I was destined to keep open house that day. Before Follet's last smoke-puff had quite slid through the open window, Madame Maür, who was perpetually in mourning, literally darkened my doorway. Seeing Follet she became nervous—he did affect women, as I have said. What with her squint and her smile, she made a spectacle of herself before she panted out her staccato statement. Doctor Maür was away with a patient on the other side of the island; and French Eva had been wringing her hands unintelligibly on the Maürs' porch. She—Madame Maür—couldn't make out what the girl wanted.
Now, this was nothing to break in on me for; and Madame Maür, in spite of her squint and her smile, was both sensible and good—broke, moreover, to the ridiculous coincidences and unfathomable dramas of Naapu. Why hadn't she treated the girl for hysterics? But I gathered presently that there was one element in it that she couldn't bear. That element, it appeared, was Ching Po, perfectly motionless in the public road—no trespasser, therefore—watching. She had got Eva into the house to have her hysterics out in a darkened room. But Ching Po never stirred. Madame Maür thought he never would stir. She couldn't order him off the public thoroughfare, and there was no traffic for him to block. He was irreproachable and intolerable. After half an hour of it, she had run out across her back garden to ask my help. He must go away or she, too, would have hysterics. And Madame Maür covered the squint with a black-edged handkerchief. If he would walk about, or whistle, or mop his yellow face, she wouldn't mind. But she was sure he hadn't so much as blinked, all that time. If a man could die standing up, she should think he was dead. She wished he were. If he stayed there all day—as he had a perfect right to do—she, Madame Maür, would have to be sent home to a maison de santé.—And she began to make guttural noises. As Félicité Maür had seen, in her time, things that no self-respecting maison de santé would stand for, I began to believe that I should have to do something. I rose reluctantly. I was about fed up with Ching Po, myself.
I helped Madame Maür out of her chair, and fetched my hat. Then I looked for Follet, to apologize for leaving him. I had neither seen nor heard him move, but he was waiting for us on the porch. He could be as noiseless on occasion as Ching Po.
"You'd better not come into this," I suggested; for there was no staying power, I felt, in Follet.
He seemed to shiver all over with irritation. "Oh, damn his yellow soul, I'll marry her!" He spat it out—with no sweetness, this time.
Madame Maür swung round to him like a needle to the pole. "You may save yourself the corvée. She won't have you. Not if any of the things she has been sobbing out are true. She loves the other man—down by the docks. Your compatriot." She indicated me. Her French was clear and clicking, with a slight provincial accent.
"Oh—" He breathed it out at great length, exhaling. Yet it sounded like a hiss. "Stires, eh?" And he looked at me.
I had been thinking, as we stood on the steps. "How am I to move Ching Po off?" I asked irritably. It had suddenly struck me that, inspired by Madame Maür, we were embarking on sheer idiocy.
"I'll move him," replied Follet with a curious intonation.
At that instant my eye lighted again on the pistol. "Not with that." I jerked my chin ever so slightly in the direction of his pocket.