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The Novels and Stories of Richard Harding Davis
THE EXILES AND OTHER STORIES
by
RICHARD HARDING DAVIS
With an Introduction by Charles Dana Gibson
Illustrated
NEW YORK
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
1919
"The Exiles" and "The Boy Orator of Zepata City" from "The Exiles,"
copyright, 1894, by HARPER & BROTHERS.
"The Other Woman" from "Gallagher," copyright, 1891, by CHARLES
SCRIBNER'S SONS; "On the Fever Ship," "The Lion and the Unicorn," and
"The Last Ride Together" from "The Lion and the Unicorn," copyright,
1899, by CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS; "Miss Delamar's Understudy" from
"Cinderella," copyright, 1896, by CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS; "The
Reporter Who Made Himself King" from "Stories for Boys," copyright,
1891, by CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS.
[Illustration: Instead she buried her face in its folds.]
TO MY FRIEND
J. DAVIS BRODHEAD
THE FIRST GLIMPSE OF DAVIS
Dick was twenty-four years old when he came into the smoking-room of
the Victoria Hotel, in London, after midnight one July night--he was
dressed as a Thames boatman.
He had been rowing up and down the river since sundown, looking for
color. He had evidently peopled every dark corner with a pirate, and
every floating object had meant something to him. He had adventure
written all over him. It was the first time I had ever seen him, and
I had never heard of him. I can't now recall another figure in that
smoke-filled room. I don't remember who introduced us--over
twenty-seven years have passed since that night. But I can see Dick
now dressed in a rough brown suit, a soft hat, with a handkerchief
about his neck, a splendid, healthy, clean-minded, gifted boy at play.
And so he always remained.
His going out of this world seemed like a boy interrupted in a game he
loved. And how well and fairly he played it! Surely no one deserved
success more than Dick. And it is a consolation to know he had more
than fifty years of just what he wanted. He had health, a great
talent, and personal charm. There never was a more loyal or unselfish
friend. There wasn't an atom of envy in him. He had unbounded mental
and physical courage, and with it all he was sensitive and sometimes
shy. He often tried to conceal these last two qualities, but never
succeeded in doing so from those of us who were privileged really to
know and love him.
His life was filled with just the sort of adventure he liked the best.
No one ever saw more wars in so many different places or got more out
of them. And it took the largest war in all history to wear out that
stout heart.
We shall miss him.
CHARLES DANA GIBSON.
CONTENTS
The First Glimpse of Davis Charles Dana Gibson
THE EXILES
THE BOY ORATOR OF ZEPATA CITY
THE OTHER WOMAN
ON THE FEVER SHIP
THE LION AND THE UNICORN
THE LAST RIDE TOGETHER
MISS DELAMAR'S UNDERSTUDY
THE REPORTER WHO MADE HIMSELF KING
ILLUSTRATIONS
INSTEAD SHE BURIED HER FACE IN ITS FOLDS (Frontispiece)
STOPPING FOR HALF-HOURS AT A TIME BEFORE A BAZAAR
THE BOAR HUNT
CONSUMED TEA AND THIN SLICES OF BREAD
"I NEVER SAW A KING," GORDON REMARKED
THE EXILES
I
The greatest number of people in the world prefer the most highly
civilized places of the world, because they know what sort of things
are going to happen there, and because they also know by experience
that those are the sort of things they like. A very few people prefer
barbarous and utterly uncivilized portions of the globe for the reason
that they receive while there new impressions, and because they like
the unexpected better than a routine of existence, no matter how
pleasant that routine may be. But the most interesting places of all
to study are those in which the savage and the cultivated man lie down
together and try to live together in unity. This is so because we can
learn from such places just how far a man of cultivation lapses into
barbarism when he associates with savages, and how far the remnants of
his former civilization will have influence upon the barbarians among
whom he has come to live.
There are many such colonies as these, and they are the most picturesque
plague-spots on the globe. You will find them in New Zealand and at
Yokohama, in Algiers, Tunis, and Tangier, and scattered thickly all
along the South American coast-line wherever the law of extradition
obtains not, and where public opinion, which is one of the things a
colony can do longest without, is unknown. These are the unofficial
Botany Bays and Melillas of the world, where the criminal goes of his
own accord, and not because his government has urged him to do so and
paid his passage there. This is the story of a young man who went to
such a place for the benefit he hoped it would be to his health, and
not because he had robbed any one, or done a young girl an injury. He
was the only son of Judge Henry Howard Holcombe, of New York. That was
all that it was generally considered necessary to say of him. It was
not, however, quite enough, for, while his father had had nothing but
the right and the good of his State and country to think about, the
son was further occupied by trying to live up to his father's name.
Young Holcombe was impressed by this fact from his earliest childhood.
It rested upon him while at Harvard and during his years at the law
school, and it went with him into society and into the courts of law.
When he rose to plead a case he did not forget, nor did those present
forget, that his father while alive had crowded those same halls with
silent, earnest listeners; and when he addressed a mass-meeting at
Cooper Union, or spoke from the back of a cart in the East Side, some
one was sure to refer to the fact that this last speaker was the son
of the man who was mobbed because he had dared to be an abolitionist,
and who later had received the veneration of a great city for his
bitter fight against Tweed and his followers.
