He had said it, spoken it like that ... his own name! After all
these weeks of trying to obliterate even the memory of it!... to
have given it to this girl without her asking!
The thought of peril cleared a space in the alcoholic fog. He saw
the expression on the girl's face and understood what it signified,
that it was the reflected pattern of his own. He shut his eyes and
groped for the wall to steady himself, wondering if this bit of
mummery would get over.
"I beg your pardon!... A bit rocky this morning.... That window
there.... Cloud back of your hat!" He opened his eyes again.
"I understand," she said. The poor boy, imagining things! "That's
want of substantial food. Better take these sandwiches."
"All right; and thank you. I'll eat them when we start. Just now
the water-chestnuts...."
She smiled, and returned to the spinsters.
Spurlock began to munch his water-chestnuts. What he needed was not
a food but a flavour; and the cocoanut taste of the chestnuts
soothed his burning tongue and throat. He had let go his name so
easily as that! What was the name she had given? Ruth something; he
could not remember. What a frightened fool he was! If he could not
remember her name, it was equally possible that already she had
forgotten his. Conscience was always digging sudden pits for his
feet and common sense ridiculing his fears. Mirages, over which he
was constantly throwing bridges which were wasted efforts, since
invariably they spanned solid ground.
But he would make it a point not to speak again to the girl. If he
adhered to this policy--to keep away from her inconspicuously--she
would forget the name by night, and to-morrow even the bearer of it
would sink below the level of recollection. That was life. They
were only passers-by.
Drink for him had a queer phase. It did not cheer or fortify him
with false courage and recklessness; it simply enveloped him in a
mist of unreality. A shudder rippled across his shoulders. He hated
the taste of it. The first peg was torture. But for all that, it
offered relief; his brain, stupefied by the fumes, grew dull, and
conscience lost its edge to bite.
He wiped the sweat from his chin and forehead. His hand shook so
violently that he dropped the handkerchief; and he let it lie on
the floor because he dared not stoop.
Ah Cum, sensing the difficulty, approached, recovered the damp
handkerchief and returned it.
"Thanks."
"Very interesting," said the Chinaman, with a wave of his tapering
hand toward the roofs. "It reminds you of a red sea suddenly
petrified."
"Or the flat stones in the meadows, teeming with life underneath.
Ants."
"You are from America?"
"Yes." But Spurlock put up his guard.
"I am a Yale man," said Ah Cum.
"Yale? Why, so am I." There was no danger in admitting this fact.
Spurlock offered his hand, which Ah Cum accepted gravely. A broken
laugh followed the action. "Yale!" Spurlock's gaze shifted to the
dead hills beyond the window; when it returned to the Chinaman
there was astonishment instead of interest: as if Ah Cum had been a
phantom a moment since and was now actually a human being. "Yale!"
A Chinaman who had gone to Yale!
"Yes. Civil engineering. Mentally but not physically competent. Had
to give up the work and take to this. I'm not noble; so my
honourable ancestors will not turn over in their graves."
"Graves." Spurlock pointed in the sloping fields outside the walls.
"I've counted ten coffins so far."
"Ah, yes. The land about these walls is a common graveyard. Every
day in the year you will witness such scenes. There are no funerals
among the poor, only burials. And many of these deaths could be
avoided if it were not for superstition. Superstition is the
Chinese Reaper. Rituals instead of medicines. Sometimes I try to
talk. I might as well try to build a ladder to heaven. We must take
the children--of any race--if we would teach knowledge. Age is set,
impervious to innovations."
The Chinaman paused. He saw that his words were falling upon dull
ears. He turned to observe what this object was that had so
unexpectedly diverted the young man's attention. It was the girl.
She was standing before a window, against the background of the
rain-burdened April sky. There was enough contra-light to render
her ethereal.
Spurlock was basically a poet, quick to recognize beauty, animate
or inanimate, and to transcribe it in unuttered words. He was
always word-building, a metaphorist, lavish with singing
adjectives; but often he built in confusion because it was
difficult to describe something beautiful in a new yet simple way.
