OFF DUTY
The last of the sunlight streamed level through a gap in the western
ridges. It melted, with sinuous, tender shadows, the dry contour of
field and knoll, and poured over all the parching land a liquid,
undulating grace. Like the shadow of clouds on ripe corn, the red tiles
of the village roofs patched the countryside. From the distant sea had
come a breath of air, cool enough to be felt with gratitude, yet so
faint as neither to disturb the dry pulsation of myriad insect-voices,
nor to blur the square mirrors of distant rice-fields, still tropically
blue or icy with reflected clouds.
Miss Drake paused on the knoll, and looked about her.
"This remains the same, doesn't it, for all our troubles?" she said;
then to herself, slowly, "'It is a beauteous evening, calm and free.'"
Heywood made no pretense of following her look.
"'Dear Nun,'" he blurted; "no, how does it go again?--'dear child, that
walkest with me here--'"
The girl started down the slope, with the impatience of one whose mood
is frustrated. The climate had robbed her cheeks of much color, but not,
it seemed, of all.
"Your fault," said Heywood, impenitent. "Merely to show you. I could
quote, once."
"Aged Man!" She laughed, as though glad of this turn. "I like you better
in prose. Go on, please, where we left off. What did you do then?"
Heywood's smile, half earnest, half mischievous, obediently faded.
"Oh, that! Why, then, of course, I discharged Rudolph's gatekeeper, put
a trusty of my own in his place, sent out to hire a diver, and turned
all hands to hunting. 'Obviously,' as Gilly would say.--We picked up two
side-bolts in the garden, by the wall, one in the mud outside, and three
the diver got in shallow water. Total recovered, six; plus two Pêng had
no time for, eight. We can ill spare four guns, though; and the affair
shows they keep a beastly close watch."
"Yes," said Miss Drake, absently; then drew a slow breath. "Pêng was the
most promising pupil we had."
"He was," stated her companion, "a little, unmitigated, skipping,
orange-tawny goblin!"
She made no reply. As they footed slowly along the winding path,
Flounce, the fox-terrier, who had scouted among strange clumps of
bamboo, now rejoined them briskly, cantering with her fore-legs
delicately stiff and joyful. Miss Drake stooped to pat her, saying:--
"Poor little dog. Little Foreign Dog!" She rose with a sigh, to add
incongruously, "Oh, the things we dream beforehand, and then the things
that happen!"
"I don't know." Heywood looked at her keenly. "Sometimes they're the
same."
The jealous terrier scored her dusty paws down his white drill, from
knee to ankle, before he added:--
"You know how the Queen of Heaven won her divinity."
"Another," said the girl, "of your heathen stories?"
"Rather a pretty one," he retorted. "It happened in a seaport, a good
many hundred miles up the coast. A poor girl lived there, with her
mother, in a hut. One night a great gale blew, so that everybody was
anxious. Three junks were out somewhere at sea, in that storm. The girl
lay there in the dark. Her sweetheart on board, it would be in a Western
story; but these were only her friends, and kin, and townsmen, that were
at stake. So she lay there in the hut, you see, and couldn't rest. And
then it seemed to her, in the dark, that she was swimming out through
the storm, out and out, and not in the least afraid. She had become
larger, and more powerful, somehow, than the rain, or the dark, or the
whole ocean; for when she came upon the junks tossing there, she took
one in each hand, the third in her mouth, and began to swim for home.
Just retrieved 'em, you know. But then across the storm she heard her
mother calling in the dark, and had to open her mouth to answer. So she
lost that junk."
"Well, then her spirit was back in the hut. But next day the two junks
came in; the third one, never. And for that dream, she was made, after
her death, the great and merciful Queen of Heaven."
As Heywood ended, they were entering a pastoral village, near the town,
but hidden low under great trees, ancient and widely gnarled.
"You told that," said Miss Drake, "as though it had really happened."
"If you believe, these things have reality; if not, they have none." His
gesture, as he repeated the native maxim, committed him to neither side.
Miss Drake looked back toward the hills.
"Her dream was play, compared to--some."
"That," he answered, "is abominably true."
The curt, significant tone made her glance at him quickly. In her dark
eyes there was no impatience, but only trouble.
"We do better," she said, "when we are both busy."
He nodded, as though reluctantly agreeing, not so much to the words as
to the silence which followed.
The evening peace, which lay on the fields and hills, had flooded even
the village streets. Without pause, without haste, the endless labor of
the day went on as quiet as a summer cloud. Meeting or overtaking,
coolies passed in single file, their bare feet slapping the enormous
flags of antique, sunken granite, their twin baskets bobbing and
creaking to the rhythm of their wincing trot. The yellow muscles rippled
strongly over straining ribs, as with serious faces, and slant eyes
intent on their path, they chanted in pairs the ageless refrain, the
call and answer which make burdens lighter:--
"O heh!--O ha?