Young Holcombe was an earnest member of every reform club and citizens'
league, and his distinguished name gave weight as a director to
charitable organizations and free kindergartens. He had inherited his
hatred of Tammany Hall, and was unrelenting in his war upon it and its
handiwork, and he spoke of it and of its immediate downfall with the
bated breath of one who, though amazed at the wickedness of the thing
he fights, is not discouraged nor afraid. And he would listen to no
half-measures. Had not his grandfather quarrelled with Henry Clay, and
so shaken the friendship of a lifetime, because of a great compromise
which he could not countenance? And was his grandson to truckle and
make deals with this hideous octopus that was sucking the life-blood
from the city's veins? Had he not but yesterday distributed six
hundred circulars, calling for honest government, to six hundred
possible voters, all the way up Fourth Avenue?--and when some flippant
one had said that he might have hired a messenger-boy to have done it
for him and so saved his energies for something less mechanical, he
had rebuked the speaker with a reproachful stare and turned away in
silence.
Life was terribly earnest to young Holcombe, and he regarded it from
the point of view of one who looks down upon it from the judge's bench,
and listens with a frown to those who plead its cause. He was not
fooled by it; he was alive to its wickedness and its evasions. He would
tell you that he knew for a fact that the window man in his district
was a cousin of the Tammany candidate, and that the contractor who had
the cleaning of the street to do was a brother-in-law of one of the
Hall's sachems, and that the policeman on his beat had not been in the
country eight months. He spoke of these damning facts with the air of
one who simply tells you that much, that you should see how terrible
the whole thing really was, and what he could tell if he wished.
In his own profession he recognized the trials of law-breakers only as
experiments which went to establish and explain a general principle.
And prisoners were not men to him, but merely the exceptions that
proved the excellence of a rule. Holcombe would defend the lowest
creature or the most outrageous of murderers, not because the man was
a human being fighting for his liberty or life, but because he wished
to see if certain evidence would be admitted in the trial of such a
case. Of one of his clients the judge, who had a daughter of his own,
said, when he sentenced him, "Were there many more such men as you in
the world, the women of this land would pray to God to be left
childless." And when some one asked Holcombe, with ill-concealed
disgust, how he came to defend the man, he replied: "I wished to show
the unreliability of expert testimony from medical men. Yes; they tell
me the man was a very bad lot."
It was measures, not men, to Holcombe, and law and order were his twin
goddesses, and "no compromise" his watchword.
"You can elect your man if you'll give me two thousand dollars to
refit our club-room with," one of his political acquaintances once
said to him. "We've five hundred voters on the rolls now, and the
members vote as one man. You'd be saving the city twenty times that
much if you keep Croker's man out of the job. You know _that_ as
well as I do."
"The city can better afford to lose twenty thousand dollars," Holcombe
answered, "than we can afford to give a two-cent stamp for
corruption."
"All right," said the heeler; "all right, Mr. Holcombe. Go on. Fight
'em your own way. If they'd agree to fight you with pamphlets and
circulars you'd stand a chance, sir; but as long as they give out
money and you give out reading-matter to people that can't read,
they'll win, and I naturally want to be on the winning side."
When the club to which Holcombe belonged finally succeeded in getting
the Police Commissioners indicted for blackmailing gambling-houses,
Holcombe was, as a matter of course and of public congratulation, on
the side of the law; and as Assistant District Attorney--a position
given him on account of his father's name and in the hope that it
would shut his mouth--distinguished himself nobly.
Of the four commissioners, three were convicted--the fourth, Patrick
Meakim, with admirable foresight having fled to that country from
which few criminals return, and which is vaguely set forth in the
newspapers as "parts unknown."
The trial had been a severe one upon the zealous Mr. Holcombe, who
found himself at the end of it in a very bad way, with nerves unstrung
and brain so fagged that he assented without question when his doctor
exiled him from New York by ordering a sea voyage, with change of
environment and rest at the other end of it. Some one else suggested
the northern coast of Africa and Tangier, and Holcombe wrote minute
directions to the secretaries of all of his reform clubs urging
continued efforts on the part of his fellow-workers, and sailed away
one cold winter's morning for Gibraltar. The great sea laid its hold
upon him, and the winds from the south thawed the cold in his bones,
and the sun cheered his tired spirit. He stretched himself at full
length reading those books which one puts off reading until illness
gives one the right to do so, and so far as in him lay obeyed his
doctor's first command, that he should forget New York and all that
pertained to it. By the time he had reached the Rock he was up and
ready to drift farther into the lazy, irresponsible life of the
Mediterranean coast, and he had forgotten his struggles against
municipal misrule, and was at times for hours together utterly
oblivious of his own personality.
A dumpy, fat little steamer rolled itself along like a sailor on shore
from Gibraltar to Tangier, and Holcombe, leaning over the rail of its
quarter-deck, smiled down at the chattering group of Arabs and Moors
stretched on their rugs beneath him. A half-naked negro, pulling at
the dates in the basket between his bare legs, held up a handful to
him with a laugh, and Holcombe laughed back and emptied the cigarettes
in his case on top of him, and laughed again as the ship's crew and
the deck passengers scrambled over one another and shook out their
voluminous robes in search of them. He felt at ease with the world and
with himself, and turned his eyes to the white walls of Tangier with a
pleasure so complete that it shut out even the thought that it was a
pleasure.
