady, luminous grey under the bent brows—made a swinging movement with its arms, half turned; then stopped, stared sideways, crouching, sniffing.
The boy’s arm was held out at its fullest stretch in front of him. Heaven—the old, old gods—only knew upon what beast-torn carrion the creature had once fed; but it was famished, and some instinct must have told it that here was food, for it snatched and crammed its mouth.
Hector turned and Rhoda’s heart was in her throat, for there was no knowing what it might not do at that. But as he moved steadily away, without so much as a glance behind him, it hesitated, threw up its hand, as though to strike or throw; then followed.
That was the beginning of it. During those first days it would have followed him to the end of the world. Later on, he told himself bitterly that he had been a fool not to have seen further; gone off anywhere—oh, anywhere, so long as it was far enough—dragging the brute after him while his leadership still held.
It was with difficulty that they prevented it from dogging them back to the Rectory—just imagine it tailing through the village at their heels! But once it understood that it must stay where it was, it sat down on a grassy hummock, crouching with its arms round its knees, one hand tightly clenched, its small, light eyes, overhung by that portentous brow, following them with a look of desolate loneliness.
Again and again the boy and girl glanced back, but it still sat there staring after them, immovable in the spot which Hector had indicated to it. They had left it all the food they had with them, and one of the blankets which they had been too hot to carry home that morning. As it plainly had not known what to do with the thing, Rhoda, overcome by a sort of motherliness, had thrown it over its shoulders. Thus it sat, shrouded like an Arab, its shaggy head cut like a giant burr against the pale primrose sky.
“A beastly shame leaving it alone like that!” They both felt it; scarcely liked to meet each other’s eyes over it. And yet, pity it as they might, engrossed in it as they were, they couldn’t stay there with it after dark. No reason, no fear—just couldn’t! Why? Oh, well, for all its new-found life, it was as far away as any ghost.
“Poor brute!” said Rhoda.
“Poor chap!” Hector’s under-lip was thrust out, his look aggressive. But there was no argument; and when he treated her—“Don’t be silly; of course it’s not a man; any duffer could see that”—with contemptuous silence, Rhoda knew that he was absolutely fixed in his convictions.
He proved it, too, next morning, leading the creature out into the half-dried mud and back again to where his sister sat, following his apparently aimless movements with puzzled eyes.
“Now, look,” he crowed. “Just you look, Miss Blooming-Cocksure!”
He was right. There was the mark of his own heavy nailed boot, and beside it the track of other feet; oddly-shaped enough, but with the weight distinctly thrown upon the heel and great-toe, as no beast save man has ever yet thrown it—that fine developed great-toe, the emblem of leadership. Hardly a trace of such pressure as the three greater apes show, all on the outer edge of the foot; not even flat and even as the baboon throws his.
It was after this that—without another word said—Rhoda, meek for once, followed her brother’s example, and began to speak of the creature as “He.”
They even gave him a name. They called him Hodge; only in fun, and yet with a feeling that here was one of the first of all countrymen: less learned, and yet in some way so much more observant, self-sufficing, than his machine-made successors.
He could run at an almost incredible rate, bent as he was; climb any tree; out-throw either of them, doubling the distance. It was there that they got at the meaning of that closed fist; for at least three days he had never let go of his stone—his one weapon.
“He didn’t trust us.” Rhoda was hurt, her vanity touched; and when they had seemed to be making such progress, too!
“Not that—a sort of ingrained habit; the poor devil didn’t feel dressed without it,” protested Hector. “Of course he trusts us as much as a perfectly natural creature ever trusts anything or anybody.”
The Rector had gone on a visit to their only relative, an old aunt, who was dying in as leisurely a fashion as she had lived, and was unable to leave her. A neighbouring curate took that next Sunday’s service.
It had been a Monday when Hector found Hodge, and a very great deal can happen in that time.
From the first it had seemed clear that nothing in the way of communicating with authorities, experts, could be done until their father was there to back them, adding his own testimony. It was no good just writing—Hector did, indeed, begin a letter to Sir Ray Lankester, but tore it up, appalled by his own formless, boyish handwriting. “He’d think we were just getting at him—a couple of silly kids,” was his reflection.
He knew a lot for his age; was very certain of his own knowledge; felt no personal fear of this wild man of his. But ordinary grown-up people! That was altogether a different matter. And here he touched the primitive mistrust of all real youth for anything too completely finished and sophisticated.
Of course, from the very beginning, there were all sorts of minor troubles with Matty over their continued thefts of food; difficulties in keeping the creature away from the house and village.
But all that was nothing to what followed.
The first dim, unformulated sense of fear began on the night when Hector, awakened by a loud rustling among the leaves of that one tree, discovered Hodge there, climbing along a bough which ended close against Rhoda’s window.
Rhoda’s, not his—that was the queer part of it!
The boy felt half huffed as he drove him off. But when he came again, some instinct, something far less plain than thought, began to worry him: something which seemed ludicrous, until it gathered and grew to a feeling of nausea so horrible that the cold sweat pricked out upon his breast and forehead.
At the third visit the fear was more defined. But still.... That brute “smitten” with Rhoda! He tried to laugh it off. Anyhow, what did it matter? And yet.... Hang it all! there was something sickening about it all. It was impossible to sleep at night, listening, always listening.
He was only thirteen. Of course he had heard other chaps talking, but he had no real idea of the fierce drive of physical desire. And yet it was plain enough that here was something “beastly” beyond all words.
He told Rhoda to keep her window bolted, and when she protested against such “fugging,” touched on his own fears, tried, awkwardly enough, to explain without explaining.
“I’m funky about Hodge—he’s taken to following us. He might get in—bag something.”
“The darling!” cried Rhoda. “Look here, old chap. I really believe he’s fond of me; fonder of me than of you!”
She persisted in putting it to the test next day; left “Hodge” sitting by her brother, and walked away.
The creature moved his head uneasily from side to side, glanced at Hector, and his glance was full of hatred, malevolence; then, scrambling furtively to his feet, helping himself with his hands, one fist tight-closed, in the old fashion, he passed round the back of the boy, and followed her.
For a minute or two Hector sat hunched together, staring doggedly out to sea. If Rhoda chose to make an ass of herself—well, let her. After all, what could the brute do? She was bigger than he was, had nothing on her worth stealing; nothing of any use to Hodge, anyhow, he told himself.
Then, of a sudden, that half-formulated dread, that sick panic seized him afresh. He glanced round; both Hodge and his sister were out of sight, and he started to run with all his might, shouting.
There was an answering cry from Rhoda, shriller than usual, with a note of panic in it. This gave him the direction; and, plunging off among a group of shallow sand-dunes, he found himself almost upon them.
Rhoda was drawn up very straight, laughing nervously, her shoulders back, flushed to the eyes, while Hodge stood close in front of her, gabbling—they had tried him with their own words, but the oddly-angled jaw had seemed to cramp the tongue beyond hope of articulate speech—gabbling, gesticulating.
“Oh, Hector!” The girl’s cry was full of relief as she swung sideways toward him; while Hodge, glancing round, saw him, raised his hand, and threw.
The stone just grazed the boy’s cheek, drawing a spurt of blood; but this was enough for Rhoda, who forgot her own panic in a flame of indignation.
The creature could not have understood a word of what she said: her denunciation, abuse, “the wigging” she gave him. But her look was enough, and he shrank aside, shamed as a beaten dog.
They did not bid him good-night. They had taught him to shake hands; but now that he was in disgrace all that was over, and they turned aside with the set severity of youth: bent brows and straightened, hard mouths.
Rhoda was the first to relent, half-way home, breaking their silence with a laugh: “Poor old Hodge! I don’t know why I was so scared—I must have got him rattled, or he’d never have thrown that stone. Why, it was always you he liked best, followed,” she added magnanimously.
And yet she was puzzled, all on edge, as she had never been before. The look Hodge had cast at her brother was unmistakable; but why?—why? What had changed him? She never even thought of that passion common to man and beast, interwoven with all desire, hatred—the lees of love—jealousy.
All that evening Hector scarcely spoke. He was not so much scared as gravely anxious in a man’s way. If that brute got him with a stone, what would happen to Rhoda? Even supposing that there had been anyone to consult, he could not, for the life of him, have put his fear into words. So much a man, he was yet too much a boy for that. Terrified of ridicule, incredulity, he hugged his secret, as that strange man-beast hugged his—the highest and lowest—the most primitive and the most cultured—forever uncommunicative; those in the midway the babblers.
He was so firm in his insistence upon Rhoda changing her room that night that she gave way, without argument, overawed by his gravity, by an odd, chill sense of fear which hung about her. “I must have got a cold. I’ve a sort of feeling of a goose walking over my grave,” was what she said laughingly, half-shamefaced, accustomed as she was to attribute every feeling to some natural cause.
That night, soon after midnight, the brute was back in the tree. Hector heard the rustling, then the spring and swish of a released bough. Before he lay down he had unbolted one of the long bars from the underneath part of his old-fashioned iron bedstead; and, now taking it in his hand, he ran to Rhoda’s room.
The white-washed walls and ceiling were so flooded with moonlight that it was almost as light as day.
Hodge was already in the room: the clothes were torn from the bed; the cupboard doors wide open; the whole place littered with feminine attire.
He—It—the impersonal pronoun slid into its place in the boy’s mind, and no words of self-reproach or condemnation could have said more—stood at the foot of the empty bed, with something white—it might have been a chemise—in its hand, held up to its face. Hector could not catch its expression, but there was something inexpressibly bestial in the silhouette of its head, bent, sniffing; he could actually hear the whistling breath.
He would have given anything if only it had stayed, fought it out then. But it belonged to a state too far away for that—defensive, at times aggressive, but forever running, hiding, slinking: a thrower from among thick boughs behind tree-trunks—and in a moment it was out of the window, bundling over the sill, so clumsy and yet so amazingly quick.
He could hear the swing of a bough as it caught it. There was a loud rustle of leaves, and a stone hurtled in through the window; but that was all.
Hector tidied the room, tossed the scattered garments into the bottom of the wardrobe, and re-made the bed in his awkward boy-fashion, moving mechanically, as if in a dream; his hands busied over his petty tasks, his mind engrossed with something so tremendous that he seemed to be two separate people, of which the one, the greater, revolved slowly and certainly in an unalterable orbit, quite apart from his old everyday life, from that Hector Fane whom he had always known, thought of, spoken of as “myself.”
