THE SPARE MAN
Beyond the scant greenery of Heywood's garden--a ropy little banyan, a
low rank of glossy whampee leaves, and the dusty sage-green tops of
stunted olives--glared the river. Wide, savage sunlight lay so hot upon
it, that to aching eyes the water shone solid, like a broad road of
yellow clay. Only close at hand and by an effort of vision, appeared the
tiny, quiet lines of the irresistible flood pouring toward the sea;
there whipped into the pool of banyan shade black snippets and tails of
reflection, darting ceaselessly after each other like a shoal of
frightened minnows. But elsewhere the river lay golden, solid, and
painfully bright. Things afloat, in the slumberous procession of all
Eastern rivers, swam downward imperceptibly, now blurred, now outlined
in corrosive sharpness.
The white men stood crowding along the spacious window. The dogs barked
outrageously; but at last above their din floated, as before, the high
wailing cries. A heaping cairn of round-bellied, rosy-pink earthen jars
came steering past, poled by a naked statue of new copper, who balanced
precariously on the edge of his hidden raft. No sound came from him; nor
from the funeral barge which floated next, where still figures in white
robes guarded the vermilion drapery of a bier, decked with vivid green
boughs. All these were silent.
"No, above!" cried Rudolph, pointing.
After the mourners' barge, at some distance, came hurrying a boat
crowded with shining yellow bodies and dull blue jackets. Long bamboo
poles plied bumping along her gunwale, sticking into the air all about
her, many and loose and incoordinate, like the ribs of an unfinished
basket. From the bow spurted a white puff of smoke. The dull report of a
musket lagged across the water.
The bullet skipped like a schoolboy's pebble, ripping out little rags of
white along that surface of liquid clay.
The line of fire thus revealed, revealed the mark. Untouched, a black
head bobbed vigorously in the water, some few yards before the boat. The
saffron crew, poling faster, yelled and cackled at so clean a miss,
while a coolie in the bow reloaded his matchlock.
The fugitive head labored like that of a man not used to swimming, and
desperately spent. It now gave a quick twist, and showed a distorted
face, almost of the same color with the water.
The mouth gaped black in a sputtering cry, then closed choking,
squirted out water, and gaped once more, to wail clearly:--
"I am Jesus Christ!"
In the broad, bare daylight of the river, this lonely and sudden
blasphemy came as though a person in a dream might declare himself to a
waking audience of skeptics. The cry, sharp with forlorn hope, rang like
an appeal.
"Why--look," stammered Heywood. "He sees us--heading here. Look,
it's--Quick! let me out!"
Just as he turned to elbow through his companions, and just as the cry
sounded again, the matchlock blazed from the bow. No bullet skipped. The
swimmer, who had reached the shallows, suddenly rose with an incredible
heave, like a leaping salmon, flung one bent arm up and back in the
gesture of the Laocoön, and pitched forward with a turbid splash. The
quivering darkness under the banyan blotted everything: death had
dispersed the black minnows there, in oozy wriggles of shadow; but next
moment the fish-tail stripes chased in a more lively shoal. The gleaming
potter, below his rosy cairn, stared. The mourners forgot their grief.
Heywood, after his impulse of rescue, stood very quiet.
"You saw," he repeated dully. "You all saw."
The clutching figure, bolt upright in the soaked remnant of prison
rags, had in that leap and fall shown himself for Chok Chung, the
Christian. He had sunk in mystery, to become at one forever with the
drunken cormorant-fisher.
Obscene delight raged in the crowded boat, with yells and laughter, and
flourish of bamboo poles.
"Come away from the window," said Heywood; and then to the white-haired
doctor: "Your question's answered, padre. Strange, to come so quick." He
jerked his thumb back toward the river. "And that's only first blood."
The others had broken into wrangling.
"Escaped? Nonsense--Cat--and--mouse game, I tell you; those devils let
him go merely to--We'll never know--Of course! Plain as your nose--To
stand by, and never lift a hand! Oh, it's--Rot! Look here,
why--Acquitted, then set on him--But we'll _never_ know!--Fang watching
on the spot. Trust him!"
A calm "boy," in sky-blue gown, stood beside them, ready to speak. The
dispute paused, while they turned for his message. It was a
disappointing trifle: Mrs. Forrester waited below for her husband, to
walk home.
"Can't leave now," snapped Gilly. "I'll be along, tell her--"
"Had she better go alone?" suggested Heywood.
"No; right you are." The other swept a fretful eye about the company.
"But this business begins to look urgent.--Here, somebody we can spare.
You go, Hackh, there's a good chap."