The town seemed one continuous mass of white stucco, with each flat,
low-lying roof so close to the other that the narrow streets left no
trace. To the left of it the yellow coastline and the green
olive-trees and palms stretched up against the sky, and beneath him
scores of shrieking blacks fought in their boats for a place beside
the steamer's companion-way. He jumped into one of these open wherries
and fell sprawling among his baggage, and laughed lightly as a boy as
the boatman set him on his feet again, and then threw them from under
him with a quick stroke of the oars. The high, narrow pier was crowded
with excited customs officers in ragged uniforms and dirty turbans,
and with a few foreign residents looking for arriving passengers.
Holcombe had his feet on the upper steps of the ladder, and was
ascending slowly. There was a fat, heavily built man in blue serge
leaning across the railing of the pier. He was looking down, and as
his eyes met Holcombe's face his own straightened into lines of
amazement and most evident terror. Holcombe stopped at the sight, and
stared back wondering. And then the lapping waters beneath him and the
white town at his side faded away, and he was back in the hot, crowded
court-room with this man's face before him. Meakim, the fourth of the
Police Commissioners, confronted him, and saw in his presence nothing
but a menace to himself.
Holcombe came up the last steps of the stairs, and stopped at their
top. His instinct and life's tradition made him despise the man, and
to this was added the selfish disgust that his holiday should have
been so soon robbed of its character by this reminder of all that he
had been told to put behind him.
Meakim swept off his hat as though it were hurting him, and showed the
great drops of sweat on his forehead.
"For God's sake!" the man panted, "you can't touch me here, Mr.
Holcombe. I'm safe here; they told me I'd be. You can't take me. You
can't touch me."
Holcombe stared at the man coldly, and with a touch of pity and
contempt. "That is quite right, Mr. Meakim," he said. "The law cannot
reach you here."
"Then what do you want with me?" the man demanded, forgetful in his
terror of anything but his own safety.
Holcombe turned upon him sharply. "I am not here on your account, Mr.
Meakim," he said. "You need not feel the least uneasiness, and," he
added, dropping his voice as he noticed that others were drawing near,
"if you keep out of my way, I shall certainly keep out of yours."
The Police Commissioner gave a short laugh partly of bravado and
partly at his own sudden terror. "I didn't know," he said, breathing
with relief. "I thought you'd come after me. You don't wonder you give
me a turn, do you? I _was_ scared." He fanned himself with his
straw hat, and ran his tongue over his lips. "Going to be here some
time, Mr. District Attorney?" he added, with grave politeness.
Holcombe could not help but smile at the absurdity of it. It was so
like what he would have expected of Meakim and his class to give every
office-holder his full title. "No, Mr. Police Commissioner," he
answered, grimly, and nodding to his boatmen, pushed his way after
them and his trunks along the pier.
Meakim was waiting for him as he left the custom-house. He touched his
hat, and bent the whole upper part of his fat body in an awkward bow.
"Excuse me, Mr. District Attorney," he began.
"Oh, drop that, will you?" snapped Holcombe. "Now, what is it you
want, Meakim?"
"I was only going to say," answered the fugitive, with some offended
dignity, "that as I've been here longer than you, I could perhaps give
you pointers about the hotels. I've tried 'em all, and they're no
good, but the Albion's the best."
"Thank you, I'm sure," said Holcombe. "But I have been told to go to
the Isabella."
"Well, that's pretty good, too," Meakim answered, "if you don't mind
the tables. They keep you awake most of the night, though, and--"
"The tables? I beg your pardon," said Holcombe, stiffly.
"Not the eatin' tables; the roulette tables," corrected Meakim. "Of
course," he continued, grinning, "if you're fond of the game, Mr.
Holcombe, it's handy having them in the same house, but I can steer
you against a better one back of the French Consulate. Those at the
Hotel Isabella's crooked."
Holcombe stopped uncertainly. "I don't know just what to do," he said.
"I think I shall wait until I can see our consul here."
"Oh, he'll send you to the Isabella," said Meakim, cheerfully. "He
gets two hundred dollars a week for protecting the proprietor, so he
naturally caps for the house."
Holcombe opened his mouth to express himself, but closed it again, and
then asked, with some misgivings, of the hotel of which Meakim had
first spoken.
"Oh, the Albion. Most all the swells go there. It's English, and they
cook you a good beefsteak. And the boys generally drop in for table
d'hôte. You see, that's the worst of this place, Mr. Holcombe; there's
nowhere to go evenings--no club-rooms nor theatre nor nothing; only
the smoking-room of the hotel or that gambling-house; and they spring
a double naught on you if there's more than a dollar up."
Holcombe still stood irresolute, his porters eying him from under
their burdens, and the runners from the different hotels plucking at
his sleeve.
"There's some very good people at the Albion," urged the Police
Commissioner, "and three or four of 'em's New-Yorkers. There's the
Morrises and Ropes, the Consul-General, and Lloyd Carroll--"
"Lloyd Carroll!" exclaimed Holcombe.
"Yes," said Meakim, with a smile, "he's here." He looked at Holcombe
curiously for a moment, and then exclaimed, with a laugh of
intelligence, "Why, sure enough, you were Mr. Thatcher's lawyer in
that case, weren't you? It was you got him his divorce?"