He went to his own room, put on his collar and coat—for he had lain down upon his bed without undressing, every nerve on edge—laced up his boots with meticulous care. He was no longer frightened or hurried; he knew exactly what he was going to do, and that alone hung him—moving slowly, surely—as upon a pivot.
The moonlight was so clear that there was no need for a candle, flooding the stairway, the study with its shabby book-shelves.
Easy enough to take the old shot-gun from the nails over the mantelshelf; only last holiday—years and years ago, while he was still a child—he had been allowed to use it for wild-duck shooting—and run his hand along the back of the writing-table drawer in search of those three or four cartridges which he had seen there a couple of days earlier.
The cartridges in his pocket swung against his hip as he mounted his bicycle and rode away—guiding himself with one hand, the gun lying heavily along his left arm; it was like someone nudging, reminding.
The scene was entirely familiar; but what was so strange in himself lent it an air of something new and uncanny. The winding road had a swing, drawing him with it; the mingled mist and moonlight were sentient, watchful, holding their breath.
Once or twice he seemed to catch sight of a low, stooping figure amid the rough grass and rush-tufted hollows to the left of him; but he could not be sure until he reached the very shore, left his bicycle in the old place.
Then a stone grazed his shoulder, and there was a blurred scurry of brown, from hummock to hummock, low as a hare to the ground.
Once in the open he got a clear sight of Hodge. The far-away tide was on the flow, but there was still a good half-mile of mud, like lead in the silvery dawn.
The man-beast bundled down the sandy strip of shore and out on to the mud: ungainly, stumbling; the boy behind it—“It.” Hector held to that: the pronoun was altogether reassuring now—something to hold to, hard as a bone in his brain.
On the edge of the tide it tried to turn, double; then paused, fascinated, amazed: numb with fear of the strange level pipe pointing, oddly threatening, the first ray of sunlight running like an arrow of gold along the top of it.
There was something utterly naïve and piteous in the misplaced creature’s gesture: the way in which it stood—long arms, short, bandy legs—moving its head uneasily from side to side; bewildered, yet fascinated.
“Poor beggar!” muttered Hector. He could not have said why, but he was horribly sorry, ashamed, saddened.
Years later he thought more clearly—“Poor beggar! After all, what did he want but life—more life—the complete life of any man—or animal, either, come to that!”
As he pressed his finger to the trigger he saw the rough brown figure throw up its arms, leap high in the air, and drop.
Something like a red-hot iron burnt up the back of his own neck; his head throbbed. After all, what did death matter when life was so rotten, so inexplicable? It wasn’t that, only—only.... Well, it was beastly to feel so tired, so altogether gone to pieces.
With bent head he made his way, ploughing through the mud and sand, back to the shore; sat down rather suddenly, with a feeling as though the ground had risen up to meet him, and winding his arms round his knees, stared out to sea; washed through and through, swept by an immense sense of grief, a desperate regret which had nothing whatever to do with his immediate action—the death of Hodge.
That was something which had to be gone through with; it wasn’t that—not exactly that.... But, oh, the futility, the waste of ... well, of everything!
“Rotten luck!” He shuddered as he dragged himself wearily to his feet. He could not have gone before, not while there was the mud with “that” on it; not even so long as the shining sands were bare. It would have seemed too hurried, almost indecent. But now that an unbroken, glittering sheet of water lapped the very edge of the shore, the funeral ceremony—with all its pomp of sunrise—was over; and, turning aside, he stumbled wearily through the rough grass to the place where he had left his bicycle.
HATTERAS
By A. W. MASON
The story was told to me by James Walker in the cabin of a seven-ton cutter, one night when we lay anchored in Helford River. It was towards the end of September; during this last week the air had grown chilly with the dusk, and the sea when it lost the sun took on a leaden and a dreary look. There was no other boat on the wooded creek and the swish of the tide against the planks had a very lonesome sound. All these circumstances I think provoked Walker to tell the story, but most of all the lonely swish of the tide against the planks. For it is the story of a man’s loneliness and the strange ways into which loneliness misled his soul. However, let the story speak for itself.
Hatteras and Walker had been schoolfellows, though never classmates. Hatteras indeed was the head of the school and prophecy vaguely sketched out for him a brilliant career in some service of importance. The definite law, however, that the sins of the fathers shall be visited upon the children overbore this prophecy. Hatteras, the father, disorganized his son’s future by dropping unexpectedly through one of the trapways of speculation into the Bankruptcy Court beneath, just two months before Hatteras, the son, was to have gone up to Oxford. The lad was therefore compelled to start life in a stony world with a stock-in-trade which consisted of a schoolboy’s command of the classics, a real inborn gift of tongues and the friendship of James Walker.
The last item proved of the most immediate value. For Walker, whose father was the junior partner in a firm of West African merchants, obtained for Hatteras an employment as the bookkeeper at a branch factory in the Bight of Benin.
Thus the friends parted. Hatteras went out to West Africa alone, and met with a strange welcome on the day when he landed. The incident did not come to Walker’s ears until some time afterwards, nor when he heard of it did he at once appreciate the effect which it had upon Hatteras. But chronologically it comes into the story at this point, and so may as well be immediately told.
There was no settlement very near to the factory. It stood by itself on the swamps of the Forcados River with the mangrove forest closing in about it. Accordingly the captain of the steamer just put Hatteras ashore in a boat and left him with his traps on the beach. Half-a-dozen Kru boys had come down from the factory to receive him, but they could speak no English, and Hatteras at this time could speak no Kru. So that although there was no lack of conversation there was not much interchange of thought. At last Hatteras pointed to his traps. The Kru boys picked them up and preceded Hatteras to the factory. They mounted the steps to the verandah on the first floor and laid their loads down. Then they proceeded to further conversation. Hatteras gathered from their excited faces and gestures that they wished to impart information, but he could make neither head nor tail of a word they said, and at last he retired from the din of their chatter through the windows of a room which gave on to the verandah, and sat down to wait for his superior, the agent.
It was early in the morning when Hatteras landed and he waited until midday patiently. In the afternoon it occurred to him that the agent would have shown a kindly consideration if he had left a written message or an intelligible Kru boy to receive him. It is true that the blacks came in at intervals and chattered and gesticulated, but matters were not thereby appreciably improved. He did not like to go poking about the house, so he contemplated the mud banks and the mud river and the mangrove forest, and cursed the agent. The country was very quiet. There are few things quieter than a West African forest in the daytime. It is obtrusively, emphatically quiet. It does not let you forget how singularly quiet it is. And towards sundown the quietude began to jar on Hatteras’ nerves. He was besides very hungry. To while away the time he took a stroll round the verandah.
He walked along the side of the houses towards the back, and as he neared the back he heard a humming sound. The further he went the louder it grew. It was something like the hum of a mill, only not so metallic and not so loud; and it came from the rear of the house.
Hatteras turned the corner and what he saw was this—a shuttered window and a cloud of flies. The flies were not aimlessly swarming outside the window; they streamed in through the lattice of the shutters in a busy, practical way; they came in columns from the forest and converged upon the shutters; and the hum sounded from within the room.
Hatteras looked about for a Kru boy for the sake of company, but at that moment there was not one to be seen.
He felt the cold strike at his spine. He went back into the room in which he had been sitting. He sat again but he sat shivering. The agent had left no word for him.... The Kru boys had been anxious to explain—something. The humming of the flies about that shuttered window seemed to Hatteras a more explicit language than the Kru boys’ chatterings. He penetrated into the interior of the house, and reckoned up the doors. He opened one of them ever so slightly and the buzzing came through like the hum of a wheel in a factory revolving in the collar of a strap. He flung the door open and stood upon the threshold. The atmosphere of the room appalled him; he felt the sweat break cold upon his forehead and a deadly sickness in all his body. Then he nerved himself to enter.
At first he saw little because of the gloom. In a while, however, he made out a bed stretched along the wall and a thing stretched upon the bed. The thing was more or less shapeless because it was covered with a black furry sort of rug. Hatteras, however, had little trouble in defining it. He knew now for certain what it was that the Kru boys had been so anxious to explain to him. He approached the bed and bent over it, and as he bent over it the horrible thing occurred which left so vivid an impression on Hatteras. The black furry rug suddenly lifted itself from the bed, beat about Hatteras’ face, and dissolved into flies. The Kru boys found Hatteras in a dead swoon on the floor half-an-hour later, and next day, of course, he was down with the fever. The agent had died of it three days before.
Hatteras recovered from the fever, but not from the impression. It left him with a prevailing sense of horror and, at first, with a sense of disgust too.
“It’s an obscene country,” he would say. But he stayed in it, for he had no choice. All the money which he could save went to the support of his family, and for six years the firm he served moved him from district to district, from factory to factory.
Now the second item of his stock-in-trade was a gift of tongues, and about this time it began to bring him profit. Wherever Hatteras was posted, he managed to pick up a native dialect, and with the dialect inevitably a knowledge of native customs. Dialects are numerous on the west coast, and at the end of six years Hatteras could speak as many of them as some traders could enumerate. Languages ran in his blood; he acquired a reputation for knowledge and was offered service under the Niger Protectorate, so that when, two years later, Walker came out to Africa to open a new branch factory at a settlement on the Bonny River, he found Hatteras stationed in command there.
Hatteras, in fact, went down to Bonny River town to meet the steamer which brought his friend.
“I say, Dick, you look bad,” said Walker.
“People are not, as a rule, offensively robust about these parts.”
“I know that; but you’re the weariest bag of bones I’ve ever seen.”
“Well, look at yourself in a glass a year from now for my double,” said Hatteras, and the pair went up river together.
“Your factory is next to the Residency,” said Hatteras. “There’s a compound to each running down to the river, and there’s a palisade between the compounds. I’ve cut a little gate in the palisade as it will shorten the way from one house to the other.”
The wicket gate was frequently used during the next few months—indeed more frequently than Walker imagined. He was only aware that, when they were both at home, Hatteras would come through it of an evening and smoke on his verandah. There he would sit for hours cursing the country, raving about the lights of Piccadilly Circus, and offering his immortal soul in exchange for a comic opera tune played upon a barrel-organ. Walker possessed a big atlas, and one of Hatteras’ chief diversions was to trace with his finger a bee-line across the African continent and the Bay of Biscay until he reached London.
