Jim looked at me with eyes aghast. He gathered himself for speech, breathing deeply.
"Mis' Oth' (my name is Othet), I tell you: Long time-long time, no man knock flon' do'. In this house, no good. No good knock. Sometime some-come-you no man see!" He lowered his voice to a rapid whisper, spreading his yellow palms tremulously. "You tell man come knock flon' do'—I go 'way. Too much bad thing!"
Muttering to himself he retreated. "Now what has he got on his mind do you suppose? Could you make out what he was driving at?"
Dean smiled, a non-committal smile. "It would be rather awkward for us, wouldn't it, if Jim should leave? We are too far from the coast for city servants in winter. I doubt if any of the natives could be persuaded to stay in this house alone."
"You think Jim would leave if I made Fahey knock at that door every night?"
Joshua answered me obliquely. "If I could ever quote anything straight, I would remind you of a saying in one of George Eliot's novels that 'we've all got to take a little trouble to keep sane and call things by the same names as other people.' Perhaps Jim doesn't take quite trouble enough. I have difficulty sometimes myself to find names for things. I should like to hear you classify a certain occurrence I have in mind, not unconnected, I think, with Jim's behavior tonight. I've never discussed it, of course. In fact, I've never spoken of it before." He smiled queerly. "It's very astonishing how they know things."
"The menials?"
He nodded. "Jim was in the house at the time. No one knows that he heard it,—no one ever told him. But he is thinking of it tonight just as I am. He's never forgotten it for a moment, and never will."
Joshua dragged the charred logs forward and stooped amid their sparks to lay a fresh one with its back to the chimney. Then he rose and looked out; as he stood in the door, I could hear the hissing of fine snow turning to rain and the drenched bamboo whipping the piazza posts; over all, the larger lament of the pines, and, from the long rows of lights in the gulch, the diapason of the stamp-heads thundering on through the night.
"'Identities of sensation,'" said Joshua, quoting again as he shut the door, "are strong with persons who live in lonely places! Jim and I have lived here too long."