Holcombe nodded.
"Carroll was the man that made it possible, wasn't he?"
Holcombe chafed under this catechism. "He was one of a dozen, I
believe," he said; but as he moved away he turned and asked: "And Mrs.
Thatcher. What has become of her?"
The Police Commissioner did not answer at once, but glanced up at
Holcombe from under his half-shut eyes with a look in which there was
a mixture of curiosity and of amusement. "You don't mean to say, Mr.
Holcombe," he began, slowly, with the patronage of the older man and
with a touch of remonstrance in his tone, "that you're _still_
with the husband in that case?"
Holcombe looked coldly over Mr. Meakim's head. "I have only a purely
professional interest in any one of them," he said. "They struck me as
a particularly nasty lot. Good-morning, sir."
"Well," Meakim called after him, "you needn't see nothing of them if
you don't want to. You can get rooms to yourself."
Holcombe did get rooms to himself, with a balcony overlooking the bay,
and arranged with the proprietor of the Albion to have his dinner
served at a separate table. As others had done this before, no one
regarded it as an affront upon his society, and several people in the
hotel made advances to him, which he received politely but coldly. For
the first week of his visit the town interested him greatly,
increasing its hold upon him unconsciously to himself. He was restless
and curious to see it all, and rushed his guide from one of the few
show-places to the next with an energy which left that fat Oriental
panting.
[Illustration: Stopping for half-hours at a time before a bazaar.]
But after three days Holcombe climbed the streets more leisurely,
stopping for half-hours at a time before a bazaar, or sent away his
guide altogether, and stretched himself luxuriously on the broad wall
of the fortifications. The sun beat down upon him, and wrapped him
into drowsiness. From far afield came the unceasing murmur of the
market-place and the bazaars, and the occasional cries of the priests
from the minarets; the dark blue sea danced and flashed beyond the
white margin of the town and its protecting reef of rocks where the
sea-weed rose and fell, and above his head the buzzards swept heavily,
and called to one another with harsh, frightened cries. At his side
lay the dusty road, hemmed in by walls of cactus, and along its narrow
length came lines of patient little donkeys with jangling necklaces,
led by wild-looking men from the farm-lands and the desert, and women
muffled and shapeless, with only their bare feet showing, who looked
at him curiously or meaningly from over the protecting cloth, and
passed on, leaving him startled and wondering. He began to find that
the books he had brought wearied him. The sight of the type alone was
enough to make him close the covers and start up restlessly to look
for something less absorbing. He found this on every hand, in the lazy
patience of the bazaars and of the markets, where the chief service of
all was that of only standing and waiting, and in the farm-lands
behind Tangier, where half-naked slaves drove great horned buffalo,
and turned back the soft, chocolate-colored sod with a wooden plough.
But it was a solitary, selfish holiday, and Holcombe found himself
wanting certain ones at home to bear him company, and was surprised to
find that of these none were the men nor the women with whom his
interests in the city of New York were the most closely connected.
They were rather foolish people, men at whom he had laughed and whom
he had rather pitied for having made him do so, and women he had
looked at distantly as of a kind he might understand when his work was
over and he wished to be amused. The young girls to whom he was in the
habit of pouring out his denunciations of evil, and from whom he was
accustomed to receive advice and moral support, he could not place in
this landscape. He felt uneasily that they would not allow him to
enjoy it his own way; they would consider the Moor historically as the
invader of Catholic Europe, and would be shocked at the lack of proper
sanitation, and would see the mud. As for himself, he had risen above
seeing the mud. He looked up now at the broken line of the roof-tops
against the blue sky, and when a hooded figure drew back from his
glance he found himself murmuring the words of an Eastern song he had
read in a book of Indian stories:
"Alone upon the house-tops, to the north
I turn and watch the lightning in the sky,--
The glamour of thy footsteps in the north.
Come back to me, Beloved, or I die!
"Below my feet the still bazaar is laid.
Far, far below, the weary camels lie--"
Holcombe laughed and shrugged his shoulders. He had stopped half-way
down the hill on which stands the Bashaw's palace, and the whole of
Tangier lay below him like a great cemetery of white marble. The moon
was shining clearly over the town and the sea, and a soft wind from
the sandy farm-lands came to him and played about him like the
fragrance of a garden. Something moved in him that he did not
recognize, but which was strangely pleasant, and which ran to his
brain like the taste of a strong liqueur. It came to him that he was
alone among strangers, and that what he did now would be known but to
himself and to these strangers. What it was that he wished to do he
did not know, but he felt a sudden lifting up and freedom from
restraint. The spirit of adventure awoke in him and tugged at his
sleeve, and he was conscious of a desire to gratify it and put it to
the test.
"'Alone upon the house-tops,'" he began. Then he laughed and clambered
hurriedly down the steep hill-side. "It's the moonlight," he explained
to the blank walls and overhanging lattices, "and the place and the
music of the song. It might be one of the Arabian nights, and I Haroun
al Raschid. _And_ if I don't get back to the hotel I shall make a
fool of myself."