More rarely Walker would stroll over to the Residency, but he soon came to notice that Hatteras had a distinct preference for the factory and for the factory verandah. The reason for the preference puzzled Walker considerably. He drew a quite erroneous conclusion that Hatteras was hiding at the Residency—well, someone whom it was prudent, especially in an official, to conceal. He abandoned the conclusion, however, when he discovered that his friend was in the habit of making solitary expeditions. At times Hatteras would be absent for a couple of days, at times for a week, and, so far as Walker could ascertain, he never so much as took a servant with him to keep him company. He would simply announce at night his intended departure, and in the morning he would be gone. Nor on his return did he ever offer to Walker any explanation of his journeys. On one occasion, however, Walker broached the subject. Hatteras had come back the night before, and he sat crouched up in a deck chair, looking intently into the darkness of the forest.
“I say,” asked Walker, “isn’t it rather dangerous to go slumming about West Africa alone?”
Hatteras did not reply for a moment. He seemed not to have heard the suggestion, and when he did speak it was to ask a quite irrelevant question.
“Have you ever seen the Horse Guards’ Parade on a dark rainy night?” he asked; but he never moved his head, he never took his eyes from the forest. “The wet level of ground looks just like a lagoon and the arches a Venice palace above it.”
“But look here, Dick!” said Walker, keeping to his subject, “you never leave word when you are coming back. One never knows that you have come back until you show yourself the morning after.”
“I think,” said Hatteras slowly, “that the finest sight in the world is to be seen from the bridge in St. James’ Park when there’s a State Ball on at Buckingham Palace and the light from the windows reddens the lake and the carriages glance about the Mall like fireflies.”
“Even your servants don’t know when you come back,” said Walker.
“Oh,” said Hatteras quietly, “so you have been asking questions of my servants?”
“I had a good reason,” replied Walker. “Your safety”; and with that the conversation dropped.
Walker watched Hatteras. Hatteras watched the forest. A West African mangrove forest night is full of the eeriest, queerest sounds that ever a man’s ears hearkened to. And the sounds come not so much from the birds or the soughing of branches; they seem to come from the swamp-life underneath the branches, at the roots of the trees. There’s a ceaseless stir as of a myriad reptiles creeping in the slime. Listen long enough and you will fancy that you hear the whirr and rush of innumerable crabs, the flapping of innumerable fish. Now and again a more distinctive sound emerges from the rest—the croaking of a bull-frog, the whining cough of a crocodile. At such sounds Hatteras would start up in his chair and cock his head like a dog in a room that hears another dog barking in the street.
“Doesn’t it sound damned wicked?” he said with a queer smile of enjoyment.
Walker did not answer. The light from a lamp in the room behind them struck obliquely upon Hatteras’ face and slanted off from it in a narrowing column until it vanished in a yellow thread among the leaves of the trees. It showed that the same enjoyment which rang in Hatteras’ voice was alive upon his face. His eyes, his ears, were alert, and he gently opened and shut his mouth with a little clicking of the teeth. In some horrible way he seemed to have something in common with, he appeared almost to participate in, the activity of the swamp. Thus had Walker often seen him sit, but never with the light so clear upon his face, and the sight gave to him a quite new impression of his friend. He wondered whether all these months his judgment had been wrong. And out of that wonder a new thought sprang into his mind.
“Dick,” he said, “this house of mine stands between your house and the forest. It stands on the borders of the trees, on the edge of the swamp. Is that why you prefer it to your own?”
Hatteras turned his head quickly towards his companion, almost suspiciously. Then he looked back into the darkness, and after a little said:
“It’s not only the things you care about, old man, which tug at you; it’s the things you hate as well. I hate this country. I hate these miles and miles of mangroves, and yet I am fascinated. I can’t get the forests and the undergrowth and the swamp out of my mind. I dream of them at night. I dream that I am sinking into that black oily batter of mud. Listen,” and he suddenly broke off with his head stretched forward. “Doesn’t it sound wicked?”
“But all this talk about London?” cried Walker.
“Oh, don’t you understand?” interrupted Hatteras roughly. Then he changed his tone and gave his reason quietly. “One has to struggle against a fascination of that sort. It’s devil’s work. So for all I am worth I talk about London.”
“Look here, Dick,” said Walker. “You had better get leave and go back to the old country for a spell.”
“A very solid piece of advice,” said Hatteras, and he went home to the Residency.
The next morning he had again disappeared. But Walker discovered upon his table a couple of new volumes, and glanced at the titles. They were Burton’s account of his pilgrimage to El Medinah and Mecca.
Five nights afterwards Walker was smoking a pipe on the verandah when he fancied that he heard a rubbing, scuffling sound as if someone very cautiously was climbing over the fence of his compound. The moon was low in the sky and dipping down toward the forest, indeed the rim of it touched the treetops so that while a full half of the enclosure was lit by the yellow light, that half which bordered on the forest was inky black in shadow, and it was from the furthest corner of this second half that the sound came. Walker leaned forward listening. He heard the sound again, and a moment after a second sound, which left him in no doubt. For in that dark corner he knew that a number of palisades for repairing the fence were piled, and the second sound which he heard was a rattle as someone stumbled against them. Walker went inside and fetched a rifle.
When he came back he saw a negro creeping across the bright open space towards the Residency. Walker hailed to him to stop. Instead the negro ran. He ran towards the wicket gate in the palisade. Walker shouted again; the figure only ran the faster. He had covered half the distance before Walker fired. He clutched his right forearm with his left hand, but he did not stop. Walker fired again, this time at his legs, and the man dropped to the ground. Walker heard his servants stirring as he ran down the steps. He crossed quickly to the negro and the negro spoke to him, but in English, and with the voice of Hatteras.
“For God’s sake keep your servants off!”
Walker ran to the house, met his servants at the foot of the steps and ordered them back. He had shot at a monkey he said. Then he returned to Hatteras.
“Dicky, are you hurt?” he whispered.
“You hit me each time you fired, but not very badly, I think.”
He bandaged Hatteras’ arm and thigh with strips of his shirt, and waited by his side until the house was quiet. Then he lifted him and carried him across the enclosure to the steps, and up the steps into his bedroom. It was a long and fatiguing process. For one thing Walker dared make no noise and must needs tread lightly with his load; for another, the steps were steep and rickety, with a narrow balustrade on each side waist-high. It seemed to Walker that the day would dawn before he reached the top. Once or twice Hatteras stirred in his arms, and he feared the man would die then and there. For all the time his blood dripped and pattered like heavy raindrops on the wooden steps.
Walker laid Hatteras on his bed and examined his wounds. One bullet had passed through the fleshy part of the forearm, the other through the fleshy part of his right thigh. But no bones were broken and no arteries cut. Walker lit a fire, baked some plantain leaves, and applied them as a poultice. Then he went out with a pail of water and scrubbed down the steps. Again he dared not make any noise; and it was close on daybreak before he had done. His night’s work, however, was not ended. He had still to cleanse the black stain from Hatteras’ skin, and the sun was up before he stretched a rug upon the ground and went to sleep with his back against the door.
“Walker,” Hatteras called out in a loud voice, an hour or so later.
Walker woke up and crossed over to the bed.
“Dicky, I’m frightfully sorry. I couldn’t know it was you.”
“That’s all right, Jim. Don’t you worry about that. What I wanted to say was that nobody had better know. It wouldn’t do, would it, if it got about?”
“Oh, I am not so sure. People would think it a rather creditable proceeding.”
Hatteras shot a puzzled look at his friend. Walker, however, did not notice it, and continued, “I saw Burton’s account of his pilgrimage in your room; I might have known that journeys of the kind were just the sort of thing to appeal to you.”
“Oh, yes, that’s it,” said Hatteras, lifting himself up in bed. He spoke eagerly—perhaps a thought too eagerly. “Yes, that’s it. I have always been keen on understanding the natives thoroughly. It’s after all no less than one’s duty if one has to rule them, and since I could speak their lingo—” he broke off and returned to the subject which had prompted him to rouse Walker. “But, all the same, it wouldn’t do if the natives got to know.”
“There’s no difficulty about that,” said Walker. “I’ll give out that you have come back with the fever and that I am nursing you. Fortunately there’s no doctor handy to come making inconvenient examinations.”
Hatteras knew something of surgery, and under his directions Walker poulticed and bandaged him until he recovered. The bandaging, however, was amateurish, and, as a result, the muscles contracted in Hatteras’ thigh and he limped—ever so slightly, still he limped—he limped to his dying day. He did not, however, on that account abandon his explorations, and more than once Walker, when his lights were out and he was smoking a pipe on the verandah, would see a black figure with a trailing walk cross his compound and pass stealthily through the wicket in the fence. Walker took occasion to expostulate with his friend.
“It’s too dangerous a game for a man to play for any length of time. It is doubly dangerous now that you limp. You ought to give it up.”
Hatteras made a strange reply.
“I’ll try to,” he said.
Walker pondered over the words for some time. He set them side by side in his thoughts with that confession which Hatteras had made to him one evening. He asked himself whether, after all, Hatteras’ explanation of his conduct was sincere, whether it was really a desire to know the native thoroughly which prompted those mysterious expeditions, and then he remembered that he himself had first suggested the explanation to Hatteras. Walker began to feel uneasy—more than uneasy, actually afraid on his friend’s account. Hatteras had acknowledged that the country fascinated him, and fascinated him through its hideous side. Was this masquerading as a black man a further proof of the fascination? Was it, as it were, a step downwards towards a closer association? Walker sought to laugh the notion from his mind, but it returned and returned, and here and there an incident occurred to give it strength and colour.
For instance, on one occasion after Hatteras had been three weeks absent, Walker sauntered over to the Residency towards four o’clock in the afternoon. Hatteras was trying cases in the Court-house, which formed the ground floor of the Residency. Walker stepped into the room. It was packed with a naked throng of blacks, and the heat was overpowering. At the end of the hall sat Hatteras. His worn face shone out amongst the black heads about him white and waxy like a gardenia.