Chantel dropped the helmet he had caught up. Bowing stiffly, Rudolph
marched across the room and down the stairs. His face, pale at the late
spectacle, had grown red and sulky, "Can spare me, can you?--I'm the
one." He descended, muttering.
Viewing himself thus, morosely, as rejected of men, he reached the
compound gate to fare no better with the woman. She stood waiting in the
shadow of the wall; and as he drew unwillingly near, the sight of
her--to his shame and quick dismay--made his heart leap in welcome. She
wore the coolest and severest white, but at her throat the same small
furbelow, every line of which he had known aboard ship, in the days of
his first exile and of his recent youth. It was now as though that youth
came flooding back to greet her.
"Good-morning." He forgot everything, except that for a few priceless
moments they would be walking side by side.
She faced him with a start, never so young and beautiful as now--her
blue eyes wide, scornful, and blazing, her cheeks red and lips
trembling, like a child ready to cry.
"I did not want _you_" she said curtly.
"Nor did they." Pride forged the retort for him, at a blow. He explained
in the barest of terms, while she eyed him steadily, with every sign of
rising temper.
"I can spare you, too," she whipped out; then turned to walk away,
holding her helmet erect, in the poise of a young goddess, pert
but warlike.
This double injustice left Rudolph chafing. In two strides, however, he
had overtaken her.
"I am under orders," he stated grimly.
Her pace gradually slackened in the growing heat; but she went forward
with her eyes fixed on the littered, sunken flags of their path. This
rankling silence seemed to him more unaccountable and deadly than all
former mischances, and left him far more alone. From the sultry tops of
bamboos, drooping like plants in an oven, an amorous multitude of
cicadas maintained the buzzing torment of steel on emery wheels, as
though the universal heat had chafed and fretted itself into a dry,
feverish utterance. Once Mrs. Forrester looked about, quick and angry,
like one ready to choke that endless voice. But for the rest, the two
strange companions moved steadily onward.
In an alley of checkered light a buffalo with a wicker nose-ring, and
heavy, sagging horns that seemed to jerk his head back in agony, heaved
toward them, ridden by a naked yellow infant in a nest-like saddle of
green fodder. Scenting with fright the disgusting presence of white
aliens, the sleep-walking monster shied, opened his eyes, and lowered
his blue muzzle as if to charge. There was a pause, full of menace.
"Don't run!" said Rudolph, and catching the woman roughly about the
shoulders, thrust her behind him. She clutched him tightly by the
wounded arm.
The buffalo stared irresolute, with evil eyes. The naked boy in the
green nest brushed a swarm of flies from his handful of sticky
sweetmeats, looked up, pounded the clumsy shoulders, and shrilled a
command. Staring doubtfully, and trembling, the buffalo swayed past, the
wrinkled armor of his gray hide plastered with dry mud as with yellow
ochre. To the slow click of hoofs, the surly monster, guided by a little
child, went swinging down the pastoral shade,--ancient yet living shapes
from a picture immemorial in art and poetry.
"Please," begged Rudolph, trying with his left hand to loosen her grip.
"Please, that hurts."
For a second they stood close, their fingers interlacing. With a touch
of contempt, he found that she still trembled, and drew short breath.
Her eyes slowly gathered his meaning.
"Oh, that!" She tore her hand loose, as though burned. "That! It _was_
all true, then. I forgot."
She caught aside her skirts angrily, and started forward in all her
former disdain. But this, after their brief alliance, was not to be
tolerated.
"What was all true?" he insisted. "You shall not treat me so. If anybody
has a right--"
After several paces, she flashed about at him in a whirl of words:--
"All alike, every one of you! And I was fool enough to think you were
different!" The conflict in her eyes showed real, beyond suspicion. "He
told me all about it. Last evening. And you dare talk of rights, and
come following me here--"
"Lucky I did," retorted Rudolph, with sudden spirit; and holding out his
wounded arm, indignantly: "That scratch, if you know how it came--"
"I know, perfectly." She stared as at some crowning impudence. "He was
chicken-hearted. You came off cheaply.--I know all you said. But the one
thing I'll never understand, is where you found the courage, after he
struck you, at the club. You'll always have _that_ to admire!"
"After he struck"--A light broke in on Rudolph, somehow. "Chantel? Oh,
that liar!"
He wheeled and started to go back.
"Wait, stop!" she called, in a strangely altered voice, which brought
him up short. "They're all with him now. You can't--What did you mean?"
He explained, sulkily at first, but ending in a kind of generous rage.
"So I couldn't even stand up to him. And except for Maurice Heywood--Oh,
you need not frown; he's the best friend I ever had."