He had not noticed the girl particularly when she offered the
sandwiches; but in this moment he found her beautiful. Her face
reminded him of a delicate unglazed porcelain cup, filled with
blond wine. But there was something else; and in his befogged
mental state the comparison eluded him.
Ruth broke the exquisite pose by summoning Ah Cum, who was lured
into a lecture upon the water-clock. This left Spurlock alone.
He began munching his water-chestnuts--a small brown radish-shaped
vegetable, with the flavour of coconut--that grow along the river
brims. Below the window he saw two coolies carrying a coffin, which
presently they callously dumped into a yawning pit. This made the
eleventh. There were no mourners. But what did the occupant of the
box care? The laugh was always with the dead: they were out of the
muddle.
From the unlovely hillside his glance strayed to the several
five-story towers of the pawnshops. Celestial Uncles! Spurlock
chuckled, and a bit of chestnut, going down the wrong way, set him
to coughing violently. When the paroxysm passed, he was forced to
lean against the window-jamb for support.
"That young man had better watch his cough," said Spinster
Prudence. "He acts queerly, too."
"They always act like that after drink," said Ruth, casually.
She intercepted the glance the spinsters exchanged, and immediately
sensed that she had said too much. There was no way of recalling
the words; so she waited.
"Miss Enschede--such an odd name!--are you French?"
"Oh, no. Pennsylvania Dutch. But I have never seen America. I was
born on an island in the South Seas. I am on my way to an aunt who
lives in Hartford, Connecticut."
The spinsters nodded approvingly. Hartford had a very respectable
sound.
Ruth did not consider it necessary, however, to add that she had
not notified this aunt of her coming, that she did not know whether
the aunt still resided in Hartford or was underground. These two
elderly ladies would call her stark mad. Perhaps she was.
"And you have seen ... drunken men?" Prudence's tones were full of
suppressed horror.
"Often. A very small settlement, mostly natives. There was a
trader--a man who bought copra and pearls. Not a bad man as men
go, but he would sell whisky and gin. Over here men drink because
they are lonely; and when they drink too hard and too long, they
wind up on the beach."
The spinsters stared at her blankly.
Ruth went on to explain. "When a man reaches the lowest scale
through drink, we call him a beachcomber. I suppose the phrase--the
word--originally meant a man who searched for food on the beach.
The poor things! Oh, it was quite dreadful. It is queer, but men of
education and good birth fall swiftest and lowest."
She sent a covert glance toward the young man. She alone of them
all knew that he was on the first leg of the terrible journey to
the beach. Somebody ought to talk to him, warn him. He was all
alone, like herself.
"What are those odd-looking things on the roofs?" she asked of Ah
Cum.
"Pigs and fish, to fend off the visitations of the devil." Ah Cum
smiled. "After all, I believe we Chinese have the right idea. The
devil is on top, not below. We aren't between him and heaven; he is
between us and heaven."
The spinsters had no counter-philosophy to offer; so they turned to
Ruth, who had singularly and unconsciously invested herself with
glamour, the glamour of adventure, which the old maids did not
recognize as such because they were only tourists. This child at
once alarmed and thrilled them. She had come across the wicked
South Seas which were still infested with cannibals; she had seen
drunkenness and called men beachcombers; who was this moment as
innocent as a babe, and in the next uttered some bitter wisdom it
had taken a thousand years of philosophy to evolve. And there was
that dress of hers! She must be warned that she had been imposed
upon.
"You'll pardon an old woman, Miss Enschede," said Sister Prudence;
"but where in this world did you get that dress?"
Ruth picked up both sides of the skirt and spread it, looking down.
"Is there anything wrong with it?"
"Wrong? Why, you have been imposed upon somewhere. That dress is
thirty years old, if a day."
"Oh!" Ruth laughed softly. "That is easily explained. I haven't
much money; I don't know how much it is going to cost me to reach
Hartford; so I fixed over a couple of my mother's dresses. It
doesn't look bad, does it?"
"Mercy, no! That wasn't the thought. It was that somebody had
cheated you."