Walker, however, thinking that the Court would rise, determined to wait for a little. But, at the last moment, a negro was put up to answer to a charge of participation in fetish rites. The case seemed sufficiently clear from the outset, but somehow Hatteras delayed its conclusion. There was evidence and unrebutted evidence of the usual details—human sacrifice, mutilations, and the like, but Hatteras pressed for more. He sat until it was dusk, and then had candles brought into the Court-house. He seemed indeed not so much to be investigating the negro’s guilt as to be adding to his own knowledge of fetish ceremonials. And Walker could not but perceive that he took more than a merely scientific pleasure in the increase of his knowledge. His face appeared to smooth out, his eyes became quick, interested, almost excited; and Walker again had the queer impression that Hatteras was in spirit participating in the loathsome ceremonies, and participating with an intense enjoyment. In the end the negro was convicted and the Court rose. But he might have been convicted a good three hours before. Walker went home shaking his head. He seemed to be watching a man deliberately divesting himself of his humanity. It seemed as though the white man was ambitious to decline into the black. Hatteras was growing into an uncanny creature. His friend began to foresee a time when he should hold him in loathing and horror. And the next morning helped to confirm him in that forecast.
For Walker had to make an early start down river for Bonny town, and as he stood on the landing-stage Hatteras came down to him from the Residency.
“You heard that negro tried yesterday?” he asked with an assumption of carelessness.
“Yes, and condemned. What of him?”
“He escaped last night. It’s a bad business, isn’t it?”
Walker nodded in reply and his boat pushed off. But it stuck in his mind for the greater part of that day that the prison adjoined the Court-house and so formed part of the ground floor of the Residency. Had Hatteras connived at his escape? Had the judge secretly set free the prisoner whom he had publicly condemned?
The question troubled Walker considerably during his month of absence, and stood in the way of his business. He learned for the first time how much he loved his friend, and how eagerly he watched for that friend’s advancement. Each day added to his load of anxiety. He dreamed continually of a black-painted man slipping among the tree-boles nearer and nearer, towards the red glare of a fire in some open space secure amongst the swamps, where hideous mysteries had their celebration. He cut short his business and hurried back from Bonny. He crossed at once to the Residency and found his friend in a great turmoil of affairs.
“Jim,” said Hatteras, starting up, “I’ve got a year’s leave; I’m going home.”
“Dicky!” cried Walker, and he nearly wrung Hatteras’ hand from his arm. “That’s grand news.”
“Yes, old man, I thought you would be glad; I sail in a fortnight.” And he did.
For the first month Walker was glad. A year’s leave would make a new man of Dick Hatteras, he thought, or at all events restore the old man, sane and sound, as he had been before he came to the West African coast. During the second month Walker began to feel lonely. In the third he bought a banjo and learnt it during the fourth and fifth. During the sixth he began to say to himself, “What a time poor Dick must have had all those years with these cursed forests about him. I don’t wonder—I don’t wonder.” He turned disconsolately to his banjo and played for the rest of the year—all through the wet season while the rain came down in a steady roar and only the curlews cried—until Hatteras returned. He returned at the top of his spirits and health. Of course he was hall-marked West African, but no man gets rid of that stamp. Moreover there was more than health in his expression. There was a new look of pride in his eyes, and when he spoke of a bachelor it was in terms of sympathetic pity.
“Jim,” said he, after five minutes of restraint, “I am engaged to be married.”
Jim danced round him in delight. “What an ass I have been,” he thought; “why didn’t I think of that cure myself?” And he asked, “When is it to be?”
“In eight months. You’ll come home and see me through.”
Walker agreed and for eight months listened to praises of the lady. There were no more solitary expeditions. In fact, Hatteras seemed absorbed in the diurnal discovery of new perfections in his future wife.
“Yes, she seems a nice girl,” Walker commented. He found her upon his arrival in England more human than Hatteras’ conversation had led him to expect, and she proved to him that she was a nice girl. For she listened for hours to his lectures on the proper way to treat Dick without the slightest irritation and with only a faintly visible amusement. Besides she insisted on returning with her husband to Bonny River, which was a sufficiently courageous thing to undertake.
For a year in spite of the climate the couple were commonplace and happy. For a year Walker clucked about them like a hen after its chickens, and slept the sleep of the untroubled. Then he returned to England and from that time made only occasional journeys to West Africa. Thus for a while he almost lost sight of Hatteras, and consequently still slept the sleep of the untroubled. One morning, however, he arrived unexpectedly at the settlement and at once called on Hatteras. He did not wait to be announced, but ran up the steps outside the house and into the dining-room. He found Mrs. Hatteras crying. She dried her eyes, welcomed Walker, and said that she was sorry, but her husband was away.
Walker started, looked at her eyes, and asked hesitatingly whether he could help. Mrs. Hatteras replied with an ill-assumed surprise that she did not understand. Walker suggested that there was trouble. Mrs. Hatteras denied the truth of the suggestion. Walker pressed the point and Mrs. Hatteras yielded so far as to assert that there was no trouble in which Hatteras was concerned. Walker hardly thought it the occasion for a parade of manners, and insisted on pointing out that his knowledge of her husband was intimate and dated from his schooldays. Therefore Mrs. Hatteras gave way.
“Dick goes away alone,” she said. “He stains his skin and goes away at night. He tells me that he must, that it’s the only way by which he can know the natives, and that so it’s a sort of duty. He says the black tells nothing of himself to the white man—never. You must go amongst them if you are to know them. So he goes, and I never know when he will come back. I never know whether he will come back.”
“But he has done that sort of thing on and off for years, and he has always come back,” replied Walker.
“Yes, but one day he will not.”
Walker comforted her as well as he could, praised Hatteras for his conduct, though his heart was hot against him, spoke of risks that every man must run who serves the Empire. “Never a lotus closes, you know,” he quoted, and went back to the factory with the consciousness that he had been telling lies.
It was a sense of duty that prompted Hatteras, of that Walker assured himself he was certain, and he waited—he waited from darkness to daybreak in his compound, for three successive nights.
On the fourth he heard the scuffling sound at the corner of the fence. The night was black as the inside of a coffin. Half a regiment of men might have passed him and he not have seen them. Accordingly he walked cautiously to the palisade which separated the enclosure of the Residency from his own, felt along it until he reached the little gate and stationed himself in front of it. In a few moments he thought that he heard a man breathing, but whether to the right or the left he could not tell; and then a groping hand lightly touched his face and drew away again. Walker said nothing, but held his breath and did not move. The hand was stretched out again. This time it touched his breast and moved across it until it felt a button of Walker’s coat. Then it was snatched away, and Walker heard a gasping indraw of the breath and afterwards a sound as of a man turning in a flurry. Walker sprang forward and caught a naked shoulder with one hand, a naked arm with the other.
“Wait a bit, Dick Hatteras,” he said.
There was a low cry, and then a husky voice addressed him respectfully as “Daddy” in trade-English.
“That won’t do, Dick,” said Walker.
The voice babbled more trade-English.
“If you’re not Dick Hatteras,” continued Walker, tightening his grasp, “you’ve no manner of right here. I’ll give you till I count ten, and then I shall shoot.”
Walker counted up to nine aloud and then——
“Jim,” said Hatteras in his natural voice.
“That’s better,” said Walker. “Let’s go in and talk.”
He went up the steps and lighted the lamp. Hatteras followed him and the two men faced one another. For a little while neither of them spoke. Walker was repeating to himself that this man with the black skin, naked except for a dirty loincloth and a few feathers on his head, was a white man married to a white wife who was sleeping—nay, more likely crying—not thirty yards away.
Hatteras began to mumble out his usual explanation of duty and the rest of it.
“That won’t wash,” interrupted Walker. “What is it? A woman?”
“Good Heaven, no!” cried Hatteras suddenly. It was plain that that explanation was at all events untrue. “Jim, I’ve a good mind to tell you all about it.”
“You have got to,” said Walker. He stood between Hatteras and the steps.
“I told you how this country fascinated me in spite of myself,” he began.
“But I thought,” interrupted Walker, “that you had got over that since—why, man, you are married,” and he came across to Hatteras and shook him by the shoulder. “Don’t you understand? You have a wife!”
“I know,” said Hatteras. “But there are things deeper at the heart of me than the love of woman, and one of these things is the love of horror. I tell you, it bites as nothing else does in the world. It’s like absinthe, that turns you sick at the beginning and that you can’t do without once you have got the taste of it. Do you remember my first landing? It made me sick enough at the beginning, you know. But now——” He sat down in a chair and drew it close to Walker. His voice dropped to a passionate whisper, he locked and unlocked his fingers with feverish movements, and his eyes shifted and glittered in an unnatural excitement.
“It’s like going down to hell and coming up again and wanting to go down again. Oh, you’d want to go down again. You’d find the whole earth pale. You’d count the days until you went down again. Do you remember Orpheus? I think he looked back, not to see if Eurydice was coming after him, but because he knew it was the last glimpse he would get of hell.” At that he broke off and began to chant in a crazy voice, wagging his head and swaying his body to the rhythm of the lines—
Quum subita incautum dementia cepit amantem
Ignoscenda quidem scirent si ignoscere manes;
Restitit Eurydicenque suam jam luce sub ipsa
Immemor heu! victusque animi respexit.
“Oh, stop that!” cried Walker, and Hatteras laughed. “For God’s sake, stop it!”
For the words brought back to him in a flash the vision of a classroom with its chipped desks ranged against the varnished walls, the droning sound of the form-master’s voice, and the swish of lilac bushes against the lower window panes on summer afternoons. Then he said, “Oh, go on, and let’s have done with it.”
Hatteras took up his tale again, and it seemed to Walker that the man breathed the very miasma of the swamp and infected the room with it. He spoke of leopard societies, murder clubs, human sacrifices. He had witnessed them at the beginning, he had taken his share in them at the last. He told the whole story without shame, with indeed a glowing enjoyment. He spared Walker no details. He related them in their loathsome completeness until Walker felt stunned and sick. “Stop,” he said again, “stop! That’s enough.”
Hatteras, however, continued. He appeared to have forgotten Walker’s presence. He told the story to himself, for his own amusement, as a child will, and here and there he laughed, and the mere sound of his laughter was inhuman. He only came to a stop when he saw Walker hold out to him a cocked and loaded revolver.
“Well?” he asked. “Well?”
Walker still offered him the revolver.
“There are cases, I think, which neither God’s law nor man’s law seems to have provided for. There’s your wife, you see, to be considered. If you don’t take it I shall shoot you myself now, here, and mark you I shall shoot you for the sake of a boy I loved at school in the old country.”
Hatteras took the revolver in silence, laid it on the table, fingered it for a little.
“My wife must never know,” he said.
