“The hell you won’t,” snarled Allister, poising swiftly to plunge after the Chinaman. “Let’s see if you’ll do it for a white man, then.”
The mate lowered the boat, not so much because Allister was white as because he was a brother of the captain.
There was a calm sea, and no difficulty in the rescue. The crew fished up the three of them, Allister supporting the exhausted Ssu Yin, who in turn held aloft, out of the wash of the sea, his most unhappy dry-land reptile.
The mate shut himself up in his cabin and drank Jamaica rum with such proficiency that it became necessary to lodge him in the brig. He wallowed there for the remainder of the voyage into Penang, where Ssu Yin, with the serpent clasped to his meager bosom, scuttled ashore and vanished from the mate’s bleary ken.
Allister, for whom the world was in its opening chapters, lost himself in bizarre and dizzy pages of Oriental life. At the end of three years he was “on the beach,” tossed up with other human jetsam from the slime of the Orient’s undertow.
He had brawled with sailors from many seas in the dives of Hongkong, tasted the wickedness of native inland cities, and squandered himself in a thousand negligible pursuits between Bangkok and Peking. He was the eternal parable of West meeting East, a conjunction perpetually fatal to the insecure soul. For it is only the strong who can sip safely at the pleasant vices of a mellower civilization.
On a day squally with the pestilent dust of an obscure Chinese outport, Allister sat gazing at a wooden door in a wall. He was oblivious to outward discomfort, although his clothes were remnants through which the wind drove chill misery. He felt only one need, and his mind had room for but one thought, and that was the gratification of an unholy lust. It was three days since opium had caressed his shrieking nerves.
Beggars, exhibiting their unspeakable sores, the ghastly souvenirs of real or simulated disease, jostled him in their crawling search for charity; it was the plaza of a temple where he had taken up his watch.
Curses, and the muttered insults that are flung to foreigners, came to him from the crowd, but he appeared not to hear; his senses were subject only to one diversion, and that was the wall before him, with its wooden door, and the peephole that for an hour of eternities had remained blind. If he could not gain the attention of Ssu Yin, he would be doomed to another night of drugless terror.