He reached the Albion very warm and breathless, with stumbling and
groping in the dark, and instead of going immediately to bed told the
waiter to bring him some cool drink out on the terrace of the
smoking-room. There were two men sitting there in the moonlight, and
as he came forward one of them nodded to him silently.
"Oh, good-evening, Mr. Meakim!" Holcombe said, gayly, with the spirit
of the night still upon him. "I've been having adventures." He
laughed, and stooped to brush the dirt from his knickerbockers and
stockings. "I went up to the palace to see the town by moonlight, and
tried to find my way back alone, and fell down three times."
Meakim shook his head gravely. "You'd better be careful at night,
sir," he said. "The governor has just said that the Sultan won't be
responsible for the lives of foreigners at night 'unless accompanied
by soldier and lantern.'"
"Yes, and the legations sent word that they wouldn't have it," broke
in the other man. "They said they'd hold him responsible anyway."
There was a silence, and Meakim moved in some slight uneasiness. "Mr.
Holcombe, do you know Mr. Carroll?" he said.
Carroll half rose from his chair, but Holcombe was dragging another
toward him, and so did not have a hand to give him.
"How are you, Carroll?" he said, pleasantly.
The night was warm, and Holcombe was tired after his rambles, and so
he sank back in the low wicker chair contentedly enough, and when the
first cool drink was finished he clapped his hands for another, and
then another, while the two men sat at the table beside him and
avoided such topics as would be unfair to any of them.
"And yet," said Holcombe, after the first half-hour had passed, "there
must be a few agreeable people here. I am sure I saw some very
nice-looking women to-day coming in from the fox-hunt. And very well
gotten up, too, in Karki habits. And the men were handsome,
decent-looking chaps--Englishmen, I think."
"Who does he mean? Were you at the meet to-day?" asked Carroll.
The Tammany chieftain said no, that he did not ride--not after foxes,
in any event. "But I saw Mrs. Hornby and her sister coming back," he
said. "They had on those linen habits."
"Well, now, there's a woman who illustrates just what I have been
saying," continued Carroll. "You picked her out as a self-respecting,
nice-looking girl--and so she is--but she wouldn't like to have to
tell all she knows. No, they are all pretty much alike. They wear
low-neck frocks, and the men put on evening dress for dinner, and they
ride after foxes, and they drop in to five-o'clock tea, and they all
play that they're a lot of gilded saints, and it's one of the rules of
the game that you must believe in the next man, so that he will
believe in you. I'm breaking the rules myself now, because I say
'they' when I ought to say 'we.' We're none of us here for our health,
Holcombe, but it pleases us to pretend we are. It's a sort of give and
take. We all sit around at dinner-parties and smile and chatter, and
those English talk about the latest news from 'town,' and how they
mean to run back for the season or the hunting. But they know they
don't dare go back, and they know that everybody at the table knows
it, and that the servants behind them know it. But it's more easy that
way. There's only a few of us here, and we've got to hang together or
we'd go crazy."
"That's so," said Meakim, approvingly. "It makes it more sociable."
"It's a funny place," continued Carroll. The wine had loosened his
tongue, and it was something to him to be able to talk to one of his
own people again, and to speak from their point of view, so that the
man who had gone through St. Paul's and Harvard with him would see it
as such a man should. "It's a funny place, because, in spite of the
fact that it's a prison, you grow to like it for its freedom. You can
do things here you can't do in New York, and pretty much everything
goes there, or it used to, where I hung out. But here you're just your
own master, and there's no law and no religion and no relations nor
newspapers to poke into what you do nor how you live. You can
understand what I mean if you've ever tried living in the West. I used
to feel the same way the year I was ranching in Texas. My family sent
me out there to put me out of temptation; but I concluded I'd rather
drink myself to death on good whiskey at Del's than on the stuff we
got on the range, so I pulled my freight and came East again. But
while I was there I was a little king. I was just as good as the next
man, and he was no better than me. And though the life was rough, and
it was cold and lonely, there was something in being your own boss
that made you stick it out there longer than anything else did. It was
like this, Holcombe." Carroll half rose from his chair and marked what
he said with his finger. "Every time I took a step and my gun bumped
against my hip, I'd straighten up and feel good and look for trouble.
There was nobody to appeal to; it was just between me and him, and no
one else had any say about it. Well, that's what it's like here. You
see men come to Tangier on the run, flying from detectives or husbands
or bank directors, men who have lived perfectly decent, commonplace
lives up to the time they made their one bad break--which," Carroll
added, in polite parenthesis, with a deprecatory wave of his hand
toward Meakim and himself, "we are _all_ likely to do some time,
aren't we?"
"Just so," said Meakim.
"Of course," assented the District Attorney.