“There’s the pistol. Outside’s the swamp. The swamp will tell no tales, nor shall I. Your wife need never know.”
Hatteras picked up the pistol and stood up.
“Good-bye, Jim,” he said, and half pushed out his hand. Walker shook his head, and Hatteras went out on the verandah and down the steps.
Walker heard him climb over the fence and then followed as far as the verandah. In the still night the rustle and swish of the undergrowth came quite clearly to his ears. The sound ceased, and a few minutes afterwards the muffled crack of a pistol-shot broke the silence like the tap of a hammer. The swamp, as Walker prophesied, told no tales. Mrs. Hatteras gave the one explanation of her husband’s disappearance that she knew, and returned broken-hearted to England. There was some loud talk about the self-sacrificing energy which makes the English a dominant race, and there you might think is the end of the story.
But some years later Walker went trudging up the Ogowe River in Congo Français. He travelled as far as Woermann’s factory in Njob Island, and, having transacted his business there, pushed up stream in the hope of opening the upper reaches for trade purposes. He travelled for a hundred and fifty miles in a little sternwheel steamer. At that point he stretched an awning over a whale-boat, embarked himself, his banjo and eight blacks from the steamer, and rowed for another fifty miles. There he ran the boat’s nose into a clay cliff close to a Fan village, and went ashore to negotiate with the chief.
There was a slip of forest between the village and the river banks, and while Walker was still dodging the palm creepers which tapestried it he heard a noise of lamentation. The noise came from the village, and was general enough to assure him that a chief was dead. It rose in a chorus of discordant howls, low in note and very long drawn out—wordless, something like the howls of an animal in pain, and yet human by reason of their infinite melancholy.
Walker pushed forward, came out upon a hillock fronting the palisade which closed the entrance to the single street of huts, and passed down into the village. It seemed as though he had been expected. For from every hut the Fans rushed out towards him, the men dressed in their filthiest rags, the women with their faces chalked and their heads shaved. They stopped, however, on seeing a white man, and Walker knew enough of their tongue to ascertain that they looked for the coming of the witch-doctor. The chief, it appeared, had died a natural death, and since the event is of sufficiently rare occurrence in the Fan country, it had promptly been attributed to witchcraft, and the witch-doctor had been sent for to discover the criminal. The village was consequently in a lively state of apprehension, for the end of those who bewitch chiefs to death is not easy. The Fans, however, politely invited Walker to inspect the corpse. It lay in a dark hut, packed with the corpse’s relations, who were shouting to it at the top of their voices on the off-chance that its spirit might think better of its conduct and return to the body. They explained to Walker that they had tried all the usual varieties of persuasion. They had put red pepper into the chief’s eyes while he was dying; they had propped open his mouth with a stick; they had burned fibres of the oil-nut under his nose. In fact they had made his death as uncomfortable as possible, but none the less he had died.
The witch-doctor arrived on the heels of the explanation, and Walker, since he was powerless to interfere, thought it wise to retire for a time. He went back to the hillock on the edge of the trees. Thence he looked across and over the palisade, and had the whole length of the street within his view.
The witch-doctor entered in from the opposite end to the beating of many drums. The first thing Walker noticed was that he wore a square-skirted eighteenth century coat and a tattered pair of brocaded knee breeches on his bare legs; the second was that he limped—ever so slightly. Still he limped, and with the right leg. Walker felt a strong desire to see the man’s face, and his heart thumped within him as he came nearer and nearer down the street. But his hair was so matted about his cheeks that Walker could not distinguish a feature. “If I was only near enough to see his eyes,” he thought. But he was not near enough, nor would it have been prudent for him to have gone nearer.
The witch-doctor commenced the proceedings by ringing a handbell in front of every hut. But that method of detection failed to work. The bell rang successfully at every door. Walker watched the man’s progress, watched his trailing limb, and began to discover familiarities in his manner: “Pure fancy,” he argued with himself. “If he had not limped I should have noticed nothing.”
Then the doctor took a wicker basket, covered with a rough wooden lid. The Fans gathered in front of him; he repeated their names one after the other, and at each name he lifted the lid. But that plan appeared to be no improvement, for the lid never stuck. It came off readily at each name. Walker, meanwhile, calculated the distance a man would have to cover who walked across country from Bonny River to the Ogowe, and he reflected with some relief that the chances were several thousand to one that any man who made the attempt, be he black or white, would be eaten on the way.
The witch-doctor turned back the big square cuffs of his sleeves as a conjurer will do, and again repeated the names. This time, however, at each name he rubbed the palms of his hands together. Walker was seized with a sudden longing to rush down into the village and examine the man’s right forearm for a bullet mark. The longing grew on him. The witch-doctor went steadily through the list. Walker rose to his feet and took a step or two down the hillock, when, of a sudden, at one particular name, the doctor’s hands flew apart and waved wildly about him. A single cry from a single voice went up out of the group of Fans. The group fell back and left one man standing alone. He made no defence, no resistance. Two men came forward and bound his hands and his feet and his body with tie-tie. Then they carried him within a hut.
“That’s sheer murder,” thought Walker. He could not rescue the victim, he knew. But he could get a nearer view of the witch-doctor. Already the man was packing up his paraphernalia. Walker stepped back among the trees, and running with all his speed, made the circuit of the village. He reached the further end of the street just as the witch-doctor walked out into the open.
Walker ran forward a yard or so until he, too, stood plain to see on the level ground. The witch-doctor did see him and stopped. He stopped only for a moment and gazed earnestly in Walker’s direction. Then he went on again towards his own hut in the forest.
Walker made no attempt to follow him. “He has seen me,” he thought. “If he knows me he will come down to the river bank to-night.” Consequently, he made the black rowers camp a couple of hundred yards down stream. He himself remained alone in his canoe.
The night fell noiseless and black, and the enclosing forest made it yet blacker. A few stars burned in the strip of sky above his head. Those stars and the glimmering of the clay bank to which the boat was moored were the only light which Walker had. It was as dark as that night when Walker waited for Hatteras at the wicket gate.
He placed his gun and a pouch of cartridges on one side, an unlighted lantern on the other, and then he took up his banjo, and again he waited. He waited for a couple of hours, until a light crackle as of twigs snapping came to him out of the forest. Walker struck a chord on his banjo, and played a hymn tune. He played, “Abide with me,” thinking that some picture of a home, of a Sunday evening in England’s summer time, perhaps of a group of girls singing about a piano, might flash into the darkened mind of the man upon the bank, and draw him as with cords. The music went tinkling up and down the river, but no one spoke, no one moved upon the bank. So Walker changed the tune, and played a melody of the barrel organs and Piccadilly Circus. He had not played more than a dozen bars, before he heard a sob from the bank, and then the sound of something sliding down the clay. The next instant, a figure shone black against the clay. The boat lurched under the weight of a foot upon the gunwale, and a man plumped down in front of Walker.
“Well, what is it?” asked Walker, as he laid down his banjo and felt for a match in his pocket.
It seemed as though the words roused the man to a perception that he had made a mistake. He said as much hurriedly in trade-English, and sprang up as though he would leap from the boat. Walker caught hold of his ankle.
“No, you don’t,” said he; “you must have meant to visit me. This isn’t Henley,” and he jerked the man back into the bottom of the boat.
The man explained that he had paid a visit out of the purest friendliness.
“You’re the witch-doctor, I suppose,” said Walker.
The other replied that he was, and proceeded to state that he was willing to give information about much that made white men curious. He would explain why it was of singular advantage to possess a white man’s eyeball, and how very advisable it was to kill anyone you caught making Itung. The danger of passing near a cotton tree which had red earth at the roots provided a subject which no prudent man should disregard; and Tando, with his driver ants, was worth conciliating. The witch-doctor was prepared to explain to Walker how to conciliate Tando. Walker replied that it was very kind of the witch-doctor, but Tando did not really worry him. He was, in fact, very much more worried by an inability to understand how a native so high up the Ogowe River had learned to speak trade-English.
The witch-doctor waved the question aside, and remarked that Walker must have enemies. “Pussin bad too much,” he called them. “Pussin woh-woh. Berrah well! Ah send grand krau-krau and dem pussin die one time.”
Walker could not recollect for the moment any “pussin” whom he wished to die one time, whether from grand krau-krau or any other disease. “Wait a bit,” he continued, “there is one man—Dick Hatteras!” and he struck the match suddenly. The witch-doctor started forward as though to put it out.
Walker, however, had the door of the lantern open. He set the match to the wick of the candle, and closed the door fast. The witch-doctor drew back. Walker lifted the lantern and threw the light on his face. The witch-doctor buried his face in his hands, and supported his elbows on his knees. Immediately Walker darted forward a hand, seized the loose sleeve of the witch-doctor’s coat, and slipped it back along his arm to the elbow. It was the sleeve of the right arm, and there on the fleshy part of the forearm was the scar of a bullet.
“Yes,” said Walker. “By God, it is Dick Hatteras!”
“Well?” cried Hatteras, taking his hands from his face. “What the devil made you tum-tum ‘Tommy Atkins’ on the banjo? Damn you!”
“Dick, I saw you this afternoon.”
“I know, I know. Why on earth didn’t you kill me that night in your compound?”
“I mean to make up for that mistake to-night!”
Walker took his rifle on to his knee. Hatteras saw the movement, leaned forward quickly, snatched up the rifle, snatched up the cartridges, thrust a couple of cartridges into the breech, and handed the loaded rifle back to his old friend.
“That’s right,” he said. “I remember. ‘There are some cases neither God’s law nor man’s law has quite made provision for.’” And then he stopped, with his finger on his lip. “Listen!” he said.
From the depths of the forest there came faintly, very sweetly the sound of church-bells ringing—a peal of bells ringing at midnight in the heart of West Africa. Walker was startled. The sound seemed fairy work, so faint, so sweet was it.
“It’s no fancy, Jim,” said Hatteras, “I hear them every night, and at matins and vespers. There was a Jesuit monastery here two hundred years ago. The bells remain, and some of the clothes.” He touched his coat as he spoke. “The Fans still ring the bells from habit. Just think of it! Every morning, every evening, every midnight, I hear those bells. They talk to me of little churches perched on hillsides in the old country, of hawthorn lanes, and women—English women. English girls—thousands of miles away, going along them to church. God help me! Jim, have you got an English pipe?”
“Yes; an English briarwood and some bird’s-eye.”