O ho ho!
O heh!--O ha?
O ho ho!"
From hidden places sounded the whir of a jade-cutter's wheel, a
cobbler's rattle, or the clanging music of a forge. Yet everywhere the
slow movements, the faded, tranquil colors,--dull blue garments, dusky
red tiles, deep bronze-green foliage overhanging a vista of subdued
white and gray,--consorted with the spindling shadows and low-streaming
vesper light. Keepers of humble shops lounged in the open air with their
gossips, smoking bright pipes of the Yunnan white copper, nodding and
blinking gravely. Above them, no less courteous and placid, little
doorway shrines besought the Earth-God to lead the Giver of Wealth
within. Sometimes, where a narrow lane gaped opposite a door, small
stone lions sat grinning upon pillars, to scare away the Secret Arrow of
misfortune. But these rarely: the village seemed a happy place, favored
of the Influences. In the grateful coolness men came and went, buying,
joking, offering neighborly advice to chance-met people.
A plump woman, who carried two tiny silver fish in an immense flat
basket, grinned at Miss Drake, and pointed roguishly.
"See the two boats going by!" she called. "Her feet are bigger than my
Golden Lilies!" And laughing, she wriggled her own dusty toes, strong,
free, and perfect in modeling.
An old, withered barber looked up from shaving a blue forehead, under a
tree.
"Their women," he growled, "are shameless, and walk everywhere!"
But a stern man, bearing a palm-leaf fan and a lark in a cage, frowned
him down.
"She brought my son safe out of the Three Sicknesses," he declared.
"Mind your trade, Catcher of Lively Ones!" Then bending over the cage,
with solicitude, he began gently to fan the lark. As Heywood and the
girl paused beside him, he glanced up, and smiled gravely. "I give my
pet his airing," he said; and then, quickly but quietly, "When you reach
the town, do not pass through the West Quarter. It is full of
evil-minded persons. Their placards are posted."
A shrill trio of naked boys came racing and squabbling, to offer
grasshoppers for sale.
"We have seen no placards," replied Heywood.
"You will to-morrow," said the owner of the lark, calmly; and squatting,
became engrossed in poking a grasshopper between the brown, varnished
splints of the cage. "Maker of Music, here is your evening rice."
The two companions passed on, with Flounce timidly at heel.
"You see," Heywood broke out. "Warnings everywhere. Now please, won't
you listen to my advice? No telling when the next ship _will_ call, but
when it does--"
"I can't run away." She spoke as one clinging to a former answer. "I
must stand by my dream, such as it used to be--and even such as it is."
He eyed her sadly, shook his head, and said no more. For a moment they
halted, where the path broadened on a market-place, part shade, part
luminous with golden dust. A squad of lank boys, kicking miraculously
with flat upturned soles, kept a wicker ball shining in the air, as true
and lively as a plaything on a fountain-jet. Beyond, their tiny juniors,
girls and boys knee-high, and fat tumbling babies in rainbow finery, all
hand-locked and singing, turned their circle inside out and back again,
in the dizzy graces of the "Water Wheel." Other boys, and girls still
trousered and queued like boys, played at hopscotch, in and out among
shoes that lay across the road. All traffic, even the steady trotting
coolies, fetched a lenient compass roundabout.
"Lucky Hand, Lucky Hand! Allow me to pass," begged a coffin-maker's man,
bent under a plank. "These Long-Life boards are heavy."
"Ho, Lame Chicken!" called another, blocked by the hop-scotch. He was a
brown grass-cutter, who grinned, and fondled a smoky cloth that
buzzed--some tribe of wild bees, captured far afield. "Ho, Lame Chicken!
Do not bump me. They will sting."
He came through safely; for at the same moment the musical "Cling-clank"
of a sweetmeat-seller's bell turned the game into a race. The way was
clear, also, for a tiny, aged collector of paper, flying the gay flag of
an "Exalted Literary Society," and plodding, between two great baskets,
on his pious rounds. "Revere and spare," he piped, at intervals,--
"revere and spare the Written Word!"
All the bright picture lingered with the two alien wayfarers, long after
they had passed and the sun had withdrawn from their path. In the hoary
peace of twilight,--
"What can _we_ do here?" the girl cried abruptly. "There--I never meant
to say it. But it runs in my head all the time. I work and work, to keep
it down. What can we do here?"
Heywood watched her face, set straight before them, and now more clearly
cut in the failing light. Were there only pride in those fine and
resolute lines, it might have been a face from some splendid coin, or
medal of victory.
"You work too hard," he said. "Think, instead, of all the good--"
But at that she seemed to wince.