"But as soon as he reaches this place, Holcombe," continued Carroll,
"he begins to show just how bad he is. It all comes out--all his
viciousness and rottenness and blackguardism. There is nothing to
shame it, and there is no one to blame him, and no one is in a
position to throw the first stone." Carroll dropped his voice and
pulled his chair forward with a glance over his shoulder. "One of
those men you saw riding in from the meet to-day. Now, he's a German
officer, and he's here for forging a note or cheating at cards or
something quiet and gentlemanly, nothing that shows him to be a brute
or a beast. But last week he had old Mulley Wazzam buy him a slave
girl in Fez, and bring her out to his house in the suburbs. It seems
that the girl was in love with a soldier in the Sultan's body-guard at
Fez, and tried to run away to join him, and this man met her quite by
accident as she was making her way south across the sand-hills. He was
whip that day, and was hurrying out to the meet alone. He had some
words with the girl first, and then took his whip--it was one of those
with the long lash to it; you know what I mean--and cut her to pieces
with it, riding her down on his pony when she tried to run, and
heading her off and lashing her around the legs and body until she
fell; then he rode on in his damn pink coat to join the ladies at
Mango's Drift, where the meet was, and some Riffs found her bleeding
to death behind the sand-hills. That man held a commission in the
Emperor's own body-guard, and that's what Tangier did for _him_."
Holcombe glanced at Meakim to see if he would verify this, but
Meakim's lips were tightly pressed around his cigar, and his eyes were
half closed.
"And what was done about it?" Holcombe asked, hoarsely.
Carroll laughed, and shrugged his shoulders. "Why, I tell you, and you
whisper it to the next man, and we pretend not to believe it, and call
the Riffs liars. As I say, we're none of us here for our health,
Holcombe, and a public opinion that's manufactured by _déclassée_
women and men who have run off with somebody's money and somebody's
else's wife isn't strong enough to try a man for beating his own
slave."
"But the Moors themselves?" protested Holcombe. "And the Sultan? She's
one of his subjects, isn't she?"
"She's a woman, and women don't count for much in the East, you know;
and as for the Sultan, he's an ignorant black savage. When the English
wanted to blow up those rocks off the western coast, the Sultan
wouldn't let them. He said Allah had placed them there for some good
reason of His own, and it was not for man to interfere with the works
of God. That's the sort of a Sultan he is." Carroll rose suddenly and
walked into the smoking-room, leaving the two men looking at each
other in silence.
"That's right," said Meakim, after a pause. "He give it to you just as
it is, but I never knew him to kick about it before. We're a fair
field for missionary work, Mr. Holcombe, all of us--at least, some of
us are." He glanced up as Carroll came back from out of the lighted
room with an alert, brisk step. His manner had changed in his absence.
"Some of the ladies have come over for a bit of supper," he said.
"Mrs. Hornby and her sister and Captain Reese. The _chef's_ got
some birds for us, and I've put a couple of bottles on ice. It will be
like Del's--hey? A small hot bird and a large cold bottle. They sent
me out to ask you to join us. They're in our rooms." Meakim rose
leisurely and lit a fresh cigar, but Holcombe moved uneasily in his
chair. "You'll come, won't you?" Carroll asked. "I'd like you to meet
my wife."
Holcombe rose irresolutely and looked at his watch. "I'm afraid it's
too late for me," he said, without raising his face. "You see, I'm
here for my health. I--"
"I beg your pardon," said Carroll, sharply.
"Nonsense, Carroll!" said Holcombe. "I didn't mean _that_. I
meant it literally. I can't risk midnight suppers yet. My doctor's
orders are to go to bed at nine, and it's past twelve now. Some other
time, if you'll be so good; but it's long after my bedtime, and--"
"Oh, certainly," said Carroll, quietly, as he turned away. "Are you
coming, Meakim?"
Meakim lifted his half-empty glass from the table and tasted it slowly
until Carroll had left them, then he put the glass down, and glanced
aside to where Holcombe sat looking out over the silent city. Holcombe
raised his eyes and stared at him steadily.
"Mr. Holcombe--" the fugitive began.
"Yes," replied the lawyer.
Meakim shook his head. "Nothing," he said. "Good-night, sir."
Holcombe's rooms were on the floor above Carroll's, and the laughter
of the latter's guests and the tinkling of glasses and silver came to
him as he stepped out upon his balcony. But for this the night was
very still. The sea beat leisurely on the rocks, and the waves ran up
the sandy coast with a sound as of some one sweeping. The music of
women's laughter came up to him suddenly, and he wondered hotly if
they were laughing at him. He assured himself that it was a matter of
indifference to him if they were. And with this he had a wish that
they would not think of him as holding himself aloof. One of the women
began to sing to a guitar, and to the accompaniment of this a man and
a young girl came out upon the balcony below, and spoke to each other
in low, earnest tones, which seemed to carry with them the feeling of
a caress. Holcombe could not hear what they said, but he could see the
curve of the woman's white shoulders and the light of her companion's
cigar as he leaned upon the rail with his back to the moonlight and
looked into her face. Holcombe felt a sudden touch of loneliness and
of being very far from home. He shivered slightly as though from the
cold, and stepping inside closed the window gently behind him.
Although Holcombe met Carroll several times during the following day,
the latter obviously avoided him, and it was not until late in the
afternoon that Holcombe was given a chance to speak to him again.
Carroll was coming down the only street on a run, jumping from one
rough stone to another, and with his face lighted up with excitement.
He hailed Holcombe from a distance with a wave of the hand. "There's
an American man-of-war in the bay," he cried; "one of the new ones. We
saw her flag from the hotel. Come on!" Holcombe followed as a matter
of course, as Carroll evidently expected that he would, and they
reached the end of the landing-pier together, just as the ship of war
ran up and broke the square red flag of Morocco from her main-mast and
fired her salute.
