Within a minute or two of six o'clock that morning the sun rose, and it was broad, staring day. One instant the world was smothered in a damp, impenetrable, almost tangible grayness; the next, its nakedness lay discovered in a glare of light.
There was a sea of limpid lukewarm water heaving slowly; a ribbon of beach, metallic-white; a tangle of untended, unproductive vegetation; a village equally untended and unproductive, except of unnecessary babies, where listless brown people moved without much purpose, or, lacking the ambition even to make a show of activity, lolled where they were.
The tropical sun had no magic of half-lights to tinge it all with romance or stir it into fugitive beauty. Such as Sicaba was at heart, it stood revealed.
When the sun rose, John McGennis rose too, and stood for a moment, unshivering in the lukewarm air, to look down on the poverty of his town, before he turned to pour water over himself out of an old tomato-can.
Like the morning and the sea and the air, the water had no tang in it, and McGennis, drying himself slowly and methodically, felt no fresher for his bath. When a youthful and well-tempered body fails to respond to the caress of sluicing water, there is generally something wrong with the mind which inhabits it. There was with the mind of McGennis.
The trouble lay outside his window. That compound of staring sky and sea and stared-at village which the day revealed had overwhelmed him. As mere geological and botanical facts, Sicaba, Pagros, the Tropics, had proved too big for him. They made of him just a spot of life, meaningless as an ant toiling unendingly in the forest of the grass-stems. Tiny dot of intelligence that he found himself, in the midst of those triumphant physical forces, McGennis had come to wonder whether anything he could do among them mattered much.
Slowly and methodically, as he had bathed, he dressed—right sock, left sock, right shoe, left shoe, right puttee, left puttee, put the strap twice round, haul it through the buckle and tuck the end back neatly—and when he was trim in his khaki and yellow leather he stood for a moment with the irresolution of inertia on him. Then he pulled his knife from his pocket, strode across to the thick corner-post of his room, stooped, and with elaborate care cut a notch in the tough, dense wood.
The post, from the upward limit of his reach to well down toward his knees, was jagged with such notches lying in groups of seven, six side by side, and another cut diagonally across them. They were a calendar of more than ordinary significance, in the mind of its maker. Each of them represented a day of "Grin, gabble, gobble," each checked off twenty-four hours in which he had stuck by his traditions, greeting every comer with that contortion of the lips which, conventionally at least, expresses pleasure, eating sufficient food to keep his body in repair—McGennis reverenced his body unthinkingly as an ancient Greek—and in which he had, both in his office and in the primitive society of Sicaba, "waggled his jaw," and thereby overcome a growing disposition to speechlessness.
With the fierce enthusiasm of an ascetic, he cut these records, ineffaceably deep, on the mornings of the days for which they stood. Thus there could be no going back. Staring at him from the undecaying wood, they warned him that for one more stretch, at least, he must grin, gobble, and gabble, or be a quitter.
They served a more immediately practical purpose also. McGennis had found that it was the first grimace, the first nibble at the food his Occidental stomach loathed, the first burst of inane chatter, which came hard. Once fairly started, the grin became a veritable smile—how boyish and appealing he had never guessed—the chatter became animated question and answer, and his stomach, more fundamentally human than Occidental, found even the food Sicaba afforded preferable to emptiness. But somehow the quiet of the evenings and the stillness of the long nights and the flatness of the dawns brought back continually the question: "What's the use?" and he would have his fight to make all over, with his notch.