The first thing I saw on entering the room was my beach-comber. For the rushlight, which was the cabin's sole illuminant, stood on a soap-box beside the couch on which the outcast lay. Dressed in a shrunken and dirty cotton suit, he was propped up against the rough mud wall, a grimy and threadbare wrap thrown across his knees. Despite the awful stuffiness of the place, he shivered beneath this ragged coverlet, although his face and chest glistened with perspiration.
Once upon a time, I judged as I measured him with my eye, he must have been a fine figure of a man. Though now coarse and bloated, with white and flabby flesh, it would easily be seen that he was tall beyond the ordinary with the narrow hips of the athlete. His eyes were deeply sunk in his head; and in them flickered wanly that strange, restless light which one sees so often in the faces of those whom Death is soon to claim. Even amid the ravages which under-nourishment, drink and drugs had made in his features, the influence of gentle birth might yet be marked in the straight, firm pencilling of the eyebrows and the well-shaped aquiline nose. I thought the man looked dreadfully ill and I noted about nose and mouth that pinched look which can never deceive.
The whole shack appeared to consist of the one room in which I found myself. It was pitiably bare. A table on which stood some unappetising remnants of food was set against the wall beneath the unglazed window which faced the sick man's couch. A broken stool and a couple of soap-boxes, one furnished with a tin basin and a petrol can of water, completed the furniture.
"There's a bar to go across the door," said a weak voice from the corner where the sick man lay; "would you be good enough to put it down? I don't want us to be disturbed...."
He cast an apprehensive glance at the window. I fitted the rough beam across the door and approached the couch. It was merely a bed of maize stalks.
"You're very ill, I'm afraid," I said pulling over one of the boxes and seating myself by the Englishman. "Have you seen a doctor?"
The vagrant waved his hand in a deprecatory manner.
"My dear fellow," he said—and again I noted the refinement in his voice,—"no sawbones can help me. I never held with them much anyway. Luisa got paid to-day—she washes at Bard's, you know (it was she who told me you were here)—and so I've got some medicine...."—he touched a little pannikin which stood on the floor at his side—"it's all that keeps me alive now that I can't get the 'snow!'"
I recognised the name which the drug traffic gives to cocaine.
The sick man was rent by a spasm of coughing.