Walker handed Hatteras his briarwood and his pouch of tobacco. Hatteras filled the pipe, lit it at the lantern, and sucked at it avidly for a moment. Then he gave a sigh and drew in the smoke more slowly and yet more slowly.
“My wife?” he asked at last, in a low voice.
“She is in England. She thinks you dead.”
Hatteras nodded.
“There’s a jar of Scotch whisky in the locker behind you,” said Walker.
Hatteras turned round, lifted out the jar and a couple of tin cups. He poured whisky into each and handed one to Walker.
“No, thanks,” said Walker. “I don’t think I will.”
Hatteras looked at his companion for an instant. Then he emptied deliberately both cups over the side of the boat. Next he took the pipe from his lips. The tobacco was not half consumed. He poised the pipe for a little in his hand. Then he blew into the bowl and watched the dull red glow kindle into sparks of flame as he blew. Very slowly he tapped the bowl against the thwart of the boat until the burning tobacco fell with a hiss into the water. He laid the pipe gently down and stood up.
“So long, old man,” he said, and sprang out on the clay. Walker turned the lantern until the light made a disc upon the bank.
“Good-bye, Jim,” said Hatteras, and he climbed up the bank until he stood in the light of the lantern. Twice Walker raised the rifle to his shoulder, twice he lowered it. Then he remembered that Hatteras and he had been at school together.
“Good-bye, Dicky,” he cried, and fired. Hatteras tumbled down to the boat-side. The blacks down river were roused by the shot. Walker shouted to them to stay where they were, and as soon as their camp was quiet he stepped ashore. He filled up the whisky jar with water, tied it to Hatteras’ feet, shook his hand, and pushed the body into the river. The next morning he started back to Fernan Vaz.
THE RANSOM
By CUTLIFFE HYNE
Methuen wriggled himself into a corner of the hut, rested his shoulders against the adobe wall, and made himself as comfortable as the raw-hide thongs with which he was tied up would permit. “Well, Calvert,” said he, “I hope you quite realise what an extremely ugly hole we’re in?”
“Garcia will hang the pair of us before sunset,” I replied, “and that’s a certainty. My only wonder is we haven’t been strung up before this.”
“You think a rope and a tree’s a sure thing, do you? I wish I could comfort myself with that idea. I wouldn’t mind a simple gentlemanly dose of hanging. But there are more things in heaven and earth, Calvert——” He broke off and whistled drearily.
I moistened my dry, cracked lips, and asked him huskily what he meant.
“Torture, old man. That’s what we’re being saved for, I’m very much afraid. A Peruvian guerilla is never a gentle-minded animal at the best of times, and Garcia is noted as being the most vindictive brute to be found between the Andes and the Pacific. Then if you’ll kindly remember how you and I have harried him, and shot down his men, and cut off his supplies, and made his life a torment and a thing of tremors for the last four weeks, you’ll see he had got a big bill against us. If he’d hated us less, he’d have had us shot at sight when we were caught; as it is, I’m afraid he felt that a couple of bullets in hot blood wouldn’t pay off the score.”
“If he thinks the matter over calmly, he’ll not very well avoid seeing that if he wipes us out there’ll be reprisals to be looked for.”
“And a fat lot,” replied Methuen grimly, “he’ll care for the chance of those. If we are put out of the way, he knows quite well that there are no two other men in the Chilian Service who can keep him on the trot as we have done. No, sir. We can’t scare Garcia with that yarn. You think that because we’re alive still there’s hope. Well, I’ve sufficient faith in my theory for this: If anyone offered me a shot through the head now, I’d accept it, and risk the chance.”
“You take the gloomy view. Now the man’s face is not altogether cruel. There’s humour in it.”
“Then probably he’ll show his funniness when he takes it out of us,” Methuen retorted. “Remember that punishment in the ‘Mikado’? That had ‘something humorous’ in it. Boiling oil, if I don’t forget.”
Involuntarily I shuddered, and the raw-hide ropes cut deeper into my wrists and limbs. I had no great dread of being killed in the ordinary way, or I should not have entered the Chilian Army in the middle of a hot war; and I was prepared to risk the ordinary woundings of action in return for the excitements of the fight. But to be caught, and held a helpless prisoner, and be deliberately tortured to death by every cruelty this malignant fiend, Garcia, could devise, was a possibility I had not counted on before. In fact, as the Peruvians had repeatedly given out that they would offer no quarter to us English in the Chilian Service, we had all of us naturally resolved to die fighting rather than be taken. And, indeed, this desperate feeling paid very well, since on two separate occasions when Methuen and myself had been cornered with small bodies of men, and would have surrendered if we could have been guaranteed our lives, we went at them each time so furiously that on each occasion we broke through and escaped. But one thinks nothing of the chances of death and maiming at those times. There is a glow within one’s ribs which scares away all trace of fear.
“I suppose there’s no chance of rescue?” I said.
“None whatever,” said Methuen, with a little sigh. “Think it over, Calvert. We start out from the hacienda with an escort of five men, sing out our adios, and ride away to enjoy a ten days’ leave in the mountains. The troops are left to recruit; for ten days they can drop us out of mind. Within twelve hours of our leaving them, Garcia cleverly ambushes us in a cañon where not three people pass in a year. The poor beggars who form our escort are all gastados.”
“Yes, but are you sure of that?” I interrupted. “I saw them all drop off their horses when we were fired upon, but that doesn’t prove they were dead. Some might have been merely wounded, and when the coast cleared, it is just possible they crawled back to our post with the news. Still, I own it’s a small chance.”
“And you may divest yourself of even that thin rag of hope. Whilst you were being slung senseless across a horse, I saw that man without the ears go round with a machete, and—well, when the brute had done, there was no doubt about the poor fellows being as dead as lumps of mud. Ah, and talk of the devil——”
The earless man swung into the hut.
“Buenas, Señores,” said he mockingly. “You will have the honour now of being tried, and I’m sure I hope you will be pleased with the result.”
“I suppose we shall find that out later,” said Methuen with a yawn; “but anyway, I don’t think much of your hospitality. A cup of wine now after that ugly ride we’ve had to-day would come in very handy, or even a nip of aguardiente would be better than nothing.”
“I fancy it might be a waste of good liquor,” was the answer; “but you must ask Garcia. He will see to your needs.”
A guard of twelve ragged fellows, armed with carbine and machete, had followed the earless man into the hut, and two of them, whilst he talked, had removed the seizings from our knees and ankles. They helped us to our feet, and we walked with them into the dazzling sunshine outside.
“I’ll trouble some of you for my hat,” said Methuen, when the glare first blazed down on him; and then, as no one took any notice of the request, he lurched against the earless man with a sudden swerve, and knocked his sombrero on to the brown baked turf. “Well, I’ll have yours, you flea-ridden ladron,” said he; “it’s better than nothing at all. Pick up the foul thing, and shake it, and put it on my head.”
The guerilla bared his teeth like an animal, and drew a pistol. I thought he would have shot my comrade out of hand, and by his look I could see that Methuen expected it. Indeed, he had deliberately invited the man to that end. But, either because the nearness of Garcia and fear of his discipline stayed him, or through thought of a finer vengeance which was to come, the earless man contented himself by dealing a battery of kicks and oaths, and bidding our guards to ward us more carefully.
In this way, then, we walked along a path between two fields of vines, and passed down the straggling street of the village which the guerillas had occupied, and brought up in a little plaza which faced the white-walled chapel. In the turret a bell was tolling dolefully with slow strokes, and as the sound came to me through the heated air, it did not require much imagination to frame it into an omen. In the centre of the plaza was a vast magnolia tree, filled with scented wax-like flowers, and splashed with cones of coral-pink.
We drew up before the piazza of the principal house. Seated under its shade in a split-cane rocker, Garcia awaited us, a small, meagre, dark man, with glittering teeth, and fingers lemon-coloured from cigarette juice.
He stared at us and spat; and the trial, such as it was, began.
I must confess that the proceedings astonished me. Animus there certainly was; the guerillas as a whole were disposed to give us short shrift; but their chief insisted on at least some parade of justice. The indictment was set forward against us: We had shot, hanged, and harried, and in fact used all the harshness of war. Had we been Chilians in the Chilian Service, this might have been pardonable; but we were aliens from across the sea; mere freebooters, fighting, not for a country, but each for his own hand; and as such we were beyond the pale of military courtesy. We had earned a punishment. Had we any word to speak why this should not be given?
Garcia looked towards us expectantly, and then set himself to roll a fresh cigarette.
I shrugged my shoulders. It seemed useless to say anything.
Methuen said: “Look here, sir! You’ve got us, there is no mistake about that. It seems to me you’ve two courses before you, and they are these: Either, you can kill us, more or less barbarously, in which case you will raise a most pestilential hunt at your heels; or, you can put us up to ransom. Now neither Calvert here, nor myself, are rich men; but if you choose to let us go with sound skins, we’re prepared to pay ten thousand Chilian dollars apiece for our passports. Now, does that strike you?”
Garcia finished rolling his cigarette, and lit it with care. He inhaled a deep breath of smoke.
“Señor,” he said (the words coming out from between his white teeth with little puffs of vapour), “you do not appear to understand. You fight as a soldier of fortune, and I am merely in arms as a patriot. I am no huckster to traffic men’s lives for money, nor am I a timorous fool to be scared into robbing a culprit of his just dues.”
“Very well, then,” said Methuen, “murder the pair of us.”
Garcia smiled unpleasantly. “You may be a very brave man,” said he, “but you are not a judicious one. To a judge less just than myself this insolence might have added something to your punishment; but as it is I shall overlook what you have said, and only impose the penalty I had determined upon before you spoke.”
He lifted his thin yellow fingers, and drew a fresh breath of smoke. Then he waved the cigarette towards the magnolia tree in the centre of the plaza. “You see that bough which juts out towards the chapel?”
“It’s made for a gallows,” said Methuen.
“Precisely,” said the guerilla, “and it will be used as one inside ten minutes. I shall string one of you up by the neck, to dangle there between heaven and earth. The other man shall have a rifle and cartridges, and if, standing where he does now, he can cut with a bullet the rope with which his friend is hanged, then you shall both go free.”
“I hear you say it,” said Methuen. “In other words you condemn one of us to be strangled slowly without chance of reprieve. But what guarantee have we that you will not slit the second man’s throat after you have had your sport out of him?”
