Yes, though I hardly expected to have to shoot Allen, at least on this first showdown, I was quite prepared to do so if he gave me any excuse at all for it; indeed, I may as well admit that I was going to be disappointed if he did not furnish me such an excuse. There need be nothing on my conscience, that was sure, for, if the fellow had had his deserts according to civilized law, he would have been put out of the way something like twenty times already. I had heard him make that boast himself one night in Kai, just before he went under Jackson's table as a consequence of trying to toss off three-fingers of "Three Star" for every man he claimed to have killed. Moreover, I had a sort of a feeling that old Bell would have liked to have seen his score evened up that way, for he, more than almost anyone I could recall, had marvelled at what he called the tricks I had tucked away in my "starboard trigger pocket." But—I may as well own it—my principal reason for hoping for a decisive showdown straightaway was that I felt sure I could see my way through an affair of that kind, even with so cool and resourceful a hand as I knew Allen to be. As an absinthe drinker, what I dreaded was to have the crisis postponed, knowing all the while that during only about from four to six hours of the twenty-four would I be fit in mind or body to oppose a child, let alone a man who, for five years and among as desperate a lot of cut-throats as the South Pacific had ever known, had lived up to his boast that he drew the line at no act under heaven to gain his end.
It had struck me as just a bit providential that Allen almost certainly would be coming to see me in the early afternoon—the very time at which, physically and mentally, I would be best prepared for him. It varies somewhat with different addicts of the drug, but with me the "hour of strength"—the interval of the swinging back of the pendulum, when all the faculties are as much above normal as they have been below it during the preceding interval of depression—was mid-afternoon. From about ten in the morning I was just about my natural self—just about at the turn of the tide between weakness and strength—for three or four hours; but from about three to five, when the renewed cravings began to stir and it had long been my custom to pour my first thin trickle of green into the cracked ice, I was preternaturally alive in hand and brain. The rigorous restriction of my painting to these brief hours of physical and spiritual exaltation must share with my colours the credit for the fact that I had already done work that was to win me a niche distinctively my own as a painter of tropical marines. How much absinthe—or the reaction from absinthe—had to do with my earlier successes was conclusively proven by the way my work at first fell off when those colourful years I was later to spend with the incomparable Huntley Rivers in the Samoas and Marquesas began to bring me back manhood of mind and body and to rid me—I trust for good and all—of the curse saddled upon me in my student days in Paris. But that is neither here nor there as regards the present story.
I had ascertained that Allen's train was to arrive from Brisbane at ten in the morning, and that he was to be taken directly from the station to the Town Hall to receive the "Freedom of the City." Then, out of consideration for the fact "that the hero" (as the Herald had it) was "still far from recovered from the terrible hardships he had endured as a consequence of his unparalleled self-sacrifice," the remainder of the day was to be left at his disposal to rest in. The further program—in which His Excellency the Governor-General himself was to take part—would be arranged only after the personal desires of the "modest hero" had been consulted.
A 'phone to the gallery where my Exhibition was on—or an inquiry of almost anyone connected with the show at the Town Hall, for that matter—would apprise Allen that I was staying at the Australia, and there I knew he would come direct the moment he could shake himself free from his entertainers. Someone was to take him off to lunch, to be sure, but—especially as it was reported that he was already dieting to get back to riding weight—I felt sure this would not detain him long. "It will be about three," I told myself, and left word at the office that any man asking for me around that hour should be brought straight to my rooms without further question. I also 'phoned Lady X—— and begged off from showing her and a party of friends from Government House my pictures at four, as I had promised a couple of days previously. Being borne off to the inevitable and interminable Australian afternoon teas—or to anything else I could not easily shake myself free from very shortly after five—was one of the worst ordeals incident to the spell of lionizing that had set in for me from the day of my arrival in Sydney. What did I care for Sydney, anyhow? Paris was my goal—gay, cynical, heartless Paris, who took or rejected what her lovers laid at her feet only as it stirred, or failed to stir, her jaded pulses, asking not how it was made or what it had cost. Paris! To bring that languid beauty fawning to my own feet for a day—even for an hour, my hour—that would be something worth living—or dying—for. For many years I had been telling myself that (between three and five in the afternoon, of course) and now—quite aside from my nocturnal flights there on the wings of the "Green Lady"—it seemed that the end so long striven for was almost in sight.
I lunched lightly—a planked red snapper and a couple of alligator pears—in my room, and toward two o'clock (to be well on the safe side) slipped into the old hunting jacket I have mentioned, and was ready; just that—ready. My nerves were absolutely steady. The hand holding the palette knife with which (to kill the passing minutes) I began daubing pigments upon a rough rectangle of blotched canvas on an easel in the embrasure of the windows, might have adjusted the hair-spring of my wrist-watch, and the beat of my heart was slow and strong and steady like the throb of the engines of a liner in mid-ocean. If either hand or nerve inclined more one way than the other, it was toward relaxation rather than tenseness. Tenseness—with a man who has himself in hand—is for the moment of action, not for the interval of waiting which precedes it. My whole feeling was that of complete adequacy; but then, the sensation was no new one to me—at that time of day.
Exhausting the gobs of variegated colour on my palette, I went to a table in the bathroom and started chipping the delicately tinted linings from the contents of a packing case of assorted sea shells, confining my attentions for the moment to a species of bivalve whose refulgent inner surface had caught and held the lambent liquid gold of sunshine that had filtered through five fathoms of limpid sea-water to reach the coral caverns where it had grown. Powdering the coruscant scalings in a mortar, I screened them from time to time, carefully noting the gradations of colour—ranging from soft fawn to scintillant saffron—as the more indurated particles stood out the longer against the friction of the pestle. At this time, I might explain, I was in the tentative stage of my experimentation to evolve and perfect a greater variety of media than had hitherto been available with which to express in colour the interminable moods of sea and sky and sunshine. The value of my contribution to art—not yet complete after five years—will have to be judged when I pass it on to my contemporaries and posterity. Of the part these colours played in my later and more permanent success (to differentiate it from the spectacular but transient spell of fame upon the threshold of which I stood at the moment of which I write), I can only say that had I been confined to the pigments with which my predecessors had been forced to express themselves, I should never have risen above the rating of a second or third class dauber of sea-scapes.
CHAPTER II
HARD-BIT DERELICTS
With Allen and his coming in the back of my brain, it was only natural that my thoughts, as I ground and sifted and sorted the golden powders, should turn to Kai and the train of events leading up to the ghastly tragedy of the Cora Andrews, so distorted a version of which had gone abroad as a consequence of the fact that Allen was alive and Bell was dead, and that I, so far, had not told what I knew of the circumstances under which the one and the other had been induced to board the stricken "black-birder."