"The good? As if there weren't dark streets and crooked children at
home! Oh, the pride and ignorance that sent me here!" She spoke quietly,
with a kind of wonder. "Just blind, ignorant feelings, I took them
for--for something too great and mysterious. It's all very strange to
look back on, and try to put into words. I remember painted glass, and
solemn music--and thinking--then!--that I knew this lovely and terrible
world--and its Maker and Master." She looked down the dusky lanes,
where glowworm lanterns began to bob and wink. "Oh, this land! where you
see the days running into years!"
"The Dragon's a wise old beast," he ventured. "He teaches--something."
She assented gravely:--
"And in those days I thought it was a dark continent--of lost souls."
"There are no dark continents," declared Heywood suddenly, in a broken
voice. "The heart of one man--can hold more darkness--You would never
see into it--"
"Don't!" she cried sharply. "What did we promise?"
They stood close in the dusk, and a tremor, a wave, passed through them
both.
"I forgot--I couldn't help"--he stammered; then, as they stumbled
forward, he regained his former tone, keen and ready. "Mustn't get to
fussing about our work, must we?--Curious thing: speaking of dreams, you
know. The other night I thought you were somewhere out on board a junk,
and Flounce with you. I swam like anything, miles and miles, but
couldn't get out to you. Worked like steam, and no headway. Flounce knew
I was coming, but you didn't. Deuced odd, how real it seemed."
She laughed, as though they had walked past some danger.
"And speaking of dragons," she rejoined. "They _do_ help. The man in
the story, that dipped in dragon's blood, was made invulnerable."
"Oh?" He stood plainly at a loss. "Oh, I see. German, wasn't he?--Pity
they didn't pop Rudie Hackh in!"
Her swift upward glance might have been admiration, if she had not
said:--
"Your mind works very slowly."
"Oh?" Again he paused, as though somewhat hurt; then answered
cheerfully: "Dare say. Always did. Thought at first you meant the
rattan-juice kind, from Sumatra."
The gate of the town yawned black. From the streets glimmered a few
lanterns, like candles in a long cave. But shunning these unfriendly
corridors, he led her roundabout, now along the walls, now through the
dim ways of an outlying hamlet. A prolonged shriek of growing fright and
anguish came slowly toward them--the cry of a wheelbarrow carrying the
great carcass of a pig, waxy white and waxy red, like an image from a
chamber of horrors. In the blue twilight, fast deepening, the most
familiar things became grotesque. A woman's voice telling stories behind
shadow pictures, and the capricious play of the black puppets on her
lighted screen, had the effect of incantation. Before the booth of a
dentist, the long strings of black teeth swayed in the lantern-glow,
rattling, like horrid necklaces of cannibals. And from a squat
den--where on a translucent placard in the dull window flickered the
words "Foreign Earth," and the guttering door-lantern hinted "As You
Like It"--there came a sweet, insidious, potent smell that seemed more
poisonous than mere opium.
"Let's go faster," said the girl. "Somehow, the dark makes me uneasy
to-night."
Skirting the town, they struck at last the open road beyond, and saw
against a fading sky the low black bulk of the nunnery, pierced with
orange squares. Past its landward wall, lanterns moved slowly, clustered
here and there by twos and threes, and dispersed. Cackling argument came
from the ditch, wherever the lantern-bearers halted; and on the face of
the wall, among elbowing shadows, shone dim strips of scarlet. Both
pillars of the gate were plastered with them.
"Placards," said Heywood. "Things are ripening fast." Lighting match
from match, he studied the long red scrolls, crowded with neat rows of
symbols. He read them off slowly.
'The Garden of the Three Exquisites.'--Pshaw! that's a theatre notice:
enterprising manager.--Ah, more like it. Long preamble, regular
trimetrical platitudes--here we are:--
"'These Red-Bristled Ghosts teach their dupes to break the ancestral
tablets, and to worship the picture of a naked infant, which points one
finger toward heaven, another toward earth.--To each man entering the
False Religion, a pill is given which confuses and darkens the
mind.--Why they dig out babies' eyes: from one hundred pounds of Chinese
lead can be extracted seven pounds of silver, and the remaining
ninety-three pounds can be sold at the original cost. This silver can be
extracted only by the elixir of black eyes. The green eyes of barbarians
are of no use.'--Really, what follows is too--er--obscure. But here's
the close: 'Tao-tais of the villages, assemble your population.
Patriots, join! Let us hurl back these wizard-beasts beyond the oceans,
to take their place among the strange things of creation!'"
"And the big characters," she added, "the big characters you tried to
hide, are 'Kill' and 'Burn'?"
Gray eyes and dark eyes met steadily, while the last match, reddening
the blood in his fingers, slowly burned out.