Garcia sprang to his feet with a stamp of passion, and the chair rolled over backwards. “You foul adventurer!” he cried. “You paid man-killer!” and then he broke off with a bitter “Pah!” and folded his arms, and for a minute held silence till he got his tongue in hand again. “Señor,” he said coldly, “my country’s wrongs may break my heart, but they can never make me break my word. I may be a hunted guerilla, but I still remain a gentleman.”
“I beg your pardon,” said Methuen.
“We will now,” continued Garcia icily, “find out which of you two will play which part. Afterwards I will add another condition which may lend more skill to what follows. I will not coerce you. Kindly choose between yourselves which of you will hang and which will shoot.”
My comrade shrugged his shoulders. “I like you, Calvert, old man,” said he, “but I’m not prepared to dance on nothing for you.”
“It would be simplest to toss for exit,” I said.
“Precisely; but, my dear fellow, I have both hands trussed up, and no coin.”
“Pray let me assist you,” said Garcia. “Señor Calvert, may I trouble you for an expression of opinion?”
He leant over the edge of the piazza, and span a dollar into the air. I watched it with a thumping heart, and when for an instant it paused, a dazzling splash of brightness against the red-tiled roof, I cried: “Heads!”
The coin fell with a faint thud in the dust a yard from my feet.
“Well?” said Methuen.
“I congratulate you, old fellow. I swing.”
He frowned and made no reply. Garcia’s voice broke the silence. “Bueno, Señor Methuen,” he said. “I advise you to shoot straight, or you will not get home even now. You remember I said there was still another condition. Well, here you are: you must cut your friend down with a bullet before he is quite dead, or I’ll string you up beside him.”
Methuen let up a short laugh. “Remember what I said about that fellow in ‘the Mikado,’ Calvert? You see where the ‘humour’ comes in? We’ve had that coin spun for nothing. You and I must change positions.”
“Not at all. I take what I’ve earned.”
“But I say yes. It works this way: I took it that the man who was hanging stood a delicate chance anyway, and I didn’t feel generous enough to risk it. But now the Señor here has put in the extra clause, the situation is changed altogether. You aren’t a brilliant shot, old man, but you may be able to cut me down with a bullet if you remember what you’re firing for, and shoot extra straight. But it’s a certain thing that I couldn’t do it if I blazed away till Doomsday. The utmost I could manage would be to fluke a pellet into your worthy self. So you see I must wear the hemp, and you must apply your shoulder to the rifle butt. Laugh, you fool,” he added in English. “Grin, and say something funny, or these brutes will think we care for them.”
But I was incapable of further speech. I could have gibed at the prospect of being hanged myself, but the horror of this other ordeal turned me sick and dumb. And at what followed I looked on mutely.
There was a well at one side of the plaza, and the earless man went and robbed the windlass of its rope. With clumsy landsman’s fingers he formed a noose, took it to the great magnolia tree, and threw the loose end over the projecting branch. The bell of the little white chapel opposite went on tolling gravely, and they marched my friend up to his fate over the sun-baked dust. They passed a thong round his ankles; the earless man fitted the noose to his throat; a dozen of the guerillas with shouts and laughter laid hold of the hauling part of the line; and then a voice from behind fell upon my ear. Garcia was speaking to me. With a strain I dragged my eyes away from the glare of the plaza, and listened. He was smiling wickedly.
“——, and so your pluck has oozed away?” he was saying, as the cigarette smoke billowed up from between the white walls of his teeth. “Well, of course, if you do not care for the game, you can throw up your hand at once. You’ve only to say the word, and you can be dangling on that bough there inside a couple of minutes. It’s quite strong enough to carry more fruit than it will bear just now. But it’s rather hard on your friend not to try——”
My wits came to me again. “You dolt!” I cried; “how can I shoot with my arms trussed up like this? If the whole thing is not a mockery, cut me adrift and give me a rifle.”
He beckoned to one of his men, and the fellow came up and cut off the lashings from my wrists and elbows; and then, with a sour smile, he motioned to some of the others, who drew near and held their weapons at the ready. “I dare wager, Señor Calvert,” he said, “that if you’d me for a mark you would not score a miss. So I wish to insure that you do not shoot in this direction.” He raised his voice, and shouted across the baking sunlight: “Quite ready here, amigos. So up with the target.”
Now up to this point I am free to own that since our capture I had cut a pretty poor figure. I had not whined, but at the same time I had not seen my way to put on Methuen’s outward show of careless brazen courage. But when I watched the guerillas tighten on the rope and sway him up till his stretched-out feet swung a couple of hand-spans above the ground, then my coolness returned to me, and my nerves set like icicles in their sockets. He was sixty yards away, and at that distance, the well-rope dwindled to the bigness of a shoemaker’s thread. Moreover, the upper two-thirds of it was almost invisible, because it hung before a background of shadows. But the eighteen inches above my poor friend’s head stood out clear and distinct against the white walls of the chapel beyond, and as it swayed to pulsing of the body beneath, it burnt itself upon my eyesight till all the rest of the world was blotted out in a red haze. I never knew before how thoroughly a man could concentrate himself.
They handed me the rifle, loaded and cocked. It was a single-shot Winchester, and I found out afterwards, though I did not know it then, that either through fiendish wish to further hamper my aim, or through pure forgetfulness, they had left the sights cocked up at three hundred yards. But that did not matter; the elevation was a detail of minor import; and besides, I was handling the weapon as a game shot fires, with head up, and eyes glued on the mark, and rifle-barrel following the eyes by instinct alone. You must remember that I had no stationary mark to aim at. My poor comrade was writhing and swaying at the end of his tether, and the well-rope swung hither and thither like some contorted pendulum.
Once I fired, twice I fired, six times, ten times, and still the rope remained uncut, and the bullets rattled harmlessly against the white walls of the chapel beyond. With the eleventh shot came the tinkle of broken glass, and the bell, after a couple of hurried nervous clangs, ceased tolling altogether. With the thirteenth shot a shout went up from the watching crowd. I had stranded the rope, and the body which dangled beneath the magnolia tree began slowly to gyrate.
Then came a halt in the firing. I handed the Winchester back to the fellow who was reloading, but somehow or other the exploded cartridge had jammed in the breach. I danced and raged before him in my passion of hurry, and the cruel brutes round yelled in ecstasies of merriment. Only Garcia did not laugh. He re-rolled a fresh cigarette, with his thin yellow fingers, and leisurely rocked himself in the split-cane chair. The man could not have been more unmoved if he had been overlooking a performance of Shakespeare.
At last I tore the Winchester from the hands of the fellow who was fumbling with it, and clawed at the jammed cartridge myself, breaking my nails and smearing the breech-lock with blood. If it had been welded into one solid piece, it could scarcely have been firmer. But the thrill of the moment gave my hands the strength of pincers. The brass case moved from side to side; it began to crumple; and I drew it forth and hurled it from me, a mere ball of shapeless, twisted metal. Then one of the laughing brutes gave me another cartridge, and once more I shouldered the loaded weapon.
The mark was easier now. The struggles of my poor friend had almost ceased, and though the well-rope still swayed, its movements were comparatively rhythmical, and to be counted upon. I snapped down the sights, put the butt-plate to my shoulder, and cuddled the stock with my cheek. Here for the first time was a chance of something steadier than a snap-shot.
I pressed home the trigger as the well-rope reached one extremity of its swing. Again a few loose ends sprang from the rope, and again the body began slowly to gyrate. But was it Methuen I was firing to save, or was I merely wasting shot to cut down a mass of cold dead clay?
I think that more agony was compressed for me into a few minutes then than most men meet with in a lifetime. Even the onlooking guerillas were so stirred that for the first time their gibing ceased, and two of them of their own accord handed me cartridges. I slipped one home and closed the breech-lock. The perspiration was running in a stream from my chin. Again I fired. Again the well-rope was snipped, and I could see the loosened strands ripple out as a snake unwraps itself from a branch.
One more shot. God in heaven, I missed! Why was I made to be a murderer like this?
Garcia’s voice came to me coldly. “Your last chance, Señor. I can be kept waiting here no longer. And I think you are wasting time. Your friend seems to have quitted us already.”
Another cartridge. I sank to one knee and rested my left elbow on the other. The plaza was hung in breathless silence. Every eye was strained to see the outcome of the shot. The men might be inhuman in their cruelty, but they were human enough in their curiosity.
The body span to one end of its swing: I held my fire. It swung back, and the rifle muzzle followed. Like some mournful pendulum it passed through the air, and then a glow of certainty filled me like a drink. I knew I could not miss that time; and I fired; and the body, in a limp and shapeless heap, fell to the ground.
With a cry I threw the rifle from me and raced across the sunlit dust. Not an arm was stretched out to stop me. Only when I had reached my friend and loosened that horrible ligature from his neck, did I hear voices clamouring over my fate.
“And now this other Inglese, your excellency,” the earless man said. “Shall we shoot him from here, or shall we string him up in the other’s place?”
But the answer was not what the fellow expected. Garcia replied to him in a shriek of passion. “You foul, slaughtering brute,” he cried, “another offer like that and I’ll pistol you where you stand. You heard me pass my word: do you dream that I could break it? They have had their punishment, and if we see one another again, the meeting will be none of my looking for. We leave this puebla in five minutes. See to your duties. Go.”
The words came to me dully through the heated air. I was almost mad with the thought that my friend was dead, and that the fault was mine, mine, mine alone!
I listened for his breaths; they did not come. I felt for a heart-throb; there was not so much as a flutter. His neck was seared by a ghastly ring. His face was livid. And yet I would not admit even then that he was dead. With a cry I seized his arms, and moved them first above his head till he looked like a man about to dive, and then clapped them against his sides, repeating this an infinite number of times, praying that the airs I drew through his lungs might blow against some smouldering spark of humanity, and kindle it once more into life.
The perspiration rolled from me; my mouth was as a sandpit; the heavy scent of the magnolia blossoms above sickened me with its strength; the sight departed from my eyes. I could see nothing beyond a small circle of the hot dust around, which waved and danced in the sunlight, and the little green lizards which came and looked at me curiously, and forgot that I was human.
And then, of a sudden, my comrade gave a sob, and his chest began to heave of itself without my laborious aid. And after that for a while I knew very little more. The sun-baked dust danced more wildly in the sunshine, the lizards changed to darker colours, the light went out, and when next I came to my senses Methuen was sitting up with one hand clutching at his throat, looking at me wildly.