"They'll be sending a boat in by-and-by," said Carroll, "and we'll
have a talk with the men." His enthusiasm touched his companion also,
and the sight of the floating atom of the great country that was his
moved him strongly, as though it were a personal message from home. It
came to him like the familiar stamp, and a familiar handwriting on a
letter in a far-away land, and made him feel how dear his own country
was to him and how much he needed it. They were leaning side by side
upon the rail watching the ship's screws turning the blue waters
white, and the men running about the deck, and the blue-coated figures
on the bridge. Holcombe turned to point out the vessel's name to
Carroll, and found that his companion's eyes were half closed and
filled with tears.
Carroll laughed consciously and coughed. "We kept it up a bit too late
last night," he said, "and I'm feeling nervous this morning, and the
sight of the flag and those boys from home knocked me out." He paused
for a moment, frowning through his tears and with his brow drawn up
into many wrinkles. "It's a terrible thing, Holcombe," he began again,
fiercely, "to be shut off from all of that." He threw out his hand
with a sudden gesture toward the man-of-war. Holcombe looked down at
the water and laid his hand lightly on his companion's shoulder.
Carroll drew away and shook his head. "I don't want any sympathy," he
said, kindly. "I'm not crying the baby act. But you don't know, and I
don't believe anybody else knows, what I've gone through and what I've
suffered. You don't like me, Holcombe, and you don't like my class,
but I want to tell you something about my coming here. I want you to
set them right about it at home. And I don't care whether it interests
you or not," he said, with quick offense; "I want you to listen. It's
about my wife."
Holcombe bowed his head gravely.
"You got Thatcher his divorce," Carroll continued. "And you know that
he would never have got it but for me, and that everybody expected
that I would marry Mrs. Thatcher when the thing was over. And I
didn't, and everybody said I was a blackguard, and I was. It was bad
enough before, but I made it worse by not doing the only thing that
could make it any better. Why I didn't do it I don't know. I had some
grand ideas of reform about that time, I think, and I thought I owed
my people something, and that by not making Mrs. Thatcher my mother's
daughter I would be saving her and my sisters. It was remorse, I
guess, and I didn't see things straight. I know now what I should have
done. Well, I left her and she went her own way, and a great many
people felt sorry for her, and were good to her--not your people, nor
my people; but enough were good to her to make her see as much of the
world as she had used to. She never loved Thatcher, and she never
loved any of the men you brought into that trial except one, and he
treated her like a cur. That was myself. Well, what with trying to
please my family, and loving Alice Thatcher all the time and not
seeing her, and hating her too for bringing me into all that
notoriety--for I blamed the woman, of course, as a man always will--I
got to drinking, and then this scrape came and I had to run. I don't
care anything about that row now, or what you believe about it. I'm
here, shut off from my home, and that's a worse punishment than any
damn lawyers can invent. And the man's well again. He saw I was drunk;
but I wasn't so drunk that I didn't know he was trying to do me, and I
pounded him just as they say I did, and I'm sorry now I didn't kill
him."
Holcombe stirred uneasily, and the man at his side lowered his voice
and went on more calmly:
"If I hadn't been a gentleman, Holcombe, or if it had been another
cabman he'd fought with, there wouldn't have been any trouble about
it. But he thought he could get big money out of me, and his friends
told him to press it until he was paid to pull out, and I hadn't the
money, and so I had to break bail and run. Well, you've seen the
place. You've been here long enough to know what it's like, and what
I've had to go through. Nobody wrote me, and nobody came to see me;
not one of my own sisters even, though they've been in the Riviera all
this spring--not a day's journey away. Sometimes a man turned up that
I knew, but it was almost worse than not seeing any one. It only made
me more homesick when he'd gone. And for weeks I used to walk up and
down that beach there alone late in the night, until I got to thinking
that the waves were talking to me, and I got queer in my head. I had
to fight it just as I used to have to fight against whiskey, and to
talk fast so that I wouldn't think. And I tried to kill myself
hunting, and only got a broken collar-bone for my pains. Well, all
this time Alice was living in Paris and New York. I heard that some
English captain was going to marry her, and then I read in the Paris
_Herald_ that she was settled in the American colony there, and
one day it gave a list of the people who'd been to a reception she
gave. She could go where she pleased, and she had money in her own
right, you know; and she was being revenged on me every day. And I was
here knowing it, and loving her worse than I ever loved anything on
earth, and having lost the right to tell her so, and not able to go to
her. Then one day some chap turned up from here and told her about me,
and about how miserable I was, and how well I was being punished. He
thought it would please her, I suppose. I don't know who he was, but I
guess he was in love with her himself. And then the papers had it that
I was down with the fever here, and she read about it. I _was_
ill for a time, and I hoped it was going to carry me off decently, but
I got up in a week or two, and one day I crawled down here where we're
standing now to watch the boat come in. I was pretty weak from my
illness, and I was bluer than I had ever been, and I didn't see
anything but blackness and bitterness for me anywhere. I turned around
when the passengers reached the pier, and I saw a woman coming up
those stairs. Her figure and her shoulders were so like Alice's that
my heart went right up into my throat, and I couldn't breathe for it.