The spinster did not ask if the mother lived; the question was
inconsequent. No mother would have sent her daughter into the world
with such a wardrobe. Straitened circumstances would not have
mattered; a mother would have managed somehow. In the '80s such a
dress would have indicated considerable financial means; under the
sun-helmet it was an anachronism; and yet it served only to add a
quainter charm to the girl's beauty.
"Do you know what you make me think of?"
"What?"
"As if you had stepped out of some old family album."
The feminine vanities in Ruth were quiescent; nothing had ever
occurred in her life to tingle them into action. She was dressed as
a white woman should be; and that for the present satisfied her
instincts. But she threw a verbal bombshell into the spinsters'
camp.
"What is a family album?"
"You poor child, do you mean to tell me you've never seen a family
album? Why, it's a book filled with the photographs of your
grandmothers and grandfathers, your aunts and uncles and cousins,
your mother and father when they were little."
Ruth stood with drawn brows; she was trying to recall. "No; we
never had one; at least, I never saw it."
The lack of a family album for some reason put a little ache in her
heart. Grandmothers and grandfathers and uncles and aunts ... to
love and to coddle lonely little girls.
"You poor child!" said Prudence.
"Then I am old-fashioned. Is that it? I thought this very pretty."
"So it is, child. But one changes the style of one's clothes
yearly. Of course, this does not apply to uninteresting old maids,"
Prudence modified with a dry little smile.
"But this is good enough to travel in, isn't it?"
"To be sure it is. When you reach San Francisco, you can buy
something more appropriate." It occurred to the spinster to ask:
"Have you ever seen a fashion magazine?"
"No. Sometimes we had the _Illustrated London News_ and _Tit-Bits._
Sailors would leave them at the trader's."
"Alice in Wonderland!" cried Prudence, perhaps a little enviously.
"Oh, I've read that!"
Spurlock had heard distinctly enough all of this odd conversation;
but until the spinster's reference to the family album, no phrase
had been sufficient in strength of attraction to break the trend of
his own unhappy thoughts. Out of an old family album: here was the
very comparison that had eluded him. His literary instincts began
to stir. A South Sea island girl, and this was her first adventure
into civilization. Here was the corner-stone of a capital story;
but he knew that Howard Spurlock would never write it.
Other phrases returned now, like echoes. The beachcomber, the
lowest in the human scale; and some day he would enter into this
estate. Between him and the beach stood the sum of six hundred
dollars.
But one thing troubled him, and because of it he might never arrive
on the beach. A new inexplicable madness that urged him to shrill
ironically the story of his coat--to take it off and fling it at
the feet of any stranger who chanced to be nigh.
"Look at it!" he felt like screaming. "Clean and spotless, but
beginning to show the wear and tear of constant use. I have worn it
for weeks and weeks. I have slept with it under my pillow. Observe
it--a blue-serge coat. Ever hear of the djinn in the bottle? Like
enough. But did you ever hear of a djinn in a blue-serge coat?
_Stitched_ in!"
Something like this was always rushing into his throat; and he had
to sink his nails into his palms to stop his mouth. Very
fascinating, though, trying to analyse the impulse. It was not an
affair of the conscience; it was vaguely based upon insolence and
defiance. He wondered if these abnormal mental activities presaged
illness. To be ill and helpless.
He went on munching his water-chestnuts, and stared at the skyline.
He hated horizons. He was always visualizing the Hand whenever he
let his gaze rest upon the horizon. An enormous Hand that rose up
swiftly, blotting out the sky. A Hand that strove to reach his
shoulder, relentless, soulless but lawful. The scrutiny of any
strange man provoked a sweaty terror. What a God-forsaken fool he
was! And dimly, out there somewhere in the South Seas--the beach!
Already he sensed the fascination of the inevitable; and with this
fascination came the idea of haste, to get there quickly and have
done. Odd, but he had never thought of the beach until this girl
(who looked as if she had stepped out of the family album) referred
to it with a familiarity which was as astonishing as it was
profoundly sad.
The beach: to get there as quickly as he could, to reach the white
man's nadir of abasement and gather the promise of that soothing
indifference which comes with the final disintegration of the
fibres of conscience. He had an objective now.