“What has happened?” he gasped. “I thought I was dead, and Garcia had hanged me. Garcia——No one is here. The puebla seems deserted. Calvert, tell me.”
“They have gone,” I said. “We are alive. We will get away from here as soon as you can walk.”
He rose to his feet, swaying. “I can walk now. But what about you?”
“I am an old man,” I said, “wearily old. In the last two hours I have grown a hundred years. But I think I can walk also. Yes, look, I am strong. Lean on my arm. Do you see that broken window in the chapel? When I fired through that, the bell stopped tolling.”
“Let us go inside the chapel for a minute before we leave the village,” said Methuen. “We have had a very narrow escape, old man. I—I—feel thankful.”
There was a faint smell of incense inside that little white-walled chapel. The odour of it lingers by me still.
THE OTHER TWIN
By EDWIN PUGH
It was the hour of siesta. Santa Plaza lay blistering, sweltering, in the white-hot glare of the noontide sun. The dust lay thick on the roads and terraces, the copings and the roofs of the houses, like untrodden snow. The sea shone like a shield of brass reflecting a brassy sky. There was not the least sign of movement anywhere.
Then Franker, the Englishman, came limping along the Lido, sat down in the shadow of the old sea-wall, and examined with grave solicitude a swollen and blistered foot swathed in filthy, blood-stained rags.
This Franker had once been a well-known figure in all the ports of those far-off southern seas. It was whispered that in the long ago he had been a gentleman. Now he was just the sport of circumstance, a jack of all trades, so long as they were indifferent honest; sailorman, stock-rider, storekeeper, croupier, crimp, anything that happened along in his hour of need. But lately he had disappeared from his old haunts, and it was unlikely that any of his old acquaintances would have recognised in that ragged and gaunt, unwashed and black-bearded wastrel on the beach the spruce adventurer of former days.
He had the look of a hunted creature. There was fear in his eyes. Even as he sat there nursing his aching foot, parched and hungry, haggard and weary, his head was perpetually turning from side to side, and ever and again he looked over his shoulder, to left and right, as if he were in dread expectation that at any moment some enemy might creep upon him unawares. And, indeed, he was in parlous case. For he had killed a man, not in itself an exceptional incident of course—only in this instance the man was one of twins, and the other twin had vowed a vendetta against him.
These twins were named Bibi and Bobo, and the extraordinary likeness between them was accentuated by their habit of always dressing alike, talking alike, thinking alike. There were some who said that they could distinguish one twin from the other, but these were foolish, vainglorious men. The thing was manifestly impossible. Even Franker did not know whether it was Bibi or Bobo he had killed.
It happened in a gambling den in Suranim, up country. They were playing the childish game of boule, and some silly dispute had arisen. Franker had lost his temper, and knocked one of the twins down. For once in a way the other twin had not been present, or most assuredly Franker would have been chived in the back before he could turn round. As it was, he saw his fallen adversary rise slowly, slowly draw a red smear across his face with the back of his hand, and then quicken on a sudden into antic activity. There was the flash of a knife. Franker dodged. The other men stood back to watch the fun—not to see fair play. Fair play was a jewel of little value in the estimation of that crew. A moment Franker hesitated, then whipped out his gun and fired point-blank at the twin. He dropped dead. Before the smoke had cleared away or the echoes of the report had subsided into stillness, Franker had left the gambling-house and was running for his life into the wilderness.
There, for three days, he lost himself. That was his idea: to lose himself. He wanted to be lost, utterly lost to the world. For he knew that so long as the other twin lived his own chances of living were reduced to the last recurring decimal. Bibi or Bobo—whichever it was—would never rest until he had wrought vengeance on his brother’s murderer. Though it wasn’t a murder, of course, but a duel in which each had taken the same risk of death. If Franker had not killed Bibi or Bobo, Bibi or Bobo would have killed him. He wished he knew which of the twins it was he had killed. So idiotic not to know. So confusing. It made your head ache, wondering. And in your sleep you dreamed of horrible, two-headed monsters coming at you crabwise, with arms and legs all round them.
On the third day of his sojourn in the wilderness the other twin had very nearly caught him napping. He had sunk down exhausted in a sandy hollow fringed with palms, and for a moment closed his eyes. And in that moment the redness of his lowered eyelids had been suddenly clouded by a shadow. In an instant he was on his feet, wide awake again. And there was the figure of the other twin in the act of flinging itself upon him. He fired an aimless shot at that black apparition, then bolted.
And all that day and all that night he had wound and wound an intorted course through virgin forest, hoping thus to shake off his pursuer. And all that day and all that night he had known that his pursuer followed him, shadowed him, stalked him, with a merciless delight in that persecution born of an insatiate hate.
Next day Franker, having doubled on his tracks, found himself on a quayside, and had shipped as a forecastle hand on an old iron hooker bound for the Caribs with a mixed cargo. He never knew or cared what that mixed cargo consisted of. He was too busy sleeping, when he wasn’t too sore from being kicked into wakefulness, to bother about trivial details. He could have left the ship at the first of the Caribs, but an island is a prison, and his yearning was for wide free spaces where a man can at least get a run for his money. So he had returned on the hooker, and had been paid off with the lurid compliments of the purser, and was once more adrift.
But the story of his wanderings and adventures over the greater part of the southern hemisphere would fill many books. Months passed, a year passed, two years, and all the while Franker was dogged by the avenger. Ever and again, just when he thought that he had at last shaken off that deadly pursuit, the other twin turned up again. And gradually it was borne in upon him that the other twin might have killed him long since had he wished. He had had numberless opportunities, and had not taken them. This puzzled Franker a bit, and then he hit upon the truth. There is more joy in the hunting than in the killing. There is more cat-like satisfaction in the slow torture of its victim than in the crunching up of its dead bones. He began to think of the other twin as a cat-like creature, exercising a cruelty of the mind far more subtle and devilish than any mere crude cruelty of tooth and claw. When the avenger tired of the sport, then he would strike. And not till then. Meanwhile, Franker was condemned to a daily round of unremitting vigilance, ceaseless watchfulness, unending apprehension.
He had been a big man, strong and fearless, with bold eyes and the voice of a bull. Now he had become a shuffling, whimpering, trembling thing of nerves and tears, who dared look no one in the face lest it should be the face of his enemy. In the old days, with no other resources than his health and vigour, bodily and mental, he had used to take chances with an overbearing recklessness, and thrust and curse his way through the mob of other roustabouts like unto himself, with whom he had fought for the means of existence. And he had been—he realised that now—quite happy then. There were times when he told himself that he would stand fast against his pursuer, force him into the open, then turn upon him and rend him, and so make an end of this long-drawn-out agony. But when the moment came his wits fled, he was distraught and afraid, he could think only of flight.
It was now a full fortnight since he had seen Bibi—or Bobo. But there had been other fortnights during which he had not seen him. And always, inevitably, he had reappeared. So would he reappear again.
Franker gazed out from the shadow of the old seawall across the glittering, limitless sea, and wished that he might drown himself in its depths. But he was not yet quite mad enough for that. Though life had become as a nightmare to him, and death as the awakening to the cool, calm peace of dawn; though life offered nothing but torment, and death offered surcease of pain, he still clung to life. It was in the nature of his being to cling to life. He was not of the stuff that gives in.
But if only he could rest awhile! If only he could lie still in some sheltered place, safe from his enemy, and thus regain his old control over his faculties, recuperate his strength!
At the western end of the Lido, where the coast swept in a wide curve to the lighthouse and the harbour, there was a long white wall. And as he remembered what that wall enclosed, what it signified, Franker had an inspiration. His face was suddenly irradiated. He laughed aloud. What a fool!—God in Heaven!—what a fool he had been not to think of that before! He rose on tremulous legs and began to shamble along the beach towards that far-off haven of refuge.
The prison official, in his gaudy livery of gold and scarlet and his immense cocked hat, conducted him to the chief inspector’s office.
“Yes?”
Franker desired to be sworn. He had a crime to confess: it had troubled his conscience for years.
“Yes?”
An affair of opium smuggling, ship’s papers forged, and customs burked. It was a true story enough, only Franker himself had not been implicated in it. The police had been so long on the track of that crime they had given it up as hopeless. And now here there was the chief criminal, a fine fat bird, dropping into the net of his own free will. The chief inspector rubbed his dry palms together as he thought of the luscious report he would send to the magistracy.
Then he committed Franker to the custody of another prison official, less gaudy than the first, and Franker was led away to the cell.
This was a big, bare, barn-like place of stone, that sometimes contained as many as twenty prisoners huddled indiscriminately together. But just now crime was slack. Franker had the whole cell to himself.
As the gaoler slammed the door on him he fell on his knees with a weeping face, and offered up thanks for this blessed refuge, this safe harbour of retreat from his relentless enemy, this sanctuary. Here, at last, he was free from the fear of pursuit. Here, during the year or two of his imprisonment, he could rest and sleep, rest his mind and find his sleep that sweet relief from the tortures of the last two years which would gradually restore him again to health and sanity.
Even as he prayed he toppled down face forward and lay there quite still, breathing softly, evenly, in peaceful slumber.
The light was fading, there was a red stain of sunset on the wall when he awoke. It was a rattling and clanging of bolts and chains that had roused him. He sat up, blinking stupidly, at first not knowing where he was. Then, as he remembered, he shed tears of joy again, and clasped his hands together in an access of delight.
The sounds drew nearer. The heavy, barred door of the prison chamber was flung open. He saw the burly figure of a gaoler over-shadowing another smaller figure that seemed to be precipitated from behind into the misty vastness of the cell. It fell head-long at Franker’s feet, and lay there stirring feebly like a wounded beetle.
Franker watched his writhings ... and a slow, cold horror grew upon him.
His fellow-prisoner raised himself on all fours, then sat up and squatted there, cross-legged, like a Chinese bonze.
It was Bibi—or Bobo.
Franker uttered a cry.
“And hast thou found me, O mine enemy!”
The other twin had leapt to his feet. He shrank back, crouching, snarling, spitting like a cat. The moment for the happy dispatch was come at last. He drew his knife and fingered its keen blade lovingly, then came mincing on tiptoe towards Franker.
As Franker’s hands closed round his throat he drove the blade deep into Franker’s breast.
THE NARROW WAY
By R. ELLIS ROBERTS