The Last Ditch

by Will Levington Comfort

Romney drew his hand across his chin. The other touched his arm.

"All that will be attended to. Don't let's think of it. You will find that all is ready for you."

3

The scent of soap in the fountain-place of the Ti Kung house might be considered by some a preposterous detail, but it was real to Romney. It had to do with Longstruth's, on a certain night when he had felt himself to be a far more reckonable person even than on the day of the field-meet at Palo Alto which brought him a trophy or two. It was on a night about mid-way in the Moira Kelvin revelations when it suddenly appeared that she was wavering a little. Hope lifted and he had felt fit to conquer continents. But that had passed. He had somehow diminished again.

It is true that she had been shaken during their last moments together, but that was different. Romney was man enough not to take any advantage there—even in thought. He understood her that night. She was in a scope of a more common attraction. She had hated herself in it. Had he pressed that advantage, it would merely have meant to unseal a crater for hell to break forth not only for himself but for her. Before knowing her, he might have considered the savage splendour of that passion as having to do with a woman's great gift, but he glimpsed in the days preceding what it would mean to the man who could force the capitulation of the full creature. Even in the blinding of those moments of parting, he knew he was far from that magnitude.

Romney threw back his head and laughed at the upper arch of tiles, his arms held out. It was the laugh of a man who stands on the rim of the last ditch.... He had certainly sifted to the bottom of things. The John Dividend was the last of many ships. He had made the grand traverse of the Asiatic coast from the Yellow Sea to the Bay of Bengal and doubled back to Shanghai. This drink-thing was the great weakness he had uncovered. Three days after her steamer had gone down the river, he had fallen into the low eddies of it—a cheap thing, but he felt cheap. He saw that he had always been intoxicated somehow. A turn of a card and he might have become a saint instead of a drunkard. Mother China had intoxicated him first; then the woman. It was all a matter of temperament. Having lost the levitation of cleanness and strength, he had permitted the mother-force of gravitation to take her certain course. From Longstruth's at Hankow he had swirled into the great drift of the water-fronts—deserters, remittance-men, hangovers from every form of human failure. He had spent everything he had within reach—a large amount of money. He had learned the value of money when his pockets flattened to a few thin coins. There was a large slice of his fortune left in Peking, but it was so placed that he would have to go there to get it. He was on the way back now. In fact the John Dividend would have taken him almost there—she was booked for Tientsin—but had been too stagnant and stenchy in her bowels. The fact is he would never have reached Manila and the deck of the John Dividend except for this new something, superlatively fine in his physique. Altogether he had seen a lot of life with the integument off—and had expected little more of the late days than to be found dead somewhere....

The scent of the fountain-place had a certain whipping magic about it. It seemed to cleanse away some weakness.

It made Moira Kelvin draw close in memory, but there was a queer up-pull to it now, as if she said:

"You have played enough, Sir Romney. Give it up—you're too clean-blooded to die soiled. You don't want me. You've forgotten for days at a time what you are trying to kill yourself for. If that next daybreak had found me in your arms—you would have hated me, and I would have had for myself something infinitely worse than hatred. You were big that night to let me go. Nature will not let a man as big as that pass out without doing his work and finding his own. If you want sin—pray, sin magnificently."

The cool running water passed over his fevered and wasted body. There was ample time for everything. A servant brought him a house-gown and slippers. Ti Kung's barber was waiting. A little helpful drink was brought from time to time, not too often, and just a touch. Ti Kung was waiting for him below. Romney had found a fineness of comprehension in the Chinese that he had not revelled in from any man for months. It was almost like a woman's. It liberated the better parts of him, but he was ill and fagged to the core. He looked forward to a long, clean night. First he would go back to the fountain place. He would think of that Longstruth's night before he slept.... Ti Kung showed him his room, opened the door, led him to the window of the low-lit chamber. From the casement he pointed out the stars and the lower lights of the distant shipping.