I just stood still staring, and when she reached the top of the steps
she looked up, breathing with the climb, and laughing; and she says,
'Lloyd, I've come to see you.' And I--I was that lonely and weak that
I grabbed her hand, and leaned back against the railing, and cried
there before the whole of them. I don't think she expected it exactly,
because she didn't know what to do, and just patted me on the
shoulder, and said, 'I thought I'd run down to cheer you up a bit; and
I've brought Mrs. Scott with me to chaperon us.' And I said, without
stopping to think: 'You wouldn't have needed any chaperon, Alice, if I
hadn't been a cur and a fool. If I had only asked what I can't ask of
you now'; and, Holcombe, she flushed just like a little girl, and
laughed, and said, 'Oh, will you, Lloyd?' And you see that ugly iron
chapel up there, with the corrugated zinc roof and the wooden cross on
it, next to the mosque? Well, that's where we went first, right from
this wharf before I let her go to a hotel, and old Ridley, the English
rector, he married us, and we had a civil marriage too. That's what
she did for me. She had the whole wide globe to live in, and she gave
it up to come to Tangier, because I had no other place but Tangier,
and she's made my life for me, and I'm happier here than I ever was
before anywhere, and sometimes I think--I hope--that she is, too."
Carroll's lips moved slightly, and his hands trembled on the rail. He
coughed, and his voice was gentler when he spoke again. "And so," he
added, "that's why I felt it last night when you refused to meet her.
You were right, I know, from your way of thinking, but we've grown
careless down here, and we look at things differently."
Holcombe did not speak, but put his arm across the other's shoulder,
and this time Carroll did not shake it off. Holcombe pointed with his
hand to a tall, handsome woman with heavy yellow hair who was coming
toward them, with her hands in the pockets of her reefer. "There is
Mrs. Carroll now," he said. "Won't you present me, and then we can row
out and see the man-of-war?"
II
The officers returned their visit during the day, and the American
Consul-General asked them all to a reception the following afternoon.
The entire colony came to this, and Holcombe met many people, and
drank tea with several ladies in riding-habits, and iced drinks with
all of the men. He found it very amusing, and the situation appealed
strongly to his somewhat latent sense of humor. That evening in
writing to his sister he told of his rapid recovery in health, and of
the possibility of his returning to civilization.
"There was a reception this afternoon at the Consul-General's," he
wrote, "given to the officers of our man-of-war, and I found myself in
some rather remarkable company. The Consul himself has become rich by
selling his protection for two hundred dollars to every wealthy Moor
who wishes to escape the forced loans which the Sultan is in the habit
of imposing on the faithful. For five hundred dollars he will furnish
any one of them with a piece of stamped paper accrediting him as
minister plenipotentiary from the United States to the Sultan's court.
Of course the Sultan never receives them, and whatever object they may
have had in taking the long journey to Fez is never accomplished. Some
day some one of them will find out how he has been tricked, and will
return to have the Consul assassinated. This will be a serious loss to
our diplomatic service. The Consul's wife is a fat German woman who
formerly kept a hotel here. Her brother has it now, and runs it as an
annex to a gambling-house. Pat Meakim, the Police Commissioner that I
indicted, but who jumped his bail, introduced me at the reception to
the men, with apparently great self-satisfaction, as 'the pride of the
New York Bar,' and Mrs. Carroll, for whose husband I obtained a
divorce, showed her gratitude by presenting me to the ladies. It was a
distinctly Gilbertian situation, and the people to whom they
introduced me were quite as picturesquely disreputable as themselves.
So you see--"
Holcombe stopped here and read over what he had written, and then tore
up the letter. The one he sent in its place said he was getting
better, but that the climate was not so mild as he had expected it
would be.
Holcombe engaged the entire first floor of the hotel the next day, and
entertained the officers and the residents at breakfast, and the
Admiral made a speech and said how grateful it was to him and to his
officers to find that wherever they might touch, there were some few
Americans ready to welcome them as the representatives of the flag
they all so unselfishly loved, and of the land they still so proudly
called "home." Carroll, turning his wine-glass slowly between his
fingers, raised his eyes to catch Holcombe's, and winked at him from
behind the curtain of the smoke of his cigar, and Holcombe smiled
grimly, and winked back, with the result that Meakim, who had
intercepted the signalling, choked on his champagne, and had to be
pounded violently on the back. Holcombe's breakfast established him as
a man of means and one who could entertain properly, and after that
his society was counted upon for every hour of the day. He offered
money as prizes for the ship's crew to row and swim after, he gave a
purse for a cross-country pony race, open to members of the Calpe and
Tangier hunts, and organized picnics and riding parties innumerable.
He was forced at last to hire a soldier to drive away the beggars when
he walked abroad. He found it easy to be rich in a place where he was
given over two hundred copper coins for an English shilling, and he
distributed his largesses recklessly and with a lack of discrimination
entirely opposed to the precepts of his organized charities at home.
He found it so much more amusing to throw a handful of coppers to a
crowd of fat naked children than to write a check for the Society for
Suppression of Cruelty to the same beneficiaries.
"You shouldn't give those fellows money," the Consul-General once
remonstrated with him; "the fact that they're blind is only a proof
that they have been thieves. When they catch a man stealing here they
hold his head back, and pass a hot iron in front of his eyes. That's
why the lids are drawn taut that way. You shouldn't encourage them."