Mrs. Forrester had walked on, with the same cloudy aspect, the same
light, impatient step. He felt the greater surprise when, suddenly
turning, she raised toward him her odd, enticing, pointed face, and the
friendly mischief of her eyes.
"The best?" she echoed, in the same half-whisper as when she had
flattered him, that afternoon in the dusky well of the pagoda stairway.
"The very best friend? Don't you think you have a better?"
Rudolph stared.
"Oh, you funny, funny boy!" she cried, with a bewildering laugh, of
delight and pride. "I hate people all prim and circumspect, and
you--You'd have flown back there straight at him, before my--before all
the others. That's why I like you so!--But you must leave that horrid,
lying fellow to me."
All unaware, she had led him along the blinding white wall of the
Forrester compound, and halted in the hot shadow that lay under the
tiled gateway. As though timidly, her hand stole up and rested on
his forearm.
"So sorry." The confined space, narrow and covered, gave to her voice a
plaintive ring. "That's twice you protected me, and I hurt you.--You
_are_ different. This doesn't happen between people, often. When you
did--that, for me, yesterday, didn't it seem different and rather
splendid, and--like a book?"
"It seemed nonsense," replied Rudolph, sturdily. "The heat. We were
fools."
She laughed again, and at close range watched him from under consciously
drooping lashes that almost veiled a liquid brilliancy. Everywhere the
cicadas kept the heat vibrating with their strident buzz. It recalled
some other widespread mist of treble music, long ago. The trilling of
frogs, that had been, before.
"You dear, brave boy," she said slowly. "You're so honest, too. I'm not
ungrateful. Do you know what I'd like--Oh, there's the _amah!"_
She drew back, with an impatient gesture.
"That stupid, fat Mrs. Earle's waiting for me.--I hate to leave you."
The stealthy brightness of her admiration changed to a slow, inscrutable
appeal. "Don't forget. Haven't you--a better friend?" And with an
instant, bold, and tantalizing grimace, she had vanished within.
* * * * *
To his homeward march, her cicadas shrilled the music of fifes. He, the
despised, the man to spare, now cocked up his helmet like fortune's
minion, dizzy with new honors. Nobody had ever praised him to his face.
And now she, she of all the world, had spoken words which he feared and
longed to believe, and which even said still less than her searching and
mysterious look.
On the top of his exultation, he reached the nunnery, and entered his
big, bare living-room, to find Heywood stretched in a wicker chair.
"Hallo, Rudie! I've asked myself to tiffin," drawled the lounger, from a
little tempest of blue smoke, tossed by the punkah. "How's the fair
Bertha?--Mausers all right? And by the way, did you make that inventory
of provisions?"
Rudolph faced him with a sudden conviction of guilt, of treachery to a
leader.
"Yes," he stammered; "I--I'll get it for you."
He passed into his bedroom, caught up the written list from a table, and
for a moment stood as if dreaming. Before him the Mausers, polished and
orderly, shone in their new rack against the lime-coated wall. Though
appearing to scan them, Rudolph saw nothing but his inward confusion.
"After all this man did for me," he mused. What had loosed the bond,
swept away all the effects?
A sound near the window made him turn. An imp in white and red livery,
Pêng, the little billiard-marker from the club, stood hurling things
violently into the outer glare.
"What thing you do?" called Rudolph, sharply.
Some small but heavy object clattered on the floor. The urchin stooped,
snatched it up, and flung it hurtling clean over the garden to the
river. He turned, grinning amiably. "Goo-moh? ning-seh. How too you
too," he chanted. "I am welly? glat to-see you." A boat-coolie, he
explained, had called this house bad names. He, Pêng, threw stones.
Bad man.
"Out of here, you rascal!" Rudolph flicked a riding-whip at the
scampering legs, as the small defender of his honor bolted for
the stairs.
"What's wrong?"
Heywood appeared promptly at the door.
From the road, below, a gleeful voice piped:--
"Goat-men! Baby-killers!"
In the noon blaze, Pêng skipped derisively, jeered at them, performed a
brief but indecorous pantomime, and then, kicking up his heels with joy,
scurried for his life.
"Chucked his billet," said Heywood, without surprise. "Little devil, I
always thought--What's missing?"
Rudolph scanned his meagre belongings, rummaged his dressing-table,
opened a wardrobe.
"Nothing," he answered. "A boat-coolie--"
But Heywood had darted to the rack of Mausers, knelt, and sprung up,
raging.
"Side-bolts! Man," he cried, in a voice that made Rudolph jump,--"man,
why didn't you stop him? The side-bolts, all but two.--Young heathen,
he's crippled us: one pair of rifles left."