We have come down by nature's route. Now we'll climb back by man's. A sort of stairway, broad-stepped, made of pebbles and pounded earth, mounts in fairly well engineered zigzags to the plateau above the lower fall, and in a straighter flight beside the gorge to the hotel which is the topmost building of San Ramon. Above that it becomes a gully curved by torrential rains; above that, zigzags again as a mule-track up to a pass in the mountains—and thereafter God knows whither. Connecting the lower zigzags (I need scarcely say) are short-cuts or slides made by the brown-footed children, who plunge down almost as steeply and quickly as the stream itself when the fortnightly fruit-steamer blows her siren beyond the point.
There is no harbour, you understand. The small steamer—by name the P.M. Diaz—drops anchor a short mile out in a half-protected roadstead, and discharges what she has to discharge, or lades what she has to lade, by boats. Her ladings during the banana-harvest are feverish, tumultuous, vociferous. Her ladings during the sleepy remainder of the year comprise canned meats, Scotch whisky, illustrated magazines, and plantation inspectors.
It was almost twelve months to a day—I am trying to tell the story to-night as a novelist would tell it, but without going beyond the material supplied to me—It was almost twelve months from the day Foe left the portico of the Flaxman Building Hotel, New York, that he stepped ashore on the beach below San Ramon and resigned his light suitcase to a herd of bare-legged boys who offered to carry it up to the hotel, but seemed likelier to dismember it on the way and share up the shreds. They took him, as a matter of course, for a plantation inspector, arrived in the off-season. He was the only passenger landed from the P.M. Diaz, which had dropped anchor comfortably, in perfect weather, but would sail in the morning. A light land-breeze blew off the mountains: but it passed over a mile of water before rippling the sea, which, inshore, lay as glass. The sunset from the Pacific lit up San Ramon above him, all terraced and embowered.
Halted there, gazing up and taking stock of this Paradise before scaling it, Foe could not be aware, though he might have guessed, that half a hundred embrasures in the climbing foliage hid field-glasses and telescopes of which he was the one and common focus. Up at the hotel, one idler said to another, "Will it be Morgansen this time, d'you think?" The other passed on the question to Engelbaum, who was so far the master of his guests that he had lazily commandeered the large telescope on the galeria, and without gainsay. "If it's old Morgansen," the second man added, "we might trot some way down the hill to wish him well. The day's cooling in."
"It's not Morgansen," announced Engelbaum. "A new man—thinnish—Oh, yes, but an inspector. You can tell these scientific men by their cut."
"Hope they haven't sacked old Morgansen," said the first idler. "He's been a bit of a scandal, these three years. But he knows about bananas more'n a banana would own to, even with a blush."
Half-way over the hill, on a packing-case in a bare veranda, sat a man who for three months had avoided the hotel and these loungers, and been given up by all of them (by some enviously) as a lost friend. A woman reclined—good old novelists' word—in a sort of deck-chair three paces away. The windows of the house stood wide, and showed rooms within carpetless, matless, swept if not garnished, with other packing-cases stacked about and labelled. There was even a label on the chair in which the woman reclined: but her skirt hid it.
When the whistle of the fruit-steamer had first sounded, out beyond the Point, and almost before the alert young population of San Ramon could tear down the pathway beside the bungalow's discreet garden, she had risen with a catch of the breath, taken up a pair of field-glasses and scanned the offing.
"It is she beyond a doubt," she had announced.
"What other could it be?" the man had answered, pretty lazily